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A Message from Kristian

I found a book of photography called Chaos by Josef Koudelka at my house in Malibu that Kristian gave me for my birthday some years ago.  In it he wrote:

“I thought this book was very apt.  Life is never black and white yet always flowing with chaos.  I feel this book goes some small way to prove that even in chaos there is beauty.”

It was lovely to find his note.   A message from Kristian, from the past.  The past, where we must leave him.

I had to make some huge and grown up decisions today.   Decisions and about romance and finance.  The two are unconnected yet have been hideously intertwined as I grappled with one or the other for the past few months.

As my fear of financial ruin overwhelmed me I turned to him to deliver me from the truth.   Today, I just had to face my unfortunate situation head on.

My financial insecurity is undoubtedly connected to uncomfortable feelings of self-worth, prestige and power.  The romance I want but cannot have.   Some things are just not meant to be.  It is challenging to come to terms with these sorts of truths but as I have written here in this blog on many occasions when I do make decisions they are swift and sure.  Something, actually, Drew Pinsky taught me whilst I was on the sex rehab show.

I have deliberately avoided talking about either the romance or the finance on this blog but more importantly I have kept it secret to those who love me best.  Fuck, it is exhausting keeping secrets.  I really hate it.  I have no intention of going into any specific detail about the romance or the finance right now.  All you need to know is that I sat with John after the cake was cut and the presents were opened and told him everything I had been hiding for the past few months.  Phew.

As we all know: the truth will set you free.

I let go of a secret I was determined to keep.  Everything I have ever let go of has been relinquished unwillingly.  With claw marks all over what ever was finally gone.

Deep down I am as sure as I ever was that everything will turn out just the way it was meant to be.   I believe in my fate.

My relationships burn like super novae in the cosmos then shrink and die.  I have an opportunity right now to make a different set of choices: taking contrary action, living in acceptance and handing over what ever gives me pain to my higher power.

Just a few days away from my trip to Europe where I will celebrate a hefty milestone.   I have chosen to travel with a close friend.  Someone I love but not a lover.   We (and The Little Dog) will explore London and Paris.  For the sake of The Little Dog we will once again visit the wallabies in the Jardin des Plantes that my darling, loyal pet found utterly spell binding when we visited Paris last Autumn.   I am sure he must have thought that they were the biggest squirrels he had ever seen.

Am I prepared to walk away with dignity?  From people, places and things?

What I own is not who I am.  Who I love cannot define me.  Of course I would love to be in love with a man who loved me as much as I loved him.

I have come a very long way this past year.  The road to serenity, self-love, sexual sobriety is littered with the corpses of those who could not.

I must have buried 30 people during the last 12 years, killed by addiction.  Overdose, suicide, etc.  Every one my hero for keeping me sober.   Each and every one.

This evening I celebrated my friend’s daughter’s 5th birthday.  I sat with his family and watched his happy little girl blow out the candles on her cake.   After supper I wandered into Soho House on my own and found people I knew to take my mind off of the grueling aloneness.  I am not lonely, I just can’t be bothered to make the effort to accept the invitation nor get in the car and drive to people who genuinely love me.

On my way home, as if by magic, friends called me.  Emails arrived, text messages appeared on the screen of the iPhone and I was wrenched away from the promise of a night of self-pity.  I can be such a pig at that particular trough.

I said to him the other night that what I found so hard to let go of was the promise of enduring love.  The door had been opened then slammed shut.  I am the wise uncle, asexual, decrepit yet ultimately willing to be of service to those who need me.

Without the crutches of objectification, intrigue and seduction I can some times flounder.  I can sometimes fall.  Late at night, when all hope is gone I wonder who will catch me?  Who will catch me when I fall?

For a moment back then, I thought it might be you. I thought, foolishly, that it might be YOU.  I thought it was you when I was 20, 30, 40 and now.   Being in love with Richard in my twenties.  I was heartbroken when he would flirt with girls.  At my birthday party on Island Wall, Whitstable my Mother saw the pain I was in and tried to reach out to me but shame got in the way.

The legacy of shame.

Love has always been my goal.  To be loved.  I crave love the way most men crave sex.

