A whirl wind trip to LA. John and I fly down at 6am on Saturday morning. Before we even get to drop our bags off at his folks’ home, we have looked at two apartments. One in Los Feliz, another down near Koreatown. One is cute, but too small; the other grand, with a sketchy management firm. Both are too far from everyone we know. Who do we know? Do we know anyone? I feel fully dizzy and the polar opposite of grounded. We swing over to John’s folks’ place in Altadena, say hey to his sister who we are officially in town to celebrate — she’s just turned 30. We have light drinks, walk Hex, and then jet back down to Westlake to look at another place. Huge, incredible architecture from the early 20s, in a wreck of a neighborhood, and a potential nightmare to maintain. I cannot get over this one towering window in the entryway: two stories, multi-pane, french-door style, opening inward. All I can picturing is my climbing monstera and passion vine up and over the molding and I am in love, but I know better: there is not a square angle in the whole place.
Westlake, Pico Union, Arlington Heights. These too-precise and unknown names that seem to exist on every internet mapping service and in the mouths of precisely no one. We reference these, we get blank stares, and with comical swiftness we are in a Californians sketch again: it’s south of the 5 but not quite over to Glendale, if you’ve gone past the 101 you’ve gone too far. My eyes glaze over.
Back home we have ribs, chicken, rolls and cake for Em’s birthday. Wine. Beer. Champagne. Fresca. I fall asleep on the couch holding Hex, 10 Things I Hate About You in the background.
We have a miserable sleep in a too-soft memory foam bed in the guest bedroom, and we are up early for the first of 10 more apartment viewings the next morning. My back hurts. I’ve had too much to drink the day before, and worry it’s actually kidney pain. Maybe it is? I’m not sure. It is hot in a way I forgot days could be, and I need water. We zig zag across the city for five hours seeing place after place after place. We put good vibes out and we get them back.
We see potential. We see pitfalls. We see actual pits dug in the floor of the kitchen of one unit: “Before we go in, there are holes in the floor, they’re doing some work, they will NOT be there when you move in.” I assume we’re going to see some pilot holes drilled to fix wiring. Instead they are two 3x3x3’ enormous trenches dug in the floor down to the water main, with corresponding mountains of soil and concrete ejecta in the kitchen next to them taking up roughly 80% of the floor plan. “They will NOT be there when you move in.” As if we’d otherwise have been like “… gosh the location is nice, and a parking spot to boot… I’m just not sure about those gaping cavities in the kitchen, should we ask about that?” We meet property managers named Paizley, Jeizel, and Gwendolyn. We meet a certified so-cal hunk of a realtor with two first names as his whole name, whose pecs look like they’ve never lost a sale. We see an endless parade of kitchen arches, pedestal sinks, open floorplans, dimly-lit bedrooms, and subway tile subway tile subway tile.
We regroup at Pine and Crane. Learning my lesson from last time, I caution us both to order one thing each, as the portions are huge, and maybe a veggie to share (peashoots). We leave uncomfortably and catastrophically full. Waddling. Belching. Naturally, the next stop on our agenda is a house party overlooking a leather kink festival in Silverlake where most of the men, amply muscled and suitably bronze, are wearing nothing but singlets and harnesses. We are both struggling to suck our guts in behind generous t-shirts. This is a mess. This is wonderful. This is a wonderful mess. I’m able to rally, be sparkling for a second, and then before I know it we’re on our way back to Altadena, I’m asleep on the couch with Hex on my chest again, and then it’s time to leave. For me. John stays behind. He is officially an Angeleno again, and I am vagabond back in the bay, in a city that no longer feels like mine, but still feels like home. We’ll see each other again in nine days, hopefully with an apartment to call home, and all my stuff in boxes, ready to go.
This finally feels real.
Earlier last week, Sam tweeted “If you’re not using [some app] to know when to water your plants, what are you even doing?” To which I replied, only half snarkily, “Paying attention.” Sam took this jab in stride and responded “You mean ‘asking your boyfriend.’”
While John is the undisputed plant king in the relationship, I can confidently regard myself the queen. I laughed and replied that I had houseplants today that watched my marriage end and this relationship grow and it is wild to me that that is a true statement. I now have four plants (a monstera obliqua, a philodendron hederaceum, a strelitzia nicolai and three monstera deliciosa that began as a single plant) that I got well before moving to San Francisco, that have miraculously survived, the latter even thriving as cuttings in new pots. This wasn’t always the case, but I can’t quite trace back to how this all started. One day, it just was. At 30 years old it’s as if that bird of paradise just materializes in my home; three years later to the day after and I’m moving to San Francisco with a small nursery in tow.
I grew up with a mom that joked she had a black thumb: every plant she turned her attention to withered in no time. Kitchen window herbs blighted in a single day, cactuses turning to mush in a month. Then, we moved back to Utah and seemingly overnight, my mom decided this identity no longer suited her and that she would have a garden. Everything flourished in her gaze. Sprawling flower-beds bursting with blossoms, trellises that sagged and shuddered under the weight of explosive growth, vegetable harvests that were truly baffling. In her mid 30’s my mom suddenly decided plants were her thing, and every growing thing bloomed for her, and she for them.
I realized the other day that I had somehow done the exact same thing, at the same age, almost 20 years later; and that were I her, I’d have, in addition to a large number of plants in my care, a 16 year-old son and three daughters to boot.
