There is a woman walking her darling 3,500 dollar Goldendoodle with pride and a twist of bitchiness while signaling her lifeless doorman for a cab. Sorry to be in the way miss. Don’t mind us passing because I’m sure you’re really busy right now. Power lesbians in action make me quake in my boots. Cubby Hole cuntessas rule the west village like female solders. I indulge myself with the upswings of the ever changing New York minute mood. Take ‘em when you can get ‘em I say. It's the little moments of bliss that get you through the day like walking your dog. The hyper extremes that come with living in the city leave not much of a grey area. It’s all or nothing here and I tend to feel like the later category.
I used to live in a lofted apartment with five Christian guys on 34th st in what is now a Wendy’s. I met this religious motley crew of denial through a rental situation. I could live there (in midtown) with my own space for the whopping price of 235 dollars a month! There was just one tiny requirement to secure this nonexistent rent.....I had to attend their church once a week out at the Jacob Javets center! Now this was around 1999 and I couldn’t have been more unstable financially or emotionally. This was also pre-musical theatre conservatory so I was a mess. I needed a place desperately so that I could get out of a bad room mate situation in Queens with a perverted ballet photographer that was borderline stalking me. You can still see him outside of Lincoln Center selling photos of ballet dancers in Pointe shoes and swans kissing. Beware dancer boys! I’d wake up and Vladimir would be standing in the corner of my room watching me sleep and smiling like a serial killer taking a moment before he suffocates his next victim! God New York is weird. All I know is that it was time to go before this toothless faggot killed me in my sleep or even worse...hits on me while I’m still alive!
Attending a church, after being out of the closet for many years before I even moved to the city, was going to be my first major acting role here. I could’ve won an Oscar for how convincing I was as a Jesus loving Christian fraud. I’d already had a lifetime of practice pretending not to hate Jesus as much as I did because of all the trouble he'd caused. Talk about publicity! You couldn't buy it. I hated god for blogging in the big book that he was sending me to Hell because I’d rather spoon a man......rude! I had no trouble morphing myself into an upstanding man of the lord. But I'd much rather have been rocking it out (like I wanted to) until the wee hours of the morn in a tiny gay sssssssparkly tee shirt at the old Limelight! No one was ever the wiser and I sailed under the radar for months and months and I thought I was home free. Then one day one of the guys came to me and asked when I was going to start dating one of the sisters in the church? Fuck, how was I going to wiggle out of this one? The broken heart theory can only last you so long before somebody starts to catch on. Also, I considered the ol’ long distance girlfriend excuse but knew that they would be onto me because I'd never mentioned her before. There was no way out. Either I came out of the closet again and risked loosing the roof over my head or I would have to consider suppressing my stomach contents (as to not vomit at the thought of taking five million steps back as a homo and start going through the motions of courting a fucking woman.....really for the first time!) I was trapped in a sickening situation and couldn’t bare the thought of going on some phony date with one of the “sisters” and asking “So....where you from?” or “How many siblings do you have....?” I think dating someone you want to fuck can be hard enough. Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve always kinda wanted to sleep with a girl but I wasn’t about to start playing this dangerous game. Plus, I could never be one of the millions of men out there that suppress their inner dick sucking tendencies only to lead some girl on in any way. The positive side to this scandalous approach would be that at least I knew that I could drag the game out a long long time because she would never pressure me to get into her pants until marriage. But to be honest I just didn’t have the energy. How could they not be onto me when I was trying my damnedest to get into a musical theatre academy for twinky bottoms? Then another room mate came to me and asked me the same question....then another and another. I knew their suspicions were up and had talked and probably prayed about the direction my soul was going as an asexual member of the household of brothers. I was stuck in a wooden box with no way out except a little glory hole that would free only one part of me. I hate religious pressure. Was the fact that I was a good person not enough to let me live in the apartment? Would these Christian boys let me stay? When the moment came to speak out or forever hold my weener, I stood up for myself and risked the fall out of these closet cases!
Of all the judgment that was happening in that house there was one guy that I couldn’t help but love. He was a sweet Haitian man named Eddington who had survived unspeakable atrocities in his home land and was here trying to make a better life for himself. His journey was the stuff that major motion pictures are made of. Because of where he came from Eddington couldn’t have been bothered with the goings on of my sexual “issues.” His eye was on the real prize unlike the other brothers. One night we were talking and he told me that he would die to make his American dream come true, and in fact he almost did! He told me about his brother and how much he missed him and how close they were and it made me think about my little bro and our connection. The only difference in our situations was that with all the political unrest and natural disasters that plague his country he hadn't heard from his brother in months and couldn't locate him anywhere. It’s as if he fell of the face of the planet and no one could find him! That would make me ill every moment of every day not knowing if my beautiful brother was alive or dead. He broke down in tears when he described the gaping hole in his life without his bro. People have real problems way beyond who David Tankersley is putting his penis in. He said his little brother had joined a young militia of rising rebels with the motto “Freedom or Death!” The only thing Jason ever fought for was his grades and my image in a red neck middle school in nowhere Tennessee. American social security numbers are juicy reality for those of us that have them. What makes me love this country is that I don’t have to think very much. I ask him if he misses Haiti and he tells me that he was born there, grew up there, and that it’s all he knows. “God the view....I miss the view” he said. I ask him if he will ever return and he tells me that it’s his dream but probably not. Then what good is a dream I wonder? As a citizen of the United States it never occurred to me that any dream I so fancied in my life might not come true. I don’t accept my limits even though I definitely have them. This man’s heart was heavy even after he achieved his freedom. He was a real person with an even realer story. “My friend built a boat and we sailed it for America years ago” he said. I couldn’t believe it. As a young, overindulgent, fat suburban kid I remembered hearing about immigrants slapping a boat together and trying to do that sort of thing. My parents would huff and puff in anger, while watching the evening news. “Damn illegals, coming over here and stealing all our jobs!” But from my point of view, the only jobs that were getting “stolen” from US citizens were the jobs nobody wanted to take anyway! You couldn’t fill all those hard working, seriously labor intensive jobs with lazy American couch potatoes if you tried. In fact I’d say they are saving this country in a way. What a Republican piece of shit I was almost raised to be. If I had stayed in the closet indefinitely I would’ve slid alllllllll the way over to the conservative right side of denial and never come out. Once the damn springs a tiny leak it’s only a matter of time before the whole thing blows.
I then asked Eddington to tell me about how he managed to sail a rickety boat to American soil undetected. He was quiet for a few moments while he remembered that day. “Everyone drowned except me and my friend because nobody could swim when the boat over turned” he said with a mystifying chuckle. What?! He was nervously laughing while tears started to stream down his face. I’ve never seen such simultaneous emotion before. It was a disbelief mixed with a kind of questioning bafflement. He then described his inability to watch the Titanic movie without having a horribly traumatic flashback of the most epic proportion. He described people slipping under the surface one at a time exhausted and panicked from their inability to tread water. What a nightmare that must have been for him that day and what a dark thing to try to bury and move past. Forgetting is not really a possibility with something so extreme. Where is your god sweet and brave Eddington? Where is he now and does he judge me as the other brothers say he does? I’m a Southern survivor of hate crimes and endless childhood taunting and prejudice so I can identify a heroic spirit in a person when I see it. And this man was absolutely radiating the unbelievable experience of a life uncommon. He is a super hero of the likes of which my sheltered and spoiled world of Big Gulps and chronic super-sizing has never known.
Working without those nine mandatory social security numbers was virtually impossible in the city and he was struggling terribly just to pay rent and feed himself. I was working in a coffee shop on the upper west side at the time and would bring him home all the unsold sandwiches and scones that were either going to go home with the employees or go in the trash. I’d leave him little post-it notes of encouragement here and there but there was too much pressure from the guys to cut me off and that came between me and one of the only friends I had in the world. That was the strategy; too freeze me out with Holy cold shoulders. I was way over due for my curtain call in the Jesus camp that was my apartment at the time. It was time for this dog and pony show to close! I know for a fact that several of them admitted during private men's prayer groups that they too had been struggling with homosexual tendencies themselves.........Oops! Or was I really getting kicked out because they couldn’t resist this and wanted to get a piece? I’ll never know why our “savior’s” guillotine came slamming down on me so hard at that exact juncture in my life, but I knew it would eventually anyway. The gig was up and I was busted and soon to be homeless by way of holy banishment. Tuppins for truth sir? Alms for the fairy? Sometimes I feel like Eddie desperately swimming for the shore with all his might with absolutely everything to loose. And maybe, by some miracle, I’ll reach the sandy shore one day and drag myself up onto the beach just barely finishing the starting line.
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