Chemistry
And here I must pause to acknowledge the spirited irony of a situation that gives me much more to blog about, with far less time to do so. As things progress with Tony and the scope of my job contract changes, I'm adjusting to a radical shift in the tone of my days and my nights. I'm learning again, too, how dramatically life's rhythms and tones change when new people and new energies enter the mix. There are residual effects and odd reactions in places where I'd never expect them.
I should point out that Tony reads this weblog, and while I may bandy about thoughts and issues, every thing I say here is stuff I'm comfortable with in a public forum. I don't have a special "friends" version with juicy details, and neither is anything written in subtextual linguacode. I've read blog after blog where relationships and issues are written as though the writer is having a private conversation with a friend in the hope that thier partner would "overhear" and, and thus englightened to the 'true' feelings, arrive at a desired decision or conclusions. That is not what I do here. If I discuss elements of my relationship with Tony here, you can reasonably assume Tony and I have already discussed it in some form or another.
After Tony and I met, I was left with some pretty intense feelings in a several different directions. The feelings were undeniable, but (as usual) I pondered and analysed the situation and projected more potential outcomes than the WOPR computer in WarGames. Tony, frankly, was a model of patience, and was respectful of my distance beyond the call. We chatted online for long stretches. His increased worry was written in the subtext and tone of his words, but whether through instict, good advice or a combination of both, he let the turkey cook 'til it was done. I should rub a buddha belly in thanks that he didn't pick up a copy of He's Just Not That Into You. Hmm...I'll rub Simba's instead.
Now that I've decided to go with the flow, it's getting easier. Since last week, I've lived *in* more moments than I've with, and that's something remarkable. Suspending disbelief doesn't come easy to me and I rarely lose myself in the moment. I would love to, but invariably the parallel commentary begins and I begin deconstructing events as I live them. Even during events in which I'm actively participating, it's as though there are some learned, very articulate bloggers in my head, constantly reading between lines and making associations as they find them. Basically, what I do here, only in real time, all the time.
Faith is nearly always a casualty of this commentary, it's mysteries shallowed by context, association with history, and personal experience. My mom reminded me once of an experience I barely remember: it's the first week of first grade at Christ The Good Shepherd Catholic School in Lincoln Park, Michigan. It's Wednesday morning mass, which means all the schoolkids are there, row and after row of light blue Oxford shirts and schoolgirl plaid. At the kids mass, instead of a homily (the part where the priest stepsdown unto the multitudes to deliver an informal topical chat), father Redwick would take questions and answers from the students in a sort of prepubescent press conference at God's House. Basically, Redwick gave his brief speech, and began to take questions. The topic is long since lost to antiquity, but what's known is this: mine was the first hand to go up, and the only hand to go up, and in rapid fire succession I followed-up each question with another more pointed than the last for some twenty minutes. Eventually, in true Ari Fleischer fashion, Father Redwick said, "I think we're out of time, and I'll ask you to defer any further questions to Sister Angelette" and then retreated to calmer liturgical waters.
The defining elements of my life were already present there, at age six: an instinctive indifference to authority, a mistrust of dogma, the ability to contextualize outside my own limited scope, a aptitude for questioning, and a penchant for doing so until acted upon by an outside force. Call it pedantic analytical inertia. :-)
I'd been told many time I should have faith in my feelings, and often I do, but I also know that sometimes my emotions trick me into seeing things that aren't there, and (more often) keep me warmly enrobed in the comforts of denial. And so I'm always questioning the often intense emotions that course through me. I stood far outside myself and chewed on potential outcomes and consequences, debated the "right thing to do." I stayed there and stayed there, playing Devil's Advocate to myself, asking myself the same questions I knew would come from all corners if we did pursue things further.
Our chemistry was immediate and obvious, but the same circumstances that make up our situation are points to consider. While some guys in my position would have jumped right away, on the surface, ingredients of a nice, fluffy disaster pie. We're ten years apart, and they're a *massive* ten years: he's 20 and I'm 30. I'd reached a point around age 25 or 26 where I swore I'd never date anybody younger than 24 - those I'd met felt too inexperienced, too subject to dreamy expectations despite prior disclaimers, too flaky, too provincial, too lacking in the fundamenal worldliness to deal with my solitude, too jealous of the creative work that pulls my attention away.
