Gu-logy

The heat today, behind my sunglasses, looks like how I imagine the 1970s. It’s sort of sepia and mean. I’ve been trying to feel (or explain what it is I feel) for a few days now. Insides like a low tumble dry.
Somebody who always looked like he was going to die young did. I think. It’s hard to tell. It’s a rumor. I no longer know him and my only real contact is Facebook, but a google search of his name doesn’t produce any useful results.
He is a person I can remember a lot about, in some ways:
-a very distinct leathery smell, mixed with some kind of soap or unassuming cologne.
-the sound of the same leather, rubbing the way leather does against angular bodies
-rogue-isms. This person was a bona fide rogue. Gentle swaying fingers that knew a lot of things and moved together, long hugs, sleepy eyes, winks.
I grew out of this person. He was one of very few people I think of this way. I watched him (as much as ‘watched’ is ‘knew for a while, left for a while, came back and knew for a while again‘) shrink into jackets that weren’t actually getting bigger. The second time I knew him he was honest, and older, and vulnerable. He told me a lot of secrets I didn’t really want to know but liked hearing anyways. He had a chip in his tooth from a drinking accident, and textbook addictions. He was taking classes at a community college and getting jazzed about philosophy. We talked about the meaning of life like only very naïve people can once, on the phone, for hours into the night. Now I’m going to make up something that happened between us. I say ‘make up’ because I want it to be understood that I’m already warping what was, and it’s important you know this because my friend is dead and so can’t defend himself:
“How long are you going to be away for?” (Him)
“Well, a semester, probably.”
“But New York’s not that far away.”
“Yeah.”
“I mean, it’s not that hard to visit.”
“Yup, that’s true.”
“Aww, you sound so cute.”
“Whaaaaaat?”
“Oh no.”
‘Whaaaaaat?”
“Well I’m a little worried now. I really like you, and the last time I really liked someone I got really hurt.”
“Well, we’re friends!”
“Yeah.”
Something something, something something. And maybe I should feel even worse about that call. Maybe once I figure out just how he went I’ll comb memory again to look for ‘signs’. Every mistake is fatal, eventually.
We went on a date, that second time around. Saw a movie. Had a meal. I was hyperconscious of how we looked together (of that, I am ashamed) and he could tell. Leaving the theatre I can’t recall if he said he wanted to see me again or drive me home or what, but I remember what I said:
“Look [it began….] -- I’m in a really weird place right now, so we’re going to have to take this really, really slow. You know?” When I said this, I did not know what I meant. He did. He smiled a very wise smile, and said:
“Okay. I just like you. That’s all.”
And we hugged. And I didn’t watch him walk away, because I was too relieved.

The first time around.
I had the biggest crush.
And I was jealous.
I was high on suddenly being pretty and talented and ogled in the drama department. He was one of those bizarre aberrations in high school theatre, the Dude technically too cool for these shenanigans with the face and Friday Night History of someone ten years graduated. He was a legend, and a presumed whore, and a flirt. He used to give joke ‘butt massages’ to another friend of mine (with whom he also flirted) and all the freshmen and sophomore girls hovered around him like gnats. He liked me, and I loved that he liked me. There were a few cast parties in memory when he’d be near by during all the PG fun, and I’d smell his leather, and we’d make eyes. I sat on his lap for the entire duration of the movie “This is Spinal Tap” once, reclined kind of awkwardly. He gave me a rose that night but I left it on the hostess’ piano. By accident.
He was still sleazing around a lot after his own graduation, and though there were two years between us he still seemed to show up at all the drama functions when I was gone, too. But for all the time he seemed to be around, there was a lot people seemed not to know about him. Once I overheard him mention that he and his Dad had lived in this other girls’ basement for a while. I asked why. He shrugged.
“They had a basement,” he said.

Gu Khalsa was a good guy. He had heart and soul and genuine-seeming interest in other people.
I worry about taking responsibility for commemorating someone I feel I was cruel to, someone I haven’t spoken to in a long while. This was the friend who de-friended me on Facebook at some point in the recent past, and from that small thing I have read in fifty larger images. They are all deeply narcissistic so I won’t write them down.
I think what your memory elects to preserve intact is important by default; I think what we remember makes us metaphorically enormous. And I’d like to think that by nature of being so far detached but still so concerned this “eulogy” is proof that people don’t die when they’ve had friends, at least not immediately. Now you know, is the idea. Tell sad stories of the deaths of kings. High-school greasers.
It’s not that I would change the past, necessarily, given the opportunity. I’m not sure we were meant to sail out beyond a mediocre date and an odd-shaped love or neurotic freak-isms in common, I’m not sure we were. Let me try a little harder to articulate what I feel about this thing that was put down and deserted, this thing to which I cannot return to. Every day I walk around thinking I haven’t made choices, thinking my real life will start any minute and It will be better than even the pale, interesting goodness of the times before because It will explode like a star with opportunities to be strong, and honest, and loved, most of all.
But on earth, you were right, Gu. New York isn’t that far away.
And I did choose.

MY WEEKEND:

I keep meeting strangers. It's very surreal. I think there might be something in the air these days that walks and talks like good karma. This revelation comes in tandem, of course, with a lot more time spent in transit between Brooklyn and Manhattan, and a lot more time spent at parties thrown by students of the New School, and a lot more time spent gunning down fading summer afternoons in Union Square Park alone. Still, I find myself in the unusual position of having to convince The Rational Brain (Martha) that it's all a coincidence and there is really nothing holy at all about the man yelling hooey from the Bible's back-pages up and down Fourteenth Street on a Saturday. Nor is there anything profound about the man beside him (they seem to be friends?!) who's trying to convince every single woman in the park to sit on his face for 'big laughs'.

