Momus

In 1999, I had only just started touring the States with a theater collective, and was randily fucking my way across America. Embarassingly enough, I was 26 and had only just started fucking my way across America. This certainly made for some awkward encounters, particularly among the set of Americans who had already been fucking their way around since age 16, and didn’t give a crap that I was a late bloomer. In other words, I encountered a whole army of gay Americans who had not bothered to wait for me to catch up. Through trial and error (after error), I managed to meet a lovely compendium of guys whose American-ness both matched and outdid my own, and who were gracious enough to tolerate my greediness and presumption for a few nights. I had arrived at a point, in that first incalculably horny year, where I figured I had it all figured out. I was wrong.

We were in a small-ish city in New Hampshire or Vermont. Two nights ago, I had been with a trucker outside of Phoenix and, on departure from my airplane away from him, had collected phone numbers from two of the flight attendants. After the desert and the flight, things were seeming pretty claustrophobic and repressive in New England, so I grabbed my girl and we went out for a cocktail, somewhere off the Town Square.

It was an “English Pub,” with made-up coats of armor on the walls, a tartan pattern for a carpet, fish ‘n chips on the menu, cigarette smoke choking the place, and a large, cold selection of beer on tap. My girl and I and a couple of our friends found a space at a low oak table, beside the pinewood paneling, and settled in for a long night.

As I lit a cigarette and sipped from my very first pint, I saw a handsome boy walk past us to the bathroom. He was tall and thin with black hair dyed blonde, thick-framed glasses, and piercings up and down each ear. Immediately, I downed half of my pint, and sat on my jumpy stomach, waiting for him to come back.

“What?” said my girl.

“Nothing,” I said.

“That boy, right?” said my girl.

“Whatever,” I said.

“He’ll be back,” she said.

Half a pint later, he left the bathroom, and slouched past us, smiling at us as he went.

“See?” said my girl.

“What?” I said.

“He likes you,” she said.

“What? No he doesn’t,” I said.

“He does,” she said. “Watch.”

Before I could collect myself and stop her, she went to his table and was sitting with him and his friends and was talking to them and they were looking over at me and before I knew it they were gesturing to me and shouting “come over!” and I was mortified and the boy wasn’t making eye-contact and I had no choice but to go over and to see what on earth was going to happen now.

Here’s what happened. The boy was named Brian. He was 24, and a dropout waiter who lived in an apartment here, the closest city to his hometown. He was there with his gorgeous older sister – a painter who had not dyed against what seemed to be their family’s dark haircolor – and their zaftig girlfriend. I sat down with them and watched my friend charm his friends as I sat, sullenly sipping my beer. Slowly, inexorably, I was drawn into conversation, about music and movies and art and whatever and, no!, but he hadn’t said a word, but he was staring at me!

The bar started to empty out. Me and my girl stayed resolutely in place with him and his girls, laughing as everyone else trickled out. Something jangly from Radiohead came on the jukebox. Me and my girl looked around. Our people were long gone. He and his girls looked at us looking. A joke was over-extended. We were invited back to the zaftig girl’s place. We went.

Without belaboring the point; the zaftig girl slept upstairs, leaving me and the boy, and my girl and the sister to share a spare room. The boys gave the girls the bed, taking an air-mattress on the floor beside them. The girls got to know each other, and their quiet squeaking allowed the two shy boys to know each other as well.

The girls went on to have their first and only lesbian affair – a set of circumstances which would take them to London, to Florence, to New York, and then to husbands and motherhood.

The boys were a different story.

Next night, I went to his apartment, where I stayed with him for the week we played in his town. The details of that week are – well, I still hang on to them to play out in my imagination in moments of quiet desperation. They are mine alone, and my point is not to divulge these details. Except for one. On the morning of my departure, while we ate pancakes and eggs in the diner next to my hotel, he slipped me a CD he had bought for me. Can you guess? It was Momus. “20 Vodka Jellies.”

You can laugh at us if you want, but we had listened to nothing but that album, and to tracks from Magnetic Fields “69 Love Songs,” as we became less shy with each other. I was to spend the next few months listening both to Momus and to Stephen Merritt over and over again, remembering the time that I admitted to being a shy guy and shared that with another guy. I was to spend the months and years after that pretending not to be a shy guy, and cringing every time I heard any track off either of those albums.

Five years later, having lost touch with my New England boy, I found myself touring through his neighborhood again. He’d been to New York and back, and I’d been all over the place, and we’d lost touch. I found that I remembered precisely the geography of his town, and stopped by the restaurant that I remembered as being his. While he didn’t materialize to take my order, the waitress that did, in a bizarre twist, was now his roommate in his new apartment.

I got his number. I phoned him.

We saw each other again. I stayed with him again for a few days, this time at his new and much nicer place. This time, we didn’t play any music, specifically. Something like the Killers or Interpol flicked passed impersonally on the i-pod, but we didn’t Play anything for each other. This time, we dealt with each other like a couple of shy boys who had hidden their shyness in a back pocket, and gotten on with the business of fucking up strangers. We tried to fuck each other up, and got fucked up by each other, and realized that we were on inexorably separate tracks.

At the end of my last night with him, he said he wanted to Play something for me. OK, I said. He Played “Saved.” By Momus. Off “20 Vodka Jellies.”

Now, I know he didn’t mean anything by it. And, if he did, he only meant something nostalgic. But, either way. Suddenly, the years went away, and I was a blubbery mess. I thought of all the guys since him. I thought of our first encounter. I thought of his trip to New York, and how I was just leaving…again. I thought of what a shit I can be, under the guise of so much sentimentality, and of how remote he had seemed.

I thought of how alone I feel and of how, no matter how one is acculturated or socialized, how being alone always feels like the worst crime of all. Not even a crime. It just seems unimaginative. I have dined alone in the Americas, in Europe, in the Middle East, in Asia and, no matter how agile one is at miming their explanation of why they are dining alone, a table for one is only ever a table for one. Urban, suburban, ex-urban, slum, ghetto, barrio, farm, pastoral, faux-pastoral, village, hut, cave, whatever. Humans are not meant to be alone. We’re just not wired for it. We can deal with it, no matter where we are in the world, but it’s just not how we’re meant to be, for whatever reason.

I have lived in New York for the past ten years. I understand the ramifications of “public solitude,” and recognize the need to seek out a pack and to sniff out a role within said pack. As a traveler, I have felt both the giddy awkwardness of being a solitary presence, and the warm embrace of having some fellow travelers on hand with whom to eat this dish or drink this drink or swim in this stream or bask in this sun. I have been both accepted and rejected as a solitary presence, a coupled presence, and a member of a pack in many parts of the world. I hate to state the obvious, but we truly are all the same. East or West. North or South. Up or Down.

The loneliest of us all, no matter where we live, are those of us who fight hardest to be acknowledged.

Thank you, Momus. And; I miss you, Brian.