We drank our coffee in subdued silence. The terrace overlooked a row of sleepy wooden rooftops and just beyond, sand and ocean. The sun shone so brilliantly that the sulking was odd, even if he was “just not a morning person.” And no amount of pleasantries and uncharacteristic chirpiness from me could improve the mood. This is what the male ego looks like when bruised. Ah well. As I am wont to do in awkward social encounters, I chose to ignore it—blotting the sullen little man from my mind and retreating further into my imagination.
“Well, I’m going to close my eyes and think about Andy Garcia,” I used to tell Ry when I found him particularly bothersome or tiresome. Ry was my ex of four undergraduate years (plus one additional) and possibly the most decent man I have met. So decent that, at the time, I didn't understand that I was bored. And I turned that boredom, quite undeservedly, into a perverse contempt. The more decent he was, the harder I pushed the limits of behavior. I guess you can call it some kind of personality defect, dear reader.
On this morning, it wasn’t Ry but a lesser man who, as I was to discover, believed that several months of occasional shared meals and the title of “friendship” entitled him to all sorts of things from me: explanations, confessions, physical intimacy, and apologies. The closer he came, the further I retreated. And in the quiet moments we spent on the island—chopping vegetables for dinner, listening to chirpy things of the evening, drinking our morning coffee—I thought about the someone else that I wanted by my side. Not Andy Garcia, although how I still love him, too!
As if intuiting my thoughts, he asked: “What kind of men do you find attractive?” I avoided a direct answer, wishing he had left the silence unbroken and dreading where this conversation would lead. After a pause and then some nonsense about compatibility, he launched into a tirade, a litany of my deficiencies
as a friend. He’s known me for x-number of months and
as a friend I shouldn’t be “putting up walls.” Further, he resents the fact that I don’t answer his phone calls in a timely manner, and
as a friend he expects this modicum of civility, at the very least. Of course, because he considers himself “well in the middle of the neediness norm curve,” my lack of responsiveness
as a friend to his friendly gestures indicates a kind of “self-centered quality” which he finds both “off-putting” and “unsettling.” At this point, he isn't even sure that he wants to sleep with me.
Here we go. I didn’t want to be confronted again about the nature of our so-called friendship, wherein he expresses his interest in advancing a romantic or sexual relationship and I express my complete indifference to that proposition. Every time I believe the matter settled, it unsettles itself again. Like now. And if by friendly gestures, he means caressing my belly and tentatively brushing up against the underside of my breast while I’m asleep on the couch, then yes, perhaps he deserves to be put off and unsettled. I've always maintained that he-and-I were not even a remote possibility. And I've disabused the notion that with the proper alchemy of environment and emotional distress, I could could be made to change my mind. Poof!
Still, I shouldn’t have agreed to come out here. The pretext for friendship was a lie, which we both used selfishly for our respective purposes. Should I feel guilty for using him as an escape hatch, to get away from that shit-storm, otherwise referred to as “my life”? Maybe. But if we are to take a purely utilitarian approach, what have I to gain from being in this strange friendship? I haven’t asked anything of him and I owe him no debt. And yet, he trumps up these grievances, using “
as a friend” to now hold something against me, to elevate himself to a position to command my attention and to make me beholden to him. Not even my family and closest friends presume such access, so what makes him so special? And in all the trips that I've taken—with Trey, Huli, Dustbunny, Shani, Tuan, Xangas and Waldorf—none have attempted this sort of bullshit power play.
Because this trip was scarcely motivated by altruism. In spite of my reluctance over his offer, he persisted that this was only a friendly and Platonic favor to him:
Please, don’t let me down. I just don’t want to have spend the week alone on an island full of gay men.
I told him I was in a terrible emotional state and that he ought to find more pleasant company:
Good company is not required. I just don’t want to have spend the week alone on an island full of gay men.
And then he offered these words, which were a lifeline to me: Really, you should come out here, not as a favor to me, but for yourself. It is a good place for reflection and to gain perspective.
I wanted to take it at face value, to understand his motives as genuine friendship and not what it really was—an attempt to manipulate the situation in service of his unspoken fantasy life.
Based on my observations of the last several days, I don’t know that I actually like him even as a friend. The reason he was out on at the beach that week was because of a certain arrangement doctors have with the community center—two hours a day at the clinic in exchange for swank lodging by the beach. It’s a sweet deal. Quite frankly, it was appalling the way he would divulge information about the walk-in cases, the way he would take my revulsion over his accounts of gonorrheal discharge and cock rings as support for his ostensible homophobia. Because to him they are not a self-selected group but typify the gay community. In the same breezy manner, he would explain how a diagnosis of fibromyalgia or IBS is a doctor’s way of telling his colleagues: “This patient is an asshole. The purported symptoms are psychosomatic.” As a confirmed hypochondriac, such cavalier attitudes within the medical profession about other people’s health is deeply unsettling. And although Dr. Lamo stopped short of revealing actual identities to stay just on this side of patient privacy, the contempt he holds for patients makes him hideous, if not outright unethical.
There is something indescribable in his movements and in his speech that give the impression of a cringing deformity. All of this is coated with a brittle veneer of snark. He is snide, covetous, prone to nasty little barbs to compensate for his nasty little insecurities. “That little bitch!” is how he referred to his Labrador who, at a moment of uncharacteristic disobedience, ran into the ocean to swim. Female canine aside, his dog’s behavior was entirely his own fault, keeping her off the leash. How was she expected to know the beach regulations? This reaction toward his beloved pet betrays a meanness—a creepy sort of impotence, which I suspect extends to human relationships. I can only imagine that names he calls me when I run off without regard to his pleasure.
You know what it all reminds me of, dear reader? The oblique sexual advances, the half-facetious innuendos, and the petty jabs? He reminds me of those thin and weak loner wolves, scavenging the peripheral area used by the pack. The misfits are most dangerous, always watching for scraps and liable to snap from repressed rage.
Perhaps you think me unkind, dear reader. But in my present mood, I can't seem to find the patience for a friendship that is entirely rooted in guilt. So if that makes me awful, so be it. I am closing my eyes and dreaming about… Andy Garcia? Or, sadly, that someone else.
P.S. I get an SMS a day later: “Are you pissed at me for some reason or are you just being you in ignoring friendly niceties?” Notice the passive-aggressive tone, phrased in such a way to induce me to defend myself against either irrationality or socially dysfunction. Ah, but he forgets that avoidance is my primary coping mechanism. So fuck it. Maybe I am both irrational and dysfunctional, but I certainly have no interest in securing his good opinion.