Furthermore, because of my upbringing and I generally feel that older, experienced people should set an example for younger people, especially those that look up to them. And I can be a piss-poor example for the young and impressionable. More people are attracted to the idea of me than the reality. This is especially true online, and I long ago began to restrict access to people I met online in favor of those that I'd met and got to know in person. But since I'm far less social and enjoy quietude more than most, I don't meet that many people.
I'm not trying to sell myself short and this isn't false modesty. I have many good qualities, and some exemplary ones that stand out above nearly everyone I know. I'm friendly and charismatic and talented and articulate and funny and gentle and handsome and many other positive things. These are the qualities that people generally take away with them when they meet me. Those qualities have earned me the acquaintance of many, many people since I've moved to California. Some of them have become my friends.
I've dated enough guys to recognize stars in someone's eyes, and it's especially painful to watch those stars fade. Suddenly the idea of me becomes the reality of an all-too-selfish loner that is far more comfortable as an observer of life than a participant in it; someone whose empathy can can be turned into a precision tool, used to manipulate; someone who likes to confront others but is so wary of being confronted that under pressure presents a Clintonian relationship to facts; someone whos fiercely loyal to a small group of friends, but someone for whom the demands of being a close friend can be frustrating and unreasonable.
These are negative qualities that millions of people possess, but in most people, these qualities manifest themselves quickly enough for a suitor to quickly determine whether or not they can work with them. And here lie my disadvantages: I (like the aforementioned president) am charismatic, and I am largely in absentia.
As for charisma - I don't find myself all that charismatic, personally. But that's not really my call. Most I meet tell me I'm likeable, some so far as to say charming. It's when they say I'm likable and charming when I was sure I was acting boorish and obnixious that I realize there's other factors that aren't on my control panel.
This I know: when people talk, I generally know what they're talking about. I have a broad knowledge of history, especially 20th century history, as well as a cross-generational, global view of popular culture that makes it as easy for me to talk to a senior citizen about the mood of America before World War II, a baby boomer (ironically, and sadly, the most closed-off and condescending of all American age groups across the political spectrum) about how opposition to the war was reflected in television, or to a high-schooler about the overall cuddlability of Joey Fatone. I've had an unsually comprehensive vocabulary since grade school that I constantly expand and am never reluctant to avail. My empathy make it easy for me to sense, translate, and adapt others feelings and associate it to my own experiences. If someone is struggling for just the right way to express something, I'll most often have alredy contexualized what they're saying, and have the words and metaphorical resources at hand to perfectly describe something so that it sings.
These are all qualities that make a killer first impression. They not only make me likeable and a healthy respect for different points of view, convince most people that I really like them too. To be fair, I rarely dislike anybody, but unlike most, solitude is not my enemy. I can read people very quickly, and, while factors vary, I usually know when someone and I click. I can like someone and not click. And if we don't click, my lifestyle and my craft don't allow me the time to build a relationship structure where I have to provide constant context, history, and rephrasings.
But then, through no direct action on my part, I go one more: I disappear or am by and large unavailable. I go to a few big parties each year, but there are many more I don't go to. I'm always online, and I've online chat buddies that I've known for years that have never seen me except for photos. This absence makes the idea of me, especially after brief meetings, loom larger than the reality.
So, to get back to my point, all this forced much handwringing on my part after I'd met Tony, because I was sure I'd never click with a 20-year-old, or would ever want to. Like most people, I used to place the idea of youth on a pedistal. As an 18-year-old, I was attrated to guys younger than I am. At 20, while I dated guys in my own age group, I, like everyone else thought Jonathan Taylor Thomas was a cutie.
