Tag: Kristian Digby

Categories
Gay Rant

Head Ache

Listening to Joni Mitchell.

I miss thinking about a future that includes someone.  I am so sick of facing every trial on my own.

If I had to write a description of a perfect man he would have almost fitted the bill.  Almost.   A little taller maybe, ten years older, not just out of a long relationship.

He was kind.   He wanted me.   He missed her.  He was brave.

Thank you-all of you.   You have all been so kind.   The kind words, the suggestions, the solution.  I tried explaining to him how important this blog is to me.   Not only do I get validation and feed back but I get to write my most troubling thoughts and when written down they vanish-as if by magic.

So, it turned out to be a strangely productive day.    I had to file a police report-the policeman had seen me on the sex rehab show.   I spent a little time up at the house making sure that the tenants are ok.   I saw two friends for lunch and I have a conference call regarding my app at 3pm.  God knows what will happen next.  It’s really not in my hands.

Michelle and Frank for coffee at the café on the corner.  Ate lemon bunt cake.

Of course I think about him.  He flitters like a moth through my head all the time.  I want the best for him-the best does not include me.  He has been central to my thoughts for the past few months.  He will not simply vanish.  I know that he will have time and space to think about his own grief.  The end of his long relationship and start afresh.

I do feel sorry for him.

Gay men have hugely intense relationships and an entire lifetime of emotion is often squeezed into just a few weeks.   He and I were no exception.

We gays are well aware of this phenomenon, most of us make morbid jokes about ‘gay years’-like dog years, and say “They were together for a year which is like a decade in gay years…”

Sadly, he was not the great love.  The truth is: if we had lived in the same city we would have scarcely lasted a month.  If I had met him as an out gay man I would have scarcely noticed him at all.

Fuck.  I need moth balls.

Off to have dinner now with Jamie and Anna.  They are waiting at a table on the sidewalk this balmy St Patrick’s day.  I am bleeding from the war.

Kristian will be buried this Sunday in Dorset.

Categories
Death Rehab

Wake Up!

Kristian’s death has affected me more than I might admit.   Rather foolishly I had a picture of him on my phone that lit up every time somebody called.  I deleted it today-I was making myself sadder than I needed to be.

Found myself looking at pornography last night-late-trying to soothe myself-trying to throw a warm blanket over my feelings.   It didn’t work.  I still woke up this morning overwhelmed with fear.  I wrote to John:

5am.  Waking up in huge amounts of fear.  Crushing, overwhelming fear. Think I may have come to the end of the line. Cannot go on.  Making bad decisions.  Can’t face anything.  Financial ruin facing me.  Nowhere to run to.   Don’t trust anyone. Obsessed.  Looked at porn this morning to try to sooth me-did not work.  Nothing works.  Do not see any more life ahead of me.

As dawn broke over the mountain I expected those particular ghouls to vanish, yet, those pesky demons lingered all day-like they were waiting patiently to claim me.

My father died when he was 53.

Found myself looking at pornography..

Now, that sounds like it happened to me rather than me searching around for that perfect porn moment.  Porn is like research, it’s scholarly, frustrating, intense.

Feeling desperately sad.  Not sobbing like when the Darling Big Dog was killed.

Cannot listen to Kate Bush or Soft Cell (remember listening with him) but rather strangely listening to the Spice Girls, which softens the edges-like having a wank.

Throwing the towel in.  “Goodbye my friend.”  Remember when we were best friends with Matt Rowe who wrote all those huge number one hits?    “Goodbye my friend.”   Remember New Years Eve at The Mercer Hotel in NYC with Melanie Sporty Spice and Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman?  Odd mixture that night?  What a night.

So I’m chatting with a friend about his childhood and he tells me that his father was sent to prison when he was 11 years old.  The only way he knew how to deal with the shame was to lie to his classmates.  He knew where his father was but told his friends that his father was on a business trip-he told lies because the truth was far too complicated.  Gosh, I related to that.  Lying to make life easier:  My father is on a business trip.  Telling palatable childish lies leading to a life of fantasy, pornography, disconnection.

It took me so long to let the truth set me free.  Now I try so hard to tell the truth.  Lyle brought word from England that I had a terrible temper.  Oh yes, I remember that.  My temper was a daily occurrence for so long.  Before I went to Sex Rehab I really had no idea why I was so angry-after sex rehab I fully understood why I was angry and the mechanism that controlled it.  So, to all that I shouted at and screamed at and made cry-I was wrong, I was wrong, I was wrong.

Sorry to repeat myself but..

When Kristian died suddenly a door opened into a world I considered closed to me.   I had considered suicide for as long as I can remember but never seriously.  Death, after all, is a very long time.  Suddenly there are enough fun people in the after life that I might have a good time.  Giggle with.   I am not scared of death-I was just scared of being bored when I got there-now with Kristian dead-death seems like a realistic option.  Holding the door open for me.

I am looking for clues for what might keep me alive?  What can I believe in?

This morning I heard John talking about being asleep and how much of the time I have been asleep.  I fall asleep when I first meet some one-a deep sleep.  I always thought that it was because I felt comfortable but now I see that it was to escape intimacy or worse that something might happen to me.

Moths in my clothes, little dog pawing at me…home sick for Whitstable, for Battersea Park..can we walk there together you and I?

Selling art-legitimate source of misery?  My friends didn’t want to buy my art.  They want to buy art from a legitimate source.  Funny.

