The first time I was with you outside of rehearsal, little sweetheart, was the night you invited the entire cast and company over to your place after for a “cupcakes & cocktails” party. It was a beautiful, generous, lovely and, as I was to learn, typical Summerlove gesture. In advance, you’d gone out and bought a set of gorgeous vintage cocktail glasses – highballs and those iconic parfait-style ones – and spent hours baking and frosting the detailed and delicious cupcakes yourself.
That night, after rehearsal finished up, you gave everyone printed directions to your apartment in the Inner Sunset. It was dark when we left the theatre and as I actually had use of a car lent me for the week, we walked across the parking lot and you directed me to follow you in your famously battered blue Prius from the Marina to your home. I dutifully tailed you down Marina Boulevard to Old Mason, past Chrissy Field until we were eventually tooling along the 101 and approaching the Golden Gate. I got confused. Didn’t you say you lived in the city? Where were we headed, Marin? A sign to the right alerted “Last Exit Before Bridge” and I watched as you abruptly made a 180 and descended into the twists and turns of the road that cuts through the Presidio.
After a few minutes of meandering through the heavy old-growth forest there at a stately pace, you finally pulled onto the shoulder, hitting your hazard lights, coming to a stop. Wondering where the hell we were and what on earth was going on, I pulled up behind you, got out and walked over to the driver’s side of your car. When you rolled down the window you were doubled over in delirious, infectious, wonderful gales of laughter. “I’m lost!” you managed to choke out between giggles. I couldn’t help laughing now, myself. I couldn’t help falling a little in love with you in that very moment – still pre-desire, a more brotherly love than a romantic one, I didn’t get it yet entirely, I simply adored you, felt something ancient and connected, felt I was somehow home just being in your presence. “Whaddya mean you’re lost?” I said. “Don’t you live here?” Another roar of giddy Summer laughter and, nearly hyperventilating, you reached for the GPS device you had stashed in the glovebox. Firing