But as I reached 25 and I had different and longer relationships with different types of guys, I began lost patience with the same boyishness that so many guys lust after well into their senior years. Eventually, it got to the point where I approached cute young guys for conversation without covertly calculating options, assessing the sexual situation, and trying to not look obvious. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I don't turn my head and walk funny as I pass the high school senior senior track team doing their calesthenics. As a human male, despite my rather democratic tastes, I'm hormonally driven to lust after the soft and supple textures and lines of the young, but like a lactose intolerant dinner guest before the dessert, I may pine for the creme brulée, but I don't indulge lest we both end up an ugly mess.
All that I admire about young people, their vivacious energies and unbridled passions and less-jaded idealism, and the things they often admire about me: my talents, skills, experiences, confidence, surity, and empathy are things best shared between generations, though the offices of friendship. I love it when people enjoy my work, but only so far as the enjoyment is as honest as it can be and unhindered by a desire to please. I don't admire or particularly like self-degrading idolization. The worst possible outcome in my mind is if my partner their own creativity because they're intimidated by my experience and output. Love brings real danger to one-way relationships - constructive criticism from an experienced older friend can be helpful, the same from a lover can be devastating.
On the other side of the coin, a teacher's job is not only to inspire and empassion, but also to correct entrenched beliefs. When that relationship is transposed to a sexual relationship, the high that the mentor gets from being an inspiration, can make it can be difficult to let a developing young person fall on their own sword as they must now and then. The same youthful idealism and passions that inspire can also grow tiresome. Young men dislike constant course-correction. As they should. And I don't want to constantly tell anyone their opinions are half-baked and their ideas aleady proven wrong. I want somebody I'm okay with making mistakes with together.
Young men, especially gay young men, are no order of milk and cookies either. As I was in the late 80's and early 90's, kids today are just as smart, calculating, and hedonistic as I - and they're smarter. Gay teens today have grown up in a world where Internet pedophilia is a given, and the gay boys know where to find the damanged men that will take them away from where they don't want to be on the false hope of finding a son or reconciling themselves. The cost benefit analysis of getting used by some wayward young queer punk on the make doesn't match the benefit, either physically or emotionally. I came to terms where I fit in the grand scheme of fathers and sons and masculinity, and I'm neither yearning for a child of my own nor looking for father I never had. It's selling any young lover and yourself short to think you can reconnect to your inner child through another boy's ass.
When Tony and I first played around, there was no presumtion that it would go any further than it did. Still when I found out he was 20, I was hesitant. But then something happened that hadn't happened before. Firstly, we talked as much as we had sex. And we talked about everything. His family, his background, his friends, his passions. And through it all, there wasn't a single point when the bloggers in my head reminded me of his age. And it continues, despite everyone I know online and off only too happy to remind me whenever they can.
I'm a firm believer in the cliché of the "old soul." Now I don't know whether means a history of various reincarnations or alien DNA or just a inherent cellular-level aptitude for combining empathy, observation, context, history, compassion, patience, knowledge, and expeirence into a dynamic, relevant wisdom. Are these "old souls" great people? Not necessarily. But the larger sense of wisdom is always there. And while I might consider myself an old soul, I'm also a simple human whose often too busy tossing off clever observational bon mots than to listen to the higher voice inside.
It was my friend Kevin, for the most part, thorugh no action on his part, that helped me to become comfortable with Tony. Kevin tought me something important: I'd been living in a bubble (both economically and socially) for some years and that the young people I encountered were often the immature and overneedy types - many had come to California during the dot-com boom and brought all overriding problems into an environment that reenforced and deepened them.
Kevin is different. And in the 8 or 9 months we shared an apartment (and especially in contrast to the other two living with us), he reminded me that to be young doesn't necessarily mean immature. Sure, he was unsure of himself and insecure and unpolished. Like many guys his age he was unmotivated and lacked self-direction. But there were times in New York when, as I struggled with some issue or another, Kevin had advice that cut through to the heart of everything. Kevin and I played around sexually when my visit was just a visit (he's my friend Doron's boyfriend, and they'd discussed it beforehand), there was never any sense that it was any more than fun. When I stayed in NY and we agreed to move in together, he had the wisdom to scale back the sexual activity, and thereby keep a powerful and potentially destructive tension out of our home.