I went to see a friend's show this weekend, and it made me sad. It was supposed to, on the one hand, and on the other I was in that weirdly vulnerable mood that sometimes steals in on Saturdays -- the sun was shining, and beautiful couples seemed to be congregating on every corner, and I was awkwardly hemming and hawing through an intermission where I realized I didn't have enough conversation to string between fifteen friends and ten minutes. After the play I went to the park where I watched a man I'd once given my phone number to seduce and destroy some other hot young thing, and then the sun was setting straight into my eyes like a fire, like a brilliant cracked egg. I went underground, feeling morose, and someone complimented me on my shoes, which is to say, Wagner filled the air and small cherubs danced from between cracks in the mosaic and filled the world with fairy dust. And no, no one was ever lonely again. At Franklin Avenue, an art collective was putting up murals all along Eastern Parkway when I got off the train.

That night, I went with some friends to a patently Weird Party, and met a personal trainer and a Pilates teacher and a bunch of other people crouched under the insulation of an attic. Someones and Strangers. I tried halfheartedly to make sleepy eyes at a loud person, but the evening wanted to end in an overpriced cab around 4am, sleepy roommates drunching on glorified Easy Mac and smiling at the wood paneled walls that weren't bouncing with stupid comments or spilled tequila, were silent, belonging to us. We watch Dazed and Confused, and a few episodes of Freaks and Geeks, and I weep with jealousy over the memoirs of Pamela des Barres as I fall asleep reading. Before I really enter Lala Land I register feeling nostalgic for high school, when days were long and pointless but discernibly and objectively hilarious. Not always, but most of the time.

And on Sunday, Someone I already Knew agrees with me about Annie Hall being a terrifically optimistic movie, actually, and she articulates it loads better than I ever have: because the beautiful part about life is actually transience and if there is any kind of proof for true love it must be in the fact that perfectly happy, complicated, wonderful relationships fail where others with the exact same ingredients can succeed. We sit and talk about love and existential crises while rolling around on a studio floor, leaving something due Monday abandoned.

At a dinner meeting, I am asked 'what I want to do with my art', and somehow manage to concoct something. I realize only once I've said it aloud that the mission is so so so right, even if it's a little pretentiously worded: "I want everyone to find the hilarity and lovability in their neuroses, flaws and weirdness."

And that's the end. This has all finished happening. It's Monday now. Writing it down it doesn't read like God. Maybe that's the bizarre thing, actually.

On Love At First Sight, in Retrospect:

Here is a funny thing that happened that is not really a story:
Two days ago I met a friend in Union Square park at the benches across from Fuerza Bruta. It was hot, and I was wearing something silly as if in protest of this fact, and we sat side by side and had a nice conversation and at some point she left and I kept sitting. It struck me, killing time on this bench alone, how "people-watching in the park" is one of those things busy people claim to really dig about New York City but it's not something you ever actively plan for. I thought these thoughts and frosted over with that light, sweet, Southern-ladies-in-To-Kill-A-Mockingbird sweat and considered everyone who passed.

And it was strange: this sort of neo-cast-of 'HAIR!' crew came dancing across my path: a guy with a guitar and a guy in a kilt and two other girls, wearing funny accessories, sporting impractical haircuts. They put up a sign by a tree that said 'Flowers or Cigarettes Appreciated!' and then this guy started playing his guitar and singing. The friends orbited him, little moons all over the grass, and filmed this concert with tiny cameras.
It was really beautiful. The kid had a great voice. I caught myself realizing I wasn't directly thinking about anything as I listened to him, and that was nice. I stayed for two songs.

The next day, for strange and unpredictable reasons, I wandered through the exact same stretch of park at the exact same time and ran into the same friend on the same bench. We sat and had a nice conversation, then she had to leave for work. I still had more seconds to fill so I stayed to watch people. No music Thursday -- instead, across from me two friends filmed a third passed out on a bench in a drunken stupor. An old hippie in the corner called the guys out for being mean and then a sort of rumble broke out. At some point, Drunk Guy emerged from his stupor and staggered to his feet, and then the old hippie admitted he was wrong to criticize, said he "was out of line, didn't mean to step to anybody." From the looks of the aftermath everyone became friends, and then the park lights to say EVENING! turned on all around me.

And as I was about to leave, I "met" someone. I use quotations because I never meet people from the ether, and neither do you, probably: any stranger who sort of rolls up on your personal space in a public park is rarely to become Someone. But THIS person was funny and odd and languid, and we talked about the scene in front of us and then managed to cram a surprising amount of personal information into eight minutes of not-knowing-the-others'-name. But another thing written in my planner pulled me away, and I got up to go to where I had to be.

I have built what I call My Life on pieces of paper. Some of it has been lost over the years, and some of it has never been printed out, some is crumpled and some is fading with age. In My Life, I think about the probability of these two unrelated Park Days, and I think about my sad, scrawled phone number swirling around somewhere in outer space undialed, uninterested in forevers, likely. My planner: many pieces of paper, many lists, many ideas, many obligations and things to look forward to, weeksdayshours broken into digest-able chunks. And some remarkable, unplanned, un-lamentable events (but were they EVENTS, really?) slipped between meetings in black ink. And I think now, isn't that funny? Weren't you so so worried about the things you'd never understand fully and weren't interested in, the books you won't read before you die, the way your ass looks fat in a certain dress and the strange ribbons of backward logic that encase your latest stab at something like love? Weren't you so so convinced that you owned the universe the last time you smoked marijuana and saw the city skyline from a friend's room, from a train window, didn't you think you had it all figured out and there was nothing left anywhere on the planet, no thing that could change what you considered a charted course? Oh boy, oh girl, you were wrong. Not every airport is the same, you see. People aren't similar, not at all. You're not afraid, you're just a kid.