The Dark Poet

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.

Illya, Mon Amour

By Lisabet Sarai

Our new member Charlotte Stein set the topic for this week: unconventional crushes. In response, I thought I'd go 'way back, practically before the dawn of history—okay, before color television at least!—and talk about one of the first crushes I remember . The intriguing thing about this crush is that it prefigured the sort of person I'd continue to be attracted to throughout my life.

In 1966 I was in ninth grade, thirteen years old, and madly in love with a guy on TV. The spy series “The Man from U.N.C.L.E” was hugely popular in those Cold War years. Each week super-agent Napoleon Solo from the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement matched mind and muscle with the evil minions of THRUSH (the Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity) as they plotted world domination.

Solo had a lot in common with his contemporary James Bond (not all that surprising, considering the fact that Ian Fleming contributed to the development of the character). He was handsome, muscular, sophisticated, witty, and what would now be termed a chick-magnet. He was clearly the hero of the series—in fact the original title was “Solo”. But I wasn't in love with Napoleon Solo, despite his many positive attributes. The man I adored, whom I would do anything to meet, for whom I was ready to die, was his slender, brilliant, and enigmatic sidekick, Illya Nikovetch Kuryakin.

Except for the fact that he was blond, Illya Kuryakin was a classic example of what I now call the “dark poet” type. You never knew what the taciturn Russian was thinking, but there wasn't any doubt that it was deep. He evaded questions about his past but he was rumored to have Gypsy blood. He smiled far less often then his extrovert partner Solo. His motivations were normally obscure. Although Illya was an explosives expert and sharp-shooter, and excelled in practically every style of martial arts, his intelligence was his most potent weapon. According to Wikipedia, he earned a Masters degree from the Sorbonne and a PhD in quantum mechanics from the University of Cambridge. He played the bass viol, the English horn and guitar, and spoke French, German and Japanese (among other languages).

I truly had it bad for Illya. I had pictures of him on my wall. I dreamed about him. I recall that once I thought I saw David McCallum, the Scottish actor who portrayed Kuryakin, in a restaurant. My parents had to hold me down to stop me from rushing up to the poor guy (who was probably just a look-alike) , begging for his autograph or volunteering to have his children. Nevertheless, I harbored a secret excitement for days after that close encounter, as if he and I had managed a secret tryst.

“The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” was canceled in 1968. Eventually I outgrew my infatuation with the lithe, mysterious spy. But he was only the first of many dark poets to hook my heart.

You know the kind of guy I'm talking about? He's usually on the thin side, possibly because he spends his time in cafés or bars, drinking black coffee or straight vodka rather than eating. His hair tends to be long, maybe even scraggly. He might have a mustache. He's stronger than he looks, with a wiry power that makes your breath catch when he uses it.

He'll hold forth with astounding eloquence on philosophical issues like the nature of time or the question of whether one can truly understand another human being, but he's far less forthcoming about his own emotions. He fills notebooks with heart-piercing poems or incandescent prose. He stays up until four AM. He improvises the blues. He'll take you to bed and to the moon, give you pleasure so acute it brings tears to your eyes, but he'll never say he loves you.

I'm a sucker for that kind of guy—moody, creative, intelligent and intense. It's a pity, because they're often not particularly good with relationships. I've got pages of poems bemoaning the fact that you never know what this sort of man really feels, even while you're ready to surrender everything to be with him.

There's a kind of glamor to this type—Illya's type—glamor in the original sense of the word, a force to bewitch. Part of the attraction, I think, is the desire to break through those emotional walls. It's a kind of conceit: “I'm the one who loves him enough to make him open up.” We all had those fantasies about Mr. Spock, didn't we? (another crush, a similar type) I'm the one who sees beyond that Vulcan mask, the one woman who can evoke true, overwhelming emotion from the man who lives by logic. It's a potent aphrodisiac, an assumption of erotic power. Let me just bed him and he'll love me—he won't be able to shut himself off from me, his soul mate...

I've had several men who fit this mold as lovers. None of those attachments ended all that well. Fortunately the man that I married has little in common with Illya Kuryakin, at least on the emotional side, though he's easily as intelligent as the U.N.C.L.E. operative. My husband is cheerful, easy-going, relatively relaxed except when he's focused on his work. He loves me and doesn't hesitate to say so.

I've spent nearly thirty satisfying years with my honey. Nevertheless, I still dream, sometimes, about slender, intense men with prodigious intellect and Gypsy blood. Maybe, after all, I never did get over that crush.

Illya, mon amour, wherever you are—I still love you.