I grew to admire him as much as like him and today I love him as one of the best friends I have, and he's perhaps one of four or five people on this planet that I trust completely. His integrity, honesty, loyalty, morality, and compassion - qualities one doesn't often associate with American men of any background - still inspire me. There are times when I stop and give a homeless person a dollar or two if I have it, because it's what Kevin would've done, and when it comes to matters such as this, Kevin is usually right.
Tony has many of these same qualities, and different ones as well. When he describes friends of his or something he and his friends did back in South Carolina, it's in terms that indicate he understands its place in his story and how that part of his story fits into the larger story around him. I rarely have to explain anything to him. I've gotten so used to having to explain myself to new people in my life, that I do it without thinking and he stops me to let me know he gets it. I have much to learn from Tony, and none of it has to do with how to be young again.
And all that aside, he's flat-out brilliant: from a poor family in South Carolina, he's on a full ride to Stanford University in California, a Top-5 Ivy League American institution. Very few people know such disctinction, certainly not I. And this last fact is important.
I want a realtionship to be on a relatively even-keel. I don't mind being a role model, but I'm uncomfortable in the role of a mentor. Tony's arrived where he is today by swimming against the currents of history and economics, against the trends of his peers, and over the protests of his mother. While I feel I've things to add and contribute to his understanding some aspects of the world, I don't feel I'm being looked to for, or as, the big answers to starry-eyed questions. And on the same token, I need never censor, dumb-down, overcontextualize, or overexplain myself. In the time I've known him, communication has gone smoother than it ever has before.
Already he's been inspiring artistically, and interesting in most all other ways. I'm getting exposure to an aspect of life I'd no desire to enjoy at the time: academia. Not to mention learning (albiet so-far second-hand) the interesting and complex subtleties of life at a mixed, largely non-judgemental frat house, which, as described, is nothing like the horned-up sexual tension festival of the gay imagination that I've read about for years and have I've been essentially begged to confirm exists. It's also more ambiguous and nuanced than those asking could ever imagine.
And if that wasn't surreal enough, if you'd have told me six months ago that in June, 2005 I would either have lunch with Bjork and Vladmir Putin in Paris or be boyfriend to a Stanford frat boy as he and his brothers celebrated on the occasion of his 21st birthday, but you didn't tell me which one...I probably woulda started taking Russian lessons.
There's more to come.
I should point out that Tony reads this weblog, and while I may bandy about thoughts and issues, every thing I say here is stuff I'm comfortable with in a public forum. I don't have a special "friends" version with juicy details, and neither is anything written in subtextual linguacode. I've read blog after blog where relationships and issues are written as though the writer is having a private conversation with a friend in the hope that thier partner would "overhear" and, and thus englightened to the 'true' feelings, arrive at a desired decision or conclusions. That is not what I do here. If I discuss elements of my relationship with Tony here, you can reasonably assume Tony and I have already discussed it in some form or another.
After Tony and I met, I was left with some pretty intense feelings in a several different directions. The feelings were undeniable, but (as usual) I pondered and analysed the situation and projected more potential outcomes than the WOPR computer in WarGames. Tony, frankly, was a model of patience, and was respectful of my distance beyond the call. We chatted online for long stretches. His increased worry was written in the subtext and tone of his words, but whether through instict, good advice or a combination of both, he let the turkey cook 'til it was done. I should rub a buddha belly in thanks that he didn't pick up a copy of He's Just Not That Into You. Hmm...I'll rub Simba's instead.
Now that I've decided to go with the flow, it's getting easier. Since last week, I've lived *in* more moments than I've with, and that's something remarkable. Suspending disbelief doesn't come easy to me and I rarely lose myself in the moment. I would love to, but invariably the parallel commentary begins and I begin deconstructing events as I live them. Even during events in which I'm actively participating, it's as though there are some learned, very articulate bloggers in my head, constantly reading between lines and making associations as they find them. Basically, what I do here, only in real time, all the time.
