I'm in Love Again

It’s about time I acknowledged my new relationship, which, if the bags under my eyes and =bleeding ulcer are any indication, I have kept under wraps far too long. I know that many will jeer outragedly when they hear of it, but I just don’t care anymore. I will shout it from the rooftops now, and even admit to it on Facebook. Having been dating since he dumped that fucking pig Oksana Grigorieva, Mel Gibson and I are very much in love.

Is he perfect? Of course not! The other evening, when we were going to attend the opening of my artist friend James’ latest show at a gallery on Main Street, Mel took one look at the tight regular-fit jeans I’d bought at Target for the occasion, and told me, at the top of his lungs, that he believed me to look like a fucking pig in heat. As you can well imagine, this was deeply disheartening and hurtful. Some readers, knowing of his comparable early treatment of his Oksana, will say, “Well, what did you expect?” What they don’t know is how contrite he became mere moments later, and how he wouldn’t let us leave for James’s show until he’d had a beautiful bouquet of flowers delivered to our door for me, and how, after the show, he insisted on my ordering champagne, truffles, and caviar at the most expensive restaurant on Main Street.

Claire believed me to be precious about my work, in the sense that I get sulky if someone doesn’t tell me I’m a genius at least every 72 hours. Mel couldn’t be less precious about his own. When The Patriot came on HBO the other night, and I said I’d rather have hot needles jammed under my fingernails than watch it, do you suppose he did anything other than chuckle, “Well, to each his own”? We wound up watching instead my own favorite program, Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, without a murmur of disenchantment from Mel, my head on the big misunderstood teddy bear’s shoulder.

I know what you’re thinking: how is this possible? Whereas my own sexuality has, since the late noted author and critic Danny Sugarman began spreading those scurrilous lies about me, been the subject of spirited debate, Mel has made no bones whatever as to his feelings about homosexuality, having quite correctly pointed out to El Pais magazine in 1991 that many gays "… take it up the ass. This [his anus] is only for taking a shit." Suffice it to say that we have found ways to give each other great pleasure without involving parts of our bodies intended primarily for elimination.

But what, some will surely ask, about the fact that I am ethnically Jewish, while Mel is known to believe that “fucking Jews…are responsible for all the wars in the world”? Well, let’s just say that in the face of mutual physical attraction like mine and Mel’s, a lot of seemingly immutable prejudices melt away like lemon drops. If you’d seen how adorable he looked in his Star of David print apron on Passover this year, helping me make what the Hirschbaums said was the loveliest seder they’d been to in years, I don’t think you would be quite so likely to tar him with the brush of antisemitism. Whatever happened to letting bygones be bygones?