By Lisabet Sarai
I've written of him before, but never of how we met. I hosted a birthday party for my dear friend Carolyn in my two-room grad school apartment. She brought D, her high school buddy. He brought a bottle of Stolichnaya vodka which he left in my freezer. Was that vodka his strategy for getting together again? Or just mine?
D was younger than I was by three or four years, skinny and unkempt, with shaggy black hair and a drooping pirate mustache. Most assuredly flawed. It didn't matter. I wanted him, not just physically but with my whole being. He talked with his hands, brilliantly, weaving complex spirals of philosophy and nonsense. He wrote poetry and sang the blues. I might find him huddled at my kitchen table at 2 AM, with a cigarette butt smoldering in one of my 5-and-10-cent store saucers, reading or scribbling or simply staring off into space. Beside him I felt shallow and earth-bound, with my conventional hours and my academic discipline. My fleshy curves were a stark contrast to his ascetic, wiry frame. My focused goals seemed almost embarrassing next to his bohemian excursions on the path to truth, beauty and freedom.
Making love with D was awesome but not easy. He acted ashamed of his arousal, as though our animal coupling was somehow unworthy - too common, too gross for people with our level of intellectual and spiritual connection. At times I felt that I'd corrupted him, dragged him from his ethereal mental realms into the mud. Yet the actual experience, when he finally relaxed and gave in to his desire, was pleasure pure enough to take me, at least, to another level of consciousness. Transcendent. Awe-inspiring.
I'm sure that part of my attraction to him was chemical. I remember burying my face in his raggedy bathrobe, breathing in his scent and aching with need. That was later, when I drove two thousand miles to spend New Years with him in the tiny Western college town where he was eking out a living as a waiter. I spent a week in his freezing basement room, using the toilet in the hall. We huddled together under his sleeping bag, all lips and fingers and tangled limbs, his mustache tickling my skin, his funky intoxicating smell making me crazy with want. That visit, overall, did not go well. The more we connected in bed, the higher the walls he built outside of it.
Even later still, he came to live with me in Los Angeles, where I had my first real job. By then the flaws had started to smother the awe. I loved him with all my heart, but we were, perhaps, too different. Ambition had no meaning for him. Sex was some kind of sin against the higher self (though I think his discomfort came from sources other than religion). I was probably too old for him. Certainly, we were at different stages in our lives.
It's ironic that he ended up becoming a lawyer, marrying and having four kids. (I'm not in touch with him, but Carolyn keeps me updated.) Meanwhile, I dropped my original career, flew off to live in a foreign country and started to write seriously.
I've used bits and pieces of D in my writing. The character Rick Martell in Ruby's Rules has a strong physical resemblance, though his personality is completely different. Daniel in Truce of Trust shares both physical and psychological traits with D, although unlike D, he has no conflicts about sex or commitment.
I still remember the shock of attraction, that first night at the party. Even through the haze of desire, I could see that he was far from perfect, but I didn't care.
I wrote a poem for him during that last, difficult period that may sum the relationship better than any prose I can offer now.
After the Fall
I've come to believe
if you lose someone
you'll find them
in LA.
They say
there is magic here -
but all I've found
are expensive sprouts
and cheap neon.
And what an unlikely
setting for you
and I to set up
our dubious housekeeping
(such as it is)
amid the flash
of satin stretch pants
and silver Porches.
A bum and a priestess,
A monk and a barmaid,
Two lovers
of words, two seekers
of truth, two wandering
souls half-chance
collided,
hungry
for holy
intoxication.
I've lost you
so many times;
our roads
are tortuous,
twisted,
together awhile
then yours will plunge
out of sight
like some winding
overgrown path
into Panther Hollow -
to struggling emerge
here in this city
of slow poisons
and paper maché.
But stay.