Faith is nearly always a casualty of this commentary, it's mysteries shallowed by context, association with history, and personal experience. My mom reminded me once of an experience I barely remember: it's the first week of first grade at Christ The Good Shepherd Catholic School in Lincoln Park, Michigan. It's Wednesday morning mass, which means all the schoolkids are there, row and after row of light blue Oxford shirts and schoolgirl plaid. At the kids mass, instead of a homily (the part where the priest stepsdown unto the multitudes to deliver an informal topical chat), father Redwick would take questions and answers from the students in a sort of prepubescent press conference at God's House. Basically, Redwick gave his brief speech, and began to take questions. The topic is long since lost to antiquity, but what's known is this: mine was the first hand to go up, and the only hand to go up, and in rapid fire succession I followed-up each question with another more pointed than the last for some twenty minutes. Eventually, in true Ari Fleischer fashion, Father Redwick said, "I think we're out of time, and I'll ask you to defer any further questions to Sister Angelette" and then retreated to calmer liturgical waters.
The defining elements of my life were already present there, at age six: an instinctive indifference to authority, a mistrust of dogma, the ability to contextualize outside my own limited scope, a aptitude for questioning, and a penchant for doing so until acted upon by an outside force. Call it pedantic analytical inertia. :-)
I'd been told many time I should have faith in my feelings, and often I do, but I also know that sometimes my emotions trick me into seeing things that aren't there, and (more often) keep me warmly enrobed in the comforts of denial. And so I'm always questioning the often intense emotions that course through me. I stood far outside myself and chewed on potential outcomes and consequences, debated the "right thing to do." I stayed there and stayed there, playing Devil's Advocate to myself, asking myself the same questions I knew would come from all corners if we did pursue things further.
Our chemistry was immediate and obvious, but the same circumstances that make up our situation are points to consider. While some guys in my position would have jumped right away, on the surface, ingredients of a nice, fluffy disaster pie. We're ten years apart, and they're a *massive* ten years: he's 20 and I'm 30. I'd reached a point around age 25 or 26 where I swore I'd never date anybody younger than 24 - those I'd met felt too inexperienced, too subject to dreamy expectations despite prior disclaimers, too flaky, too provincial, too lacking in the fundamenal worldliness to deal with my solitude, too jealous of the creative work that pulls my attention away.
Furthermore, because of my upbringing and I generally feel that older, experienced people should set an example for younger people, especially those that look up to them. And I can be a piss-poor example for the young and impressionable. More people are attracted to the idea of me than the reality. This is especially true online, and I long ago began to restrict access to people I met online in favor of those that I'd met and got to know in person. But since I'm far less social and enjoy quietude more than most, I don't meet that many people.
I'm not trying to sell myself short and this isn't false modesty. I have many good qualities, and some exemplary ones that stand out above nearly everyone I know. I'm friendly and charismatic and talented and articulate and funny and gentle and handsome and many other positive things. These are the qualities that people generally take away with them when they meet me. Those qualities have earned me the acquaintance of many, many people since I've moved to California. Some of them have become my friends.
I've dated enough guys to recognize stars in someone's eyes, and it's especially painful to watch those stars fade. Suddenly the idea of me becomes the reality of an all-too-selfish loner that is far more comfortable as an observer of life than a participant in it; someone whose empathy can can be turned into a precision tool, used to manipulate; someone who likes to confront others but is so wary of being confronted that under pressure presents a Clintonian relationship to facts; someone whos fiercely loyal to a small group of friends, but someone for whom the demands of being a close friend can be frustrating and unreasonable.
These are negative qualities that millions of people possess, but in most people, these qualities manifest themselves quickly enough for a suitor to quickly determine whether or not they can work with them. And here lie my disadvantages: I (like the aforementioned president) am charismatic, and I am largely in absentia.
As for charisma - I don't find myself all that charismatic, personally. But that's not really my call. Most I meet tell me I'm likeable, some so far as to say charming. It's when they say I'm likable and charming when I was sure I was acting boorish and obnixious that I realize there's other factors that aren't on my control panel.