I told him:  I’m really scared that I will never love again.   That I will never be loved.  How could I have got this so wrong?    To believe that love was possible, enduring and could be one day mine?

From out of the chaos comes beauty.  It will give me succour when all else fails.  I am going to Europe to fill my heart and soul with art and architecture.  To walk the streets and parks of two great cities.  To explore what it might have been like to be loved.   I know that when I get back he will be gone.  It is our swan song, our last hurrah.  But before I write the end I must enjoy the journey.  I must not fear the future nor have unrealistic expectations, I must set aside my shame and feel the sun on my face, in my heart.

Categories
Gay Rant

Spinster of This Parish? Not Today Thanks

I need something from you.   I need closure.  Don’t take this the wrong way.  Moving at the wrong pace.  I love you but…

You told me that you could not give me what I wanted-but I think you misjudged what I wanted.   What I wanted more than anything was that we could do all the things we said we wanted to do when we weren’t in a position to do them.  We had some really great ideas about what it meant to be together, time together, excitement together, exploration together.

You said you would fly to see me if only you could, then when you could..you couldn’t.

You may have become less free rather than more free, less brave rather than more brave and complain all the time about your lot without ever taking action to improve it.  Darling Lamb Head:  get a  job you love and a place to live and make yourself available.  Stop wallowing in self-pity and false promises.    How long is this charade going to last where you pretend not to be having a life because you don’t want to be found out?

I am afraid of the huge difference between us.   You see, I am not scared of all that life has to offer!  When I was your age, at the merest hint of an invitation I would have been on that plane, that boat, that train, I would have been in Paris and London and Rome!  You put all the reasons why NOT to before the reasons why you should.

If it had been me I would have come home triumphant!  Armed with stories I would have told my grandchildren.

Darling, I need you to not call me when you are lonely and make cooing noises that just makes me love you all over again.  I need you to set me free from the hope that we could ever be anything other than friends.  If that!

It simply isn’t fair or considerate-in fact it is down right cruel because I cannot call you when I am feeling lonely not least because you are not very good at being compassionate.  I don’t think we should see each other at all until we have got ourselves settled with other people.

I am going to meet this guy tomorrow and I am going to take him to dinner and then I am going to ask him if he will come to Paris with me.  You had your chance and all you could say like a willful, petulant child is NO!

I think we really did exhaust things this time.  We really may have pushed the right button.  Please, please lets hope we did.

So, as a delicious post script to the man I loved:

You know, the days we spent in NYC together were some of the best I ever spent with anyone..ever.  Lamb Head, you never let me write about that.  You kept me silent.   I wasn’t allowed to describe the joy, the love and the kindness.  Never allowed to describe our tender kisses just in case it hurt other people.  Our perfect moments sullied by your fear of what others might think.   Like holding hands in the street.   I can’t hold your hand in the street because I can’t bear the thought of the disapproving glances.   No wonder your mother thinks so badly of me because I never get to write the beautiful things..because you told me not to.   So, I want you to know that we had beautiful time.  I had a beautiful time with your son.  That he is capable of great love.  He knows how to love a man.  He knows how to make a man happy.

Just as it is meant to be.

The last thing he said this evening was that he didn’t make the huge changes in his life to be with me but that, I’m afraid, is the lie he tells himself.  He left the other for a relationship with men, not this man, not me, but with men and we must honour him for that, for it was his bravest hour.

We are tired of the conflict, tired of the unresolved feelings that causes so much distress on this roiling sea of emotion.  We must say goodbye now-help me. Help me say goodbye.

Categories
Gay Rant

I am the happy WIDOW

At night.  On my own.  One more time.  By myself.

I am lip-syncing Judy Garland torch songs around my drawing-room.   After Judy I shall perform for the little dog a medley of miserable break up songs.  But actually I am not unhappy.

I am having rather a good time.  Listen, it’s all OK.  I am pretending that I have long hair that I can twist into a chignon.  I am pretending that I have long smooth legs and perfect breasts.

I got a bit irritable today.  Christ what was I thinking?  Trying to hold on..that’s what I was doing.  At least as one gets older and the break ups happen the fall out is less toxic.  I am trying hard not to be mean-after all he was totally out of his depth.  I might try to con myself into thinking that I did all the work but that simply isn’t true.  He fell into a snake pit-unwittingly.  Poor lamb.  Falling in love with me is like biting into something that smells wonderful but is actually totally rotten.   Like an old pineapple.