Lying.  It’s a choice.  To tell the truth or lie?  It seems obvious doesn’t it?   Well, these muddled days, as Michael Moore reminded us when he picked up his Oscar, are ‘Lying times’.  Within a relationship there are all kinds of lies but I don’t want to tell HIM lies.  I just want him to know the truth.

The silence in the Malibu Mountains, the thudding base from the music playing in the apartment above my Hollywood apartment.   Both the silence and the interminable base making my head ache.   My head aches.

The questions that haunt me:  How could he have taken such a risk?   How can he be calling me to join him there and why am I listening?

One day I will write about FULL DISCLOSURE-a most unsavory practice.

I love you MR DARLING NYC-you are keeping me alive,  your love and your perfect smile are keeping the worst of these terrible demons from driving me to the gates of hell.

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Categories
Dogs Gay Hollywood Queer

Say Hello, Wave Goodbye

I needed to stay in home alone tonight.  I feel sad.  Sad about Kristian, sad about my friends who died this year and sad that once again I am on my own:  the vacuum left behind after a wonderful weekend with a great friend.

I have always had and certainly will continue to have a serious problem with goodbye.  Saying goodbye permanently or even temporarily brings up huge feelings of loss, vulnerability and then the anger-the anger overwhelms me.

The genesis of these feelings: I was ripped from my mother’s breast and put up for adoption.  These are primal fears of life and death.   The most profoundly affecting goodbye after my mother’s abandonment was the death of my Darling Big Dog.

When my dog was violently killed the resulting anguish unleashed a torrent of sadness, a great wave of misery that may have resulted from not ever having said goodbye-ever to anyone I loved.  I did not go to my grandfather’s funeral nor my grandmother’s.   I have rigorously avoided any ritual goodbye and for that I am a lesser man.

Whenever I leave a party I just slip away as if saying goodbye will somehow humiliate me.

The same feelings overcome me now after the deaths of three friends in as many months.  Yet the very act of writing about them lends me immediate solace.

The end of relationships causes me unrelenting heartache.

Stoically accepting the end of a relationship?  No, not for me.  Nearly all of the relationships I have had have ended badly.  I never, it seems, get to write that scene in the movie of my life where two people say a dignified goodbye.

The end of my relationship with Joe ended thus:  I knew that I was going to leave but it took me 2 years to end it and when I finally did I tried to do it with tenderness and compassion but he was so angry that he made my life miserable for a full year after I left him-ending up in court fighting over property.

In my mad head I forget that I have choices, the choice to remember that the past no longer runs the show, choices to say goodbye without the reenactment of traumatic and ruinous scenarios.

Today I waved goodbye to a new friend who has come to mean a great deal to me.  Whether there is any romantic future between us is really not up to me-unless I behave in such a way that he would never want to see me again.   This morning I began to get angry, angry that he was leaving but knew that it was for the best.

Even though I was only momentarily angry-until I could identify what was going on in my mad head and break the cycle of abandonment and despair by telling him that I would miss him, that I was feeling sad, that I had no mechanism for making those feelings go away…and by telling him the truth I was freed from behaviors that would alienate him from me forever.

I will say goodbye to Kristian this week, say my heartfelt adieu.   His death has brought up all sorts of STUFF.   I sorted out pictures of us today and will post them as soon as I can.

IMG_1988 IMG_1964 IMG_1963

Categories
Gay

Kristian Digby

My friend (briefly my lover) Kristian Digby died yesterday; apparently of auto asphyxiation.

Kristian was a sweet, thoughtful intelligent man.  Not intelligent enough, he would have scoffed, to think twice about pulling a bag over his head, a belt around his neck and deprive his wonderful brain of oxygen.

By inducing a lucid, semi-hallucinogenic state called hypoxia-combined with orgasm, the rush is said to be no less powerful than cocaine, and highly addictive.

Kristian and I met in 2001 at the International Cannes film festival waiting in line for the Soho House annual Cannes party-bonding over the sight of Andi McDowell being pushed and shouted at by her surly, over weight publicist.  After becoming immediate friends-later that night, very drunk and having gate crashed a very grand yacht party, Kristian told actor Ray Winstone that he had always fancied him and tried, much to my horror, to kiss him.  Like most of his antics it was very, very funny but realizing how inappropriate trying to kiss Ray was we ran like mad children into the night and had a very romantic time walking bare foot back to his hotel room along the deserted beach at dawn.

I introduced Kristian to one of his many and varied heroes, the glorious Marianne Faithful. We were at Will Self’s house.   He sat at her feet.  She spilt red wine on his white linen trousers.  Whilst she fussed over the stain he was delighted that Marianne Faithful had spilled red wine on him.  Delighted.

He did not have one bad bone in his gorgeous body.

Creative, funny, erudite.  He had so much further to travel.

Kristian loved the films and books of Dereck Jarman-his true hero.  We had great fun exploring the dead filmmakers garden at Dungerness.  We ate a very high tea (english expression not drug induced) at a local hotel over looking the bleak gray sea.

I was always in awe of Kristian and those of us who knew him very well knew that there was much to be in awe of.

During the time that we knew each other best (when I moved to LA permanently we saw each other less often) we explored ideas, cites and over coffee in Old Compton Street the state of our gay lives.

He was a regular visitor to my house in Whitstable.  Everyone that met him there loved Kristian-I have been overwhelmed by sad emails from friends he met from my old home town.

He was not without his dark side-a troubled childhood and un-accepting parents blighted his early years as a gay man.

Lastly, let us not forget how much enjoyment he gave to those who never knew him personally: his loyal TV audience.

Oh Kristian, you silly billy, what did you do that for?  I will really miss you.