Starf*cker: a Meme-oir (43 page)

I’ve been thinking about death a lot lately. I don’t know what’s causing it to be a matter of concern—I’m not even sure it
is
a matter of concern. Maybe it’s just that it’s something worth
considering
. Or maybe I just have a bad case of the olds.

For the past year or so I’ve found myself puzzling out death, trying to picture what will happen. What I’ve come up with instead of answers are metaphors. Death could be just another part of life, similar to sleep. Sometimes, as I drift off to sleep, I find myself wondering if this is what it will feel like to die—an overwhelming urge to be still, to close one’s eyes, to relinquish waking control. If so, maybe, against all odds, death isn’t an end, but a transition. Maybe there is some vague degree of consciousness, similar to dreaming.

Even if death is an ultimate cessation, I still wonder if our need to sleep every day is some kind of natural preparation for an eventual dirt nap.

If death is an ending, I can envision it as the culmination of a long, wearying journey. I think about a person walking down an endless hall that becomes darker and darker, more claustrophobic. He eventually tires, slowing to a crawl, finally becoming still. No more progress. Others will pass him and forget him soon enough, and in turn meet the same fate and be forgotten themselves despite there being so much more hall to travel; such a shame to have the desire and determination without the energy. Death as a failure to continue, a defeat.

I took a trip to Chicago a while back, armed with Joan Didion’s
The Year Of Magical Thinking
, about the death of the author’s daughter. It’s a mesmerizingly, almost paralyzingly sad book that was a hard-sell for some Amazon readers, one of whom sniffed that she disliked the book because she found the narrator “unlikeable.”
Your kid died? What’s wrong with you?
Still other unimpressed readers branded the book the two most unforgivable things in the age of the 24/7 immediate-minute news cycle: boring and depressing.

I had planned the trip to Chicago to see my mother and sister and yet it was Chicago itself that reached out to me first—I received an e-mail a couple of nights before I left from a woman I’d known there, before I moved to New York. I’d known her as a fabulous, exotic, mercurial lady who could be trusted to dress flamboyantly and accompany her gay brother to a club. I dated that gay brother, Geoffrey, and had a lot of affection for him, a bright, mysterious young student who shared some important experiences with me, sexual and otherwise. I stopped seeing him only because I left the area. In that way, we never truly broke up, just separated.

The e-mail I received from his sister was to inform me that he’d died that day. It took me completely by surprise. You sometimes forget people’s lives continue on even when you’re not in the room. Well, so do their deaths. When I gently inquired as to what had happened—“Was this as much of a surprise to you as it is to me?”—she replied that he’d been drinking himself to death for many years. “He could not seem to accept or forgive himself. Thank you for remembering him.”

Remembering him was not a courtesy for me, it was a given, but I knew what she meant and was touched, humbled even, that she’d decided to inform me—on the day it happened, no less. I was haunted by what she told me because I could not connect alcoholism with the person I’d known, let alone a persistent, self-destructive death wish. I also could not guess what it was he did not like about himself—homosexuality seemed an unlikely cause. Somehow, I felt this was all I needed to know, and all I was going to know, so I asked no more questions. He’d reached the end of the journey and I was already further down the hall.

In Chicago, I stayed with my college roommate Omar, seeing him for the first time in forever—he’d gotten plump, I’d gotten thin, and I’m sure we’ve both reversed those trends by now.

Omar had an absolutely beautiful home, a duplex with a lake view in a historical building. I stayed in a serenely unadorned guest room painted white. At night, I would lie in the bed and stare at the moonlight that created the borders of the window and feel like I was floating, wondering if this was in any way a parallel for the loss of consciousness, or even for death itself, which felt all around me that trip. Walking around the city, I visited my current agent, Danielle, who told me a famous writer I’d once worked with and who was one of her star clients had been told he had terminal cancer and was expected to go at any moment.

This was exactly what happened to her former boss, my former agent, my mentor, Jane. Thinking of him making arrangements not for his death but for what would happen after he had died made me more openly curious about the end of our time on earth than ever. When I’d found that Jane’s nagging back pain of a couple of months had finally been diagnosed as cancer throughout her body and that she had a month to live, I called her and told her I was so sorry to hear the news.

“Don’t you be sorry.” Her girlish voice was unlike any tone I could recall her having used when we worked together. “Sure would like to see you.”

I could tell she was keeping the conversation short to hold back tears. Why she felt it was important not to cry over such inarguably sad news, I don’t know.

My old coworker Sandra and I flew in to Chicago to see her within a few weeks, but arrived the day after she lost consciousness. We held her hand in the hospital and reminisced with or to her, watching her brow furrow (could she hear?) even as she was unable to close her mouth. It seemed like she was struggling to communicate, but it could also have been involuntary.

Jane died the following day, which seemed impossible. She was so indefatigable it was hard to believe she would ever close her eyes.

Walking along the beach (yes, Chicago has them) in the unseasonal 80-degree weather, I discovered it must be a tradition to memorialize late loved ones with graffiti on the cement walkways near where Omar lived. Seeing the child-like scrawls and odes to “Mom” and “Dad,” I wondered if there were people out there who might critique them as boring or depressing. These same people will be stifling yawns as The Grim Reaper hugs them close.