This I know: when people talk, I generally know what they're talking about. I have a broad knowledge of history, especially 20th century history, as well as a cross-generational, global view of popular culture that makes it as easy for me to talk to a senior citizen about the mood of America before World War II, a baby boomer (ironically, and sadly, the most closed-off and condescending of all American age groups across the political spectrum) about how opposition to the war was reflected in television, or to a high-schooler about the overall cuddlability of Joey Fatone. I've had an unsually comprehensive vocabulary since grade school that I constantly expand and am never reluctant to avail. My empathy make it easy for me to sense, translate, and adapt others feelings and associate it to my own experiences. If someone is struggling for just the right way to express something, I'll most often have alredy contexualized what they're saying, and have the words and metaphorical resources at hand to perfectly describe something so that it sings.
These are all qualities that make a killer first impression. They not only make me likeable and a healthy respect for different points of view, convince most people that I really like them too. To be fair, I rarely dislike anybody, but unlike most, solitude is not my enemy. I can read people very quickly, and, while factors vary, I usually know when someone and I click. I can like someone and not click. And if we don't click, my lifestyle and my craft don't allow me the time to build a relationship structure where I have to provide constant context, history, and rephrasings.
But then, through no direct action on my part, I go one more: I disappear or am by and large unavailable. I go to a few big parties each year, but there are many more I don't go to. I'm always online, and I've online chat buddies that I've known for years that have never seen me except for photos. This absence makes the idea of me, especially after brief meetings, loom larger than the reality.
So, to get back to my point, all this forced much handwringing on my part after I'd met Tony, because I was sure I'd never click with a 20-year-old, or would ever want to. Like most people, I used to place the idea of youth on a pedistal. As an 18-year-old, I was attrated to guys younger than I am. At 20, while I dated guys in my own age group, I, like everyone else thought Jonathan Taylor Thomas was a cutie.
But as I reached 25 and I had different and longer relationships with different types of guys, I began lost patience with the same boyishness that so many guys lust after well into their senior years. Eventually, it got to the point where I approached cute young guys for conversation without covertly calculating options, assessing the sexual situation, and trying to not look obvious. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I don't turn my head and walk funny as I pass the high school senior senior track team doing their calesthenics. As a human male, despite my rather democratic tastes, I'm hormonally driven to lust after the soft and supple textures and lines of the young, but like a lactose intolerant dinner guest before the dessert, I may pine for the creme brulée, but I don't indulge lest we both end up an ugly mess.
All that I admire about young people, their vivacious energies and unbridled passions and less-jaded idealism, and the things they often admire about me: my talents, skills, experiences, confidence, surity, and empathy are things best shared between generations, though the offices of friendship. I love it when people enjoy my work, but only so far as the enjoyment is as honest as it can be and unhindered by a desire to please. I don't admire or particularly like self-degrading idolization. The worst possible outcome in my mind is if my partner their own creativity because they're intimidated by my experience and output. Love brings real danger to one-way relationships - constructive criticism from an experienced older friend can be helpful, the same from a lover can be devastating.
On the other side of the coin, a teacher's job is not only to inspire and empassion, but also to correct entrenched beliefs. When that relationship is transposed to a sexual relationship, the high that the mentor gets from being an inspiration, can make it can be difficult to let a developing young person fall on their own sword as they must now and then. The same youthful idealism and passions that inspire can also grow tiresome. Young men dislike constant course-correction. As they should. And I don't want to constantly tell anyone their opinions are half-baked and their ideas aleady proven wrong. I want somebody I'm okay with making mistakes with together.
Young men, especially gay young men, are no order of milk and cookies either. As I was in the late 80's and early 90's, kids today are just as smart, calculating, and hedonistic as I - and they're smarter. Gay teens today have grown up in a world where Internet pedophilia is a given, and the gay boys know where to find the damanged men that will take them away from where they don't want to be on the false hope of finding a son or reconciling themselves. The cost benefit analysis of getting used by some wayward young queer punk on the make doesn't match the benefit, either physically or emotionally. I came to terms where I fit in the grand scheme of fathers and sons and masculinity, and I'm neither yearning for a child of my own nor looking for father I never had. It's selling any young lover and yourself short to think you can reconnect to your inner child through another boy's ass.
