A Busful of the Morbidly Obese

I should have spoken out earlier, well before health insurance reform found itself in its current jeopardy, but cowardice kept my lips sealed; I have found over the years that it isn’t a great idea to antagonize the powerful and ruthless, and these people are both. I am coming forward now, though. If this is my last journal entry, I ask only that my grave be kept clean and my memory revered.

For nearly a year in the early 80s, Scott Brown, the Senator-elect from Massachusetts, the guy whose replacement of the late Ted Kennedy means that the Democrats will no longer be able to keep the Republicans from filibustering, and I were lovers — homosexual lovers, lovers whose love Leviticus 18:22 emphatically forbade.

Like so many others, I first became aware of Scotty (my pet name for him; his for me was Johnny) after he posed for Cosmopolitan magazine. I was between heterosexual relationships at the time, lonely and confused. Jesus had spoken to me quite audibly at one point years before, but had then taken to mumbling, and finally become inaudible; I see now that he was testing my faith. I see now that I failed the test. This is a shame I shall live with for the rest of my days, or until I fall prey to Alzheimer’s.

I was reading Cosmo only for its articles. I would read "10 Things to Whisper to Him Just Before He Ejaculates That Will Make Him Your Sex Slave", for instance, and just mentally reverse all the pronouns. When I saw Scott’s photo spread, don’t imagine that I was transfixed. He wasn’t as cute as Burt Reynolds. He lacked Burt’s cocksure smirk. He lacked Burt’s irresistible furriness.

But then I saw him at the Boston disco where I would occasionally drop in for a cold beer or a couple of poppers in those days of loneliness and confusion, and realized the Cosmo photos hadn’t done him justice. He asked me to dance. I didn’t see any harm in it. After a couple of hours, he asked if I’d enjoy seeing his collection of Tom of Finland lithographs. I didn’t see any harm in it. Once back at his apartment, he asked if he could sodomize me. I’d had a lot more beer over the course of the evening than prudence would have poured, and didn’t see the harm in it. It hurt — this was before I began getting regular (every five years or so) prostate exams — but it felt so right.

We became inseparable. He was just starting law school at the time. I would bring him cups of hot chocolate while he studied. He thought it might be fun to pretend we were inmates in a maximum security correctional facility; he was now sufficiently comfortable with me to admit that he’d long fantasized about being the “daddy” in such a setting. What this turned out to mean was that he wanted me to wear makeup and tight cutoffs and to do his laundry. I’d been a member of a sort of a glam rock group at one point, so the makeup wasn’t a problem. I was already doing the laundry.

It wasn’t as though I didn’t still have an occasional heterosexual fantasy, mind you. Sometimes I thought about plugging Morgan Fairchild, for instance, making her gasp and moan, mussing her perfect coiffure.

After he passed the bar, we got harder-core. Scotty bought both of us leather outfits, and we became friends with a couple who’d converted their rumpus room into a dungeon. I wasn’t crazy about getting burned with cigarettes while suspended upside down and handcuffed from the ceiling, and I won’t deny that I had misgivings about Scotty trading me that one time to an outlaw motorcycle gang for a case of Michelob Lite, but the rest of it was kind of fun. The Property of Master Scotty tattoo on my chest is a constant reminder — at least on days that I look at myself in the mirror while shirtless -- of those happy times.

I think we’d both known they wouldn’t last forever. The beginning of the end came when the supervising partner at the corporate law firm where he worked after first passing the bar told him he’d better get himself married, and quick, if he ever wanted to make partner. I drifted back into heterosexuality — not, mind you, with Morgan, who not only didn’t return my calls, but just had to get that offensive, gratuitous restraining order against me. It would have killed her to meet for coffee? The realization that I’d allowed myself to have been an unwitting foot solder in the homosexual war on American decency hit me like a busful of the morbidly obese.

All I have left are the tat, some cigarette burn scars, and my memories. But what memories!

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Mystery Man in Brangelina Split Named

What you’ve heard about Angelina and Brad is true. They’re breaking up. I know because I’m the guy she’s leaving him for.

I can guess what you’re thinking. “He was sort of cute in a saturnine semitic way decades ago, but time hasn’t been kind to him.” The fact is that after five years of You-Know-Who, though, Ange has had her fill of pretty. Now she wants mordant and depressive and much older. She wants what she used to have with Billy Bob Thornton, except without the weird stuff. I haven’t asked her to get my name tattooed on the most intimate part of herself. I haven’t given her a vial of my blood to wear around her neck. All I’ve given here are a corsage, and my heart. I have a rare blood type.

We met three months ago in the small produce section of the only supermarket on Beacon’s Main Street, Key Food. It’s really expensive. Most ghetto supermarkets are expensive. Beacon isn’t a ghetto. There are as many fine artists here as welfare queens or crack dealers, and as many drag queens as welfare queens. If you want ghetto, you have to cross the river to Newburgh. But nobody wants ghetto, not really. The slurring white punks in their baggy pants and backward baseball caps and necklaces may think they do, but they don’t. As I write this, the river is frozen.

She was looking at onions. There were red ones and the other, more typical kind. I can’t imagine that she does her own cooking, but it was none of my business. I figured she had it up to here with perfect strangers questioning her. She noticed me staring. She smiled. Her famous lips looked even more lubricious than in photographs. I wanted to kiss them, but I gave her space.

I pretended to need pasta. It was in a different part of the store. She followed me. Don’t think I wasn’t flattered. There were other men doing their grocery shopping, lonely, single men. A man with a woman wouldn’t have shopping for groceries. He’d have been at home fixing things. He'd have been hunting or fishing.

She asked if I had a favorite shape. I said I’d always liked Jayne Mansfield’s. She said, “No, smartass, for pasta, I mean.” There was a twinkle in her eye when she said it. I said but what about You-Know-Who? She said not to look a gift horse in the mouth. I filled her. Neither of us smoked afterward. We have too much self-respect.

She liked that I’d dated famous actresses in the past. Morgan Fairchild and I were an item at one point. There have been others. Famous actresses like a man who doesn’t ask for their autograph. They like men they can’t intimidate, and who are unintimidatd enough to tease them. Jen used to love my pronouncing her surname Anus-town. She'd pretend otherwise, but her laughter gave her away.

She introduced me to her six children. I had a child of my own once. I didn’t get along only with Maddox and Pax and Knox, but also with the ones lacking an x at the end, Zahara, Shiloh, and Vivienne. I asked if she and You-Know-Who had considered naming one of the twins Barbecue since they were so crazy about unusual names. She didn’t get it. “Barbecue Pitt,” I said.

The look she gave me made me feel chastened. There used to be a famous restaurant in Beverly Hills called Chasen’s. Ange’s estranged dad, Jon Voight, might have gone there with his agent. Ange was probably too young to have been there. They were famous for their chili, of all things. Elizabeth Taylor had a bathtubful of it flown to Rome when she was shooting Cleopatra. She thought immersing herself in it kept her skin soft. This was well before Michael Jackson. Some people think Ange would make a good Cleopatra. Some people used to think You-Know-Who would make a good Achilles. No one ever thought Michael Jackson would.

We’re taking it one day at a time, though neither of us is an alcoholic. I’m writing tersely today, with almost no adverbs. I haven’t even mentioned my huge backlog of unjustly unproduced screenplays. There will be time for that later, or there won’t. It isn’t mine to know.

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