His life was really just how it was meant to be before he met me.  An ordinary gay man in an ordinary closet just about to have a cast of extraordinary characters unleashed upon him.  It must have felt like he was walking around a movie studio.  The freaks and the clowns and the whores.  And me, the most freakish, clownish whore of them all.

I only told him one lie whilst I was with him.  Just one.  When whoever wrote to me chastising him for leaving her.  I didn’t tell him how vicious they had been.   I didn’t tell him because he was being so brave.  He was already in such torment.  I know what it is to live a lie.  To live in the dark.  I know what it is like to be scared of who you are.

And as I unravel the short time we spent together I have to ignore that he hates me writing this-but that’s how we met.  The blog.

Sad note from a friend of Kristian’s today.   There’s no getting over some people.  Kristian, Dione and Justin will live on in my heart forever.

What a fucking palava!  If I died right now (and I think about that all the time) if I died right now I have had a fucking blast!  Actually, I hope that there is one great passionate love affair before I die.  Some one with as much flair and enthusiasm as I have. As brave as I am.  As magnificent!  Someone who is as anarchic and as manly and womanly and I am.

What a surprise, who could forsee? I come to feel about you what you felt about me.  Why only now when I see that you have drifted away, what a surprise what a cliché.

I am not wearing a black velvet jewel encrusted gown.  I am not wearing a wig.  I am not wearing makeup.  But I wish I was.   When I think of my totally uptight male film industry friends (like the fat pig agent) I take time to wonder how many of them could express themselves like that?  With verve?

You know what?  Every person I have ever fallen out of love with has come crawling back to me.  Every one.  They never somehow forgot what they were first attracted to.   Arrogant huh?  I don’t care.  Not tonight.  Look, my first boy friend was Fred Hughes.  One can’t get more glam than that dear.  He had his chance dear.  He had a moment in the fucking sun.

Maybe just one never came back to me and that was Matty but he was oddly like the last one.  A kind of blank canvas.   An ordinary boy hankering after a bigger life but not brave enough to take what was on offer.  The fact is-I am not a civilian.  Never was and never will be.  The ups and downs are all part of the deal.  Emotional Boom and Bust.  And fuck it I would rather have that than the parsimonious, mediocre life on offer to most.

Nobody expected anything from me and look what they got!

I’ve been to paradise but I’ve never been to me..

Ranting on a Friday night before I go out to dinner.   Perhaps I might take other risks tonight.  Perhaps I might take the truck and cruise the streets.  I have a parking place now.  A Hollywood parking place.  I can go where I want and a have a place to park when I come home.

Take my hand, let me take you love to love land..float on..

Now I am smiling and jigging about to the Doobie Brothers.

No Joni tonight.  It’s toooo depressing darlings.  Not Joni nor the Brokeback Mountain theme.  Not tonight.  Now, it’s time to flush this toilet and go out for dinner.

Thanks everyone, thanks for being there.  I don’t know what I would do without you.

Categories
Death Gay Love

Normal People

Dinner with Anna in Los Feliz.  We discussed how focused one has to be to make a film… how determined.  More importantly… we both really have to want to make film.   Neither of us are motivated by studio films.

I am in perhaps the most ideal position ever to make another film yet without a script that I really believe in what’s the point?

The same goes for my book.  I don’t want to write it.  I was writing it with him and now he has gone so my interest has burned off like the marine layer over the Malibu Mountains.   Oh fuck.

The problem with the last script?  It is really two films crammed into one… like Siamese twins I have to very carefully separate them.  This requires me being meticulous and I can’t summon the interest.   Where did all the energy come from before?  How did I muster the enthusiasm?

I have lost my enthusiasm for film, for love, for life.

I have been asking normal people about falling in love.

It seems that most people believe that they are worth loving.  I have never felt like I was worth loving.