When Tony and I first played around, there was no presumtion that it would go any further than it did. Still when I found out he was 20, I was hesitant. But then something happened that hadn't happened before. Firstly, we talked as much as we had sex. And we talked about everything. His family, his background, his friends, his passions. And through it all, there wasn't a single point when the bloggers in my head reminded me of his age. And it continues, despite everyone I know online and off only too happy to remind me whenever they can.
I'm a firm believer in the cliché of the "old soul." Now I don't know whether means a history of various reincarnations or alien DNA or just a inherent cellular-level aptitude for combining empathy, observation, context, history, compassion, patience, knowledge, and expeirence into a dynamic, relevant wisdom. Are these "old souls" great people? Not necessarily. But the larger sense of wisdom is always there. And while I might consider myself an old soul, I'm also a simple human whose often too busy tossing off clever observational bon mots than to listen to the higher voice inside.
It was my friend Kevin, for the most part, thorugh no action on his part, that helped me to become comfortable with Tony. Kevin tought me something important: I'd been living in a bubble (both economically and socially) for some years and that the young people I encountered were often the immature and overneedy types - many had come to California during the dot-com boom and brought all overriding problems into an environment that reenforced and deepened them.
Kevin is different. And in the 8 or 9 months we shared an apartment (and especially in contrast to the other two living with us), he reminded me that to be young doesn't necessarily mean immature. Sure, he was unsure of himself and insecure and unpolished. Like many guys his age he was unmotivated and lacked self-direction. But there were times in New York when, as I struggled with some issue or another, Kevin had advice that cut through to the heart of everything. Kevin and I played around sexually when my visit was just a visit (he's my friend Doron's boyfriend, and they'd discussed it beforehand), there was never any sense that it was any more than fun. When I stayed in NY and we agreed to move in together, he had the wisdom to scale back the sexual activity, and thereby keep a powerful and potentially destructive tension out of our home.
I grew to admire him as much as like him and today I love him as one of the best friends I have, and he's perhaps one of four or five people on this planet that I trust completely. His integrity, honesty, loyalty, morality, and compassion - qualities one doesn't often associate with American men of any background - still inspire me. There are times when I stop and give a homeless person a dollar or two if I have it, because it's what Kevin would've done, and when it comes to matters such as this, Kevin is usually right.
Tony has many of these same qualities, and different ones as well. When he describes friends of his or something he and his friends did back in South Carolina, it's in terms that indicate he understands its place in his story and how that part of his story fits into the larger story around him. I rarely have to explain anything to him. I've gotten so used to having to explain myself to new people in my life, that I do it without thinking and he stops me to let me know he gets it. I have much to learn from Tony, and none of it has to do with how to be young again.
And all that aside, he's flat-out brilliant: from a poor family in South Carolina, he's on a full ride to Stanford University in California, a Top-5 Ivy League American institution. Very few people know such disctinction, certainly not I. And this last fact is important.
I want a realtionship to be on a relatively even-keel. I don't mind being a role model, but I'm uncomfortable in the role of a mentor. Tony's arrived where he is today by swimming against the currents of history and economics, against the trends of his peers, and over the protests of his mother. While I feel I've things to add and contribute to his understanding some aspects of the world, I don't feel I'm being looked to for, or as, the big answers to starry-eyed questions. And on the same token, I need never censor, dumb-down, overcontextualize, or overexplain myself. In the time I've known him, communication has gone smoother than it ever has before.
Already he's been inspiring artistically, and interesting in most all other ways. I'm getting exposure to an aspect of life I'd no desire to enjoy at the time: academia. Not to mention learning (albiet so-far second-hand) the interesting and complex subtleties of life at a mixed, largely non-judgemental frat house, which, as described, is nothing like the horned-up sexual tension festival of the gay imagination that I've read about for years and have I've been essentially begged to confirm exists. It's also more ambiguous and nuanced than those asking could ever imagine.
And if that wasn't surreal enough, if you'd have told me six months ago that in June, 2005 I would either have lunch with Bjork and Vladmir Putin in Paris or be boyfriend to a Stanford frat boy as he and his brothers celebrated on the occasion of his 21st birthday, but you didn't tell me which one...I probably woulda started taking Russian lessons.
There's more to come.
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