I know there are people who want to die, but I can’t understand them. In the car on the way to the airport to get home, I called my grandmother, in her nineties and still living alone quite handily. She told me how her pastor son, my uncle, had to accompany a woman to the “boondocks of Canada” to identify the body of her husband, a suicide. Death is such an expected eventuality that we’re all a bit obsessed with tales that challenge any of our expectations—suicides, murders, freak health collapses, previously unguessed personal failings...all will keep just about any of us rapt, maybe also because they are potentially autobiographies.

It’s not unironic that I spend so much of my time marveling at ninetysomething movie stars when I have a real, live ninetysomething grandma in my own family who only hears from me irregularly.

I’d like to say I live each day as if it were my last, but the reality is I—and most people—live each day as if it were the first day of the rest of my life, like I have time to burn, and so I burn it without a care in the world. Maybe the best thing to take from my recent fixation on death is putting that angst to good use. What gives death its greatest power over us is the fear that we lived the wrong way, missed out.

I think the least we should take from our shared expectation of death is to resolve to let that expectation inform how we live. So as I move forward as a middle-aged guy, I have resolved to try to accomplish whatever I can so that whenever death arrives, my last thought won’t be, “No, wait, I still have to….”

When I started blogging, I had no idea what I was doing. That may be the one thing that has remained consistent about the endeavor over the past ten years.

In the same way that I launched a teen magazine without the benefit of any research or a solid understanding of what my audience really wanted (
not
guys with underarm hair), I launched my blog, BoyCulture.com, without a business plan or any more of a goal than having my opinion heard and drawing attention to the release of the movie based on my novel.

The journey to getting
Boy Culture
adapted as a film had taken about nine years. The producers had been methodical in attempting to get a good script, which started with my own attempt, one that went down in flames since I’d never done a script before and I was completely burned out on the story; keep in mind I had begun writing it when I was twenty, so the idea of pouring myself into adapting it for the screen after doing it as a short story and then a novella and then a novel was exhausting to me. The producers had to find the right writers and a director with vision.

They finally found that as a twofer in Q. Allan Brocka, who co-wrote the screenplay with Philip Pierce, the original person to option the book. Then, they had to raise money to get the movie made, cast it, and get it shot economically.

I had been waiting for so long for the film to happen—I’m sure my friends were just humoring me when they let me talk about the process—that when everything fell into place and shooting was about to begin, I’m not sure I truly grasped that it was a done deal. Unbeknownst to me, the director had told the producers he had no interest in putting out into the world another lily-white fairy tale, so he’d rewritten one of the lead parts as an African-American. I only found this out when Googling for info on the film’s Seattle shoot, when I saw a casting call asking for black actors.

I was pissed because it felt arbitrary to me, because I hadn’t been told, and because, as the creator, it felt like I was being told my story wasn’t good enough, that it needed to be fixed in order to be worthy of being filmed. It wasn’t, “How dare you make my white character black?” it was, “How dare you change my character so substantially with no regard for however it might affect what I was trying to say?”

I pouted about it, didn’t visit the set, and had strong words with Philip over the subterfuge. I’d been so in the loop up until then, I didn’t understand why I was suddenly being managed.

When I first watched a cut of the movie in the privacy of my home on DVD, I didn’t know what to think, and I couldn’t control what I felt: exposed raw because Allan had preserved a shocking amount of my original dialogue; duped that the story wasn’t the same one I’d told; and, to top it all off, envious because the racially re-imagined version of the story definitely worked. Despite some minor aspects that I didn’t like, on subsequent viewings I realized that making the “Andrew” character black had not been arbitrary, and that it had added a new dimension to the story, improving it for the movie it wound up being.

I got over myself and embraced
Boy Culture
.

I was proud of how the movie had turned out, and was even prouder when it received good reviews at various influential film festivals, including Tribeca and Outfest, the latter of which gave it awards for the lead performance by Derek Magyar and for the screenplay by Philip and Allan. The performance of Darryl Stephens as “Andrew,” the character who’d become black for the big screen, is often cited by fans as a major reason they liked or even saw the movie. “Joey,” Jonathon Trent, scored some magazine covers.

As part of my embrace of the film, I decided to start a personal blog so I could keep fans of the book apprised of what was going on with the movie as it wended its way through the festival circuit toward what we hoped would be a wide release and
Brokeback Mountain
-sized success.

I remember that at the time I started a blog, I barely understood what one was. The year before, I had heard about Perez Hilton’s PageSixSixSix.com (both names I found to be hilarious) and attempted to read it, but was thrown by the intentionally juvenile quality and the disregard for esoteric things like spelling and grammar. I did not get his appeal at first, and I wasn’t even exactly sure who this gossip terrorist was…another Drudge?

Then, I remember visiting PinkIsTheNewBlog.com and literally not comprehending how to read it…it was stacks of information about celebrities, but I didn’t really get how one read a blog—from top to bottom—let alone what one was or could be.

By November of 2005, I had figured it all out enough to read up on Typepad and successfully create a daily personal blog, which I decreed to be about “men, Madonna, mouthing off & me.” Not necessarily in that order. I dug in, writing about aspects of pop culture that caught my attention whenever I didn’t have some news about the movie to impart.

The first day I posted was November 5, 2005, and I got a whopping one view, probably from me. This is the equivalent of checking yourself out in the mirror accidentally, or liking your own Facebook post.