Tonight I saw a gay couple leaving the restaurant.  One of them was much older than his boyfriend.  My heart sank.  They looked so happy.  Both of them probably believed that they worth loving.  They didn’t come from a damaged place, they hadn’t had their childhood ripped apart by shame, violence, lies, resentment.  I hope not.  I really do.

I wouldn’t wish my early years on my worst enemy.

I wanted to kill myself as soon as I understood that it was possible.  I tried when I was 12, then again when I was 17 and finally gave into the interminably slow suicide that alcohol and drugs offer the committed self hater.

I have a few amends to make in NYC.  To those I sidelined when I met him.   I did a terrible thing.  We both cheated… it wasn’t just him.   I can make a thousand excuses but I am sick of making excuses.

At dinner (crispy crusted pizza) Anna and I discussed pornography.

In search of that authentic moment in the narrative.  Isn’t that why so many people go to such dark places on the internet?  Looking for a moment that is indisputably real?

How could any man ever measure up to what I see there?  Whilst love makes a fool of me I seek solace in pornography.  I prayed again tonight for some sort of deliverance from the obsession.

Send me somebody kind I say-but would I know how to let them love me?

Oh, I have been loved so much-so often.  So many men.  Yet, until recently, I thought that anyone who loved me was a fool.  If I couldn’t love me how could anyone else?  So I thought again about the long sleep-longer than the one I have been awake for.

Down the dark corridor.

Categories
Uncategorized

New Blank Document

My apartment looks like an art gallery, paintings neatly stacked and waiting to be sold.  Everything here is for sale.  I am slowly getting ready to move back to Malibu and all that entails.   As I have written previously, my pack rat collection of more stuff is getting me down.  It all needs to be sold.

Last night I decided that I couldn’t see Mr. Darling NYC ever again, that it was doing me in.  Yet, for all the hopelessness there is still an unavoidable truth-we love each other.  What am I meant to do?  Just walk away from what may very well be the best thing to ever happen to me?

I am prepared to wake up alone every morning until he can wake up with me. I loathe waking up alone, alone is not good for a man who obviously has so much to offer.

I long to try something I’ve never had..lover man oh where can you be?

We both have so much.

Up until now I craved a companion on my terms.  After our conversation today I now crave a lover on our terms.  As he was quick to point out-this is not just about Duncan Roy.  My beautiful boy has feelings too, feelings that until today I was ill prepared for.

HE DOESN’T WANT TO MOVE TO LA.

So what of Malibu?  I would move anywhere if it meant we could be together.  I looked online at houses in Upstate New York, London and Paris.    After our long and emotional conversation I understood just how selfish I had become.  Yet, sometimes you just have to go with your heart.

This morning, after writing yesterday’s sensible blog, I woke up alone and angry.  Angry with him, angry that our fragile love affair could be so easily tossed aside, unless of course I fully appreciated his situation.  I shouted at him.  He burst into tears.

He is lost and terrified of loneliness.   And that description could so easily be mine.

His wracked, desperate sobs silenced and shamed me.

After he tearfully described his fears I knew that things were not as simple or solvable as I had kidded myself.  The thrill of romance will not solve this problem.  Resolve, strength and patience on my part may be all I can offer him.

I prayed for guidance this morning.  God can and will set me straight.  Even if it can’t keep him..straight.

I love a married man.  A married man loves me.  Send in the fucking clowns.

I read a really great blog called Love in The Time of Foreclosure.   The blog charts the ups and downs of a couple facing the loss of their house and staying in love.   Adversity, so it seems, keeps people fighting for what they believe in.

It’s odd how much one can learn about oneself when love is at stake.   I have not really been in love since Matt and I broke up 10 years ago.  The sort of love that makes one desirously wild with anticipation.  Delirious.  Desirous.

Listening to him cry made me love him more.  After all, when one is craving authenticity to hear another man cry is as about as authentic as it gets.

I usually write my blogs when I get up in the morning.  I breach the surface of the new day with a description of the previous day but this evening I am sitting at home with The Little Dog listening to old tunes and eating Swiss chocolate.   Somehow, my darling man crying has settled something deep within me.

All of me, why not take all of me, can’t you see I’m no good without you. Take my lips I want to lose them, take my arms; I’ll never use them.  Your goodbye left me with eyes that cry.  How can I go on my dear without you?