This past weekend was the first Daytime Realness of the season at El Rio. Paul and I lyfted over, planning to arrive 40 minutes or so after opening, figuring we’d beat the line that inevitably forms as the day goes on. We were greeted by easily 150 people in the queue already, and we joined Tyler and Colin midway through. Once inside we were greeted by essentially every masc-of-center queer in the city, crammed shoulder to shoulder from front to back, filling the space well past capacity.
By the time we’d been there for an hour or so, I truly felt like I had run into or caught glimpses of every person I’d hooked up with, chatted with, had cruised or been cruised by in the city since moving out here in 2016. It felt like a fitting bookend to my time here, like an insipid allegory: people who I’d engaged in the briefest of dark-corner fantasies, twilight encounters, night-time rendezvous, all dragged out into the harsh midday sun at 2pm on a Sunday. Look at them! Some were people I’d hoped to meet up with again — that rarest of birds, the NSA serial hook-up — some I’d hope to become friends with, here they all were, crammed on the patio next to the realization that none of that would ever come to pass. Time is up, time to go.
I’m not trying to read too much into it, but it’s definitely informing how I want to approach trysts in Los Angeles. John laughed when I told him that, but I was being serious. More intent, less chaff… a more careful curation.
Last week Carson, a friend from Utah, was chatting me up on Grindr. He was 32 miles away in San Jose for a work thing, and wanted my advice on the best cruising spots in the city. We’d served our church missions together 15 years ago — both of us desperately horny, closeted fags, (literally and metaphorically on an island) but neither of us realizing there was a kindred spirit in the other (an archipelago!) nor brave enough to do anything had we recognized one another. After some some recommendation from my go-tos, a pause, and then “why didn’t we ever have sex?” He means when I was in town last, not on our missions, but I still don’t have a ready answer. Who knows? The attraction was there, as was the hotel room, the willingness ; nevertheless the timing hadn’t ever worked out in that precisely right, exactly correct, literally perfect way required for two friends with the metric tons of religio-societal traumas we share, separately, to relax into a sexual encounter without tainting it with the anxiety of the aftermath. And here I was, on the exact opposite side of things at El Rio: “why didn’t we become friends?” I mentally telegraph to all of them. With the same answer, and for probably the same reasons: Who knows?
Lately I’ve been wanting to draw my hookups, portraits. Not in some sort of black book way, not a score sheet — but maybe just as a… memorial? A way to say: I knew this person, however briefly, and I think I saw them, too. Boys, men, theybies, all. We were the same, we shared something, and it both was and was not enough.
It’s bright out, and from my office window I’m tricked into thinking the walk to coffee will not require a jacket. Familiar with San Francisco for almost a decade, living here full time for three years and I still fall for this trick, a nerd offered a handshake only to have the cool kid snatch their hand away: obvious and humiliating.
I need to escape work for a second, need to clear my head. The tech kids on meet and greets, amply padded in their puffer vests, sit on the shady side of Cafe Reveille, while I’m soaking up the sun at the bar in the window, almost sweating. I draw a house from my walk to kalari in Berkeley, a simple cracker box with stunning topiary. Outside the window, willowy North Beach girls fresh from yoga stalk shivering in the shade of Mr. Bings, off to who knows where.
“Strange to be almost fifty, no? I feel like I just understood how to be young.” “Yes! It’s like the last day in a foreign country. You finally figure out where to get coffee, and drinks, and a good steak. And then you have to leave. And you won’t ever be back.”
— Less, Andrew Sean Greer
I recently finished reading Less, and wow… the first time in a long time that I felt so connected to a character in a book. There’s a part where a character is taking the protagonist, a writer, to task and he says “You’re a bad gay — It’s our duty to show something beautiful from our world.” After reading so many books filled with queer men who were made to suffer by their authors — Barbie dolls in a tortured melodrama, pain writ large, book award bait — it was startling to see a life I could recognize on the page. I laughed a lot, I was startled by the beauty of the writing, and more than once I cried. The book felt like the last days of summer, like the sun going down and casting long purple palm tree shadows on a wall — inevitable.
I’ve been thinking so much about growing old. Wincing over it. Panicking about it. Paul is in town from Toronto. He’s nearly 5 years my senior, in his early 40s, gray at his temples and beard, fine lines annotating his face. He is handsome, and my friends (younger than me) all say so. We go to El Rio, we go to the Stud. I see myself standing next to him, and wonder if this makes more sense to others. The older guys together. Do they see me standing next to Tyler or Colin, in their perpetual 20 something youth, and think me tragic? My friends as incongruous as cargo shorts and bleached tips would be; a desperate clawing at youth as I slide over the cliff?
I’m 36 and my body is determined to make me look 10 years older. My beard, chest hair, and now even my arms are going gray, quickly. I’ve been bald since 20. I look at my dad’s dad, his brothers — catastrophic heart failures at 65, all. Is it in me? Am I more than half way done? Who knows.
24 years ago, in Clueless, Cher asserts that legs crossed towards another was an unequivocal sex-invite. My 12 year old brain took that as gospel truth, and I spent the next… well, 24 years being careful about how I cross my legs. The statement ensconced itself as a text-book truth. Recently, a friend told me that a 60 year old told him that at 20 you think your 30s are going to be the time of your life, but at 60, you realize it was your 40s. My brain has taken this as a hard fact, and good god, I hope it’s true.