Almost Like Being in Love (7 page)

Trusts me enough to tell me I’m wrong

Always lets me pick the first fortune cookie

Teases me when I need it but knows when to stop

Pursues making me laugh as a hobby

Pretends to like the same things I do even when he doesn’t Misses me when we’re apart

Isn’t afraid to fight with me

Allows me to drive him crazy

Would rather do nothing with me than something by himself Can fall asleep in my lap while I work—and still call it a date
TOP-OF-THE-LINE LEVEL

Can say “I love you” with his eyes

Never lies (except to spare my feelings)

Doesn’t worry about losing me because he knows he can’t Forgets there was a time when we didn’t know each other Kisses me for no good reason

Celebrates my faults

Sighs when I hold him

Knows all the lyrics to
Flora, The Red Menace
(optional)

Strong Points
: I could definitely spend the rest of my life with him.

Shortcomings
: He killed his last boyfriend (acquitted: involuntary manslaughter).

Comments
: The knockout blonde he kept having lunch with wasn’t his lover—she was his attorney. Serves me right for spying on him.

I should have known it was going to be an uphill battle right from Gate 3: Adolescence. First there was a Craig, then there was a kiss, then there was a goodbye, then there were the letters, then he stopped writing to me, and then there was Cardinal Rule Number 1: Never Fall in Love When You’re 17. Not unless you want to spend your entire freshman year at USC learning how to sleep by yourself again. If it hadn’t been for Adam-Down-the-Hall-with-the-Sky-Blue-Eyes, I might have been playing Camille until I was a junior. As it was, I managed to hit the dirt running: before I’d even hung up my Camelot and Fade Out, Fade In posters, I’d inadvertently discovered (through some carefully orchestrated eavesdropping at the Coliseum urinal) that he was a wannabe actor from Chicago. So I wrote my one and only play—a shamefully melodramatic character study about seven ballplayers stuck in the Cubs dugout at Wrigley Field during a rain delay—solely as an excuse to (a) cast him, and 'b( meet him. He didn’t get the part 'much to his boyfriend’s disappointment), but at least I had half a dozen other men in jockstraps to choose from. That was my preliminary encounter with Puckett’s Curse: I wound up with the only all-heterosexual all-male cast in the history of World Theatre. And from there, it really turned ugly.

1.
Gregory
. We met at my Harvey Milk vigil in November. I was 18, he was 33—an ex-Marine who still wore a high-and-tight, with a chiseled body that didn’t know when to quit. How did I get so lucky? Especially when he confessed that he was God’s disciple of truth, sent down to earth to find twelve apostles who’d be willing to follow him. 'Into what? Sharon Tate’s living room?(

2.
Robbie
. We were both 26. It was “Some Enchanted Evening” all over again. On our eight-month anniversary, he bought me the original cast recording of Kwamina and took me to a gang bang—without telling me that I was the one getting banged. Men are such assholes.

3.
Michael
. Five years ago. He was a tenor. We spent our first date listening to Götterdämmerung on the radio while we read along from the score (for six hours!). He was obsessed with Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, so I—with only $247, a T-bill, and a heart made out of oatmeal—promised it to him for Christmas.

How was I supposed to know it came in eighteen volumes?! Three months later, he was sitting on a bench in Ocean Park reading “O”

when a tall brunet with Armani teeth and a Calvin Klein body sat down next to him. Turned out he was an oboe player. Nobody ever heard from either one of them again.

And as long as I’m being brutally candid, I only wound up teaching American History because I followed a cute ass into the country-and-western section at Barnes & Noble and found out it was attached to an adorably self-conscious Poli-Sci professor who, in retrospect, was probably more anxious to stick a needle in his eye than have coffee with me. Three cappuccinos later, I could already envision myself stretched out on an Eames couch with my head in his lap while we both graded papers—so I applied for a job in the history department at USC. And by the time he’d introduced me to his boy toy—a gym bunny with a Ph.D.

(natch)—I already had five classes and a parking space with my name on it. (Not that I ever blamed him for robbing Broadway of its brightest light. My musical comedy ambitions had been short-circuited three years earlier at the still-woundable age of 20, when I auditioned for a campus production of On a Clear Day at the Stop Gap Theatre and discovered quite by accident that my singing voice causes cancer.( Once again I’d chosen to sleep through Obvious Clues 101: the formal handshake instead of a kiss 'he’s bashful(, his unflagging use of the plural possessive

'“our” dog clearly meant the one his parents had bought him when he was six—Spot or Shucks or Barnacle Bill), and the three hickeys barely hidden by his Versace collar (toner cartridge fell on his neck). Also overlooked was the fact that nothing makes my skin crawl like countryand- western music—unless it’s Götterdämmerung.

Okay. One more root canal. But that’s it. Otherwise, people might start thinking I’m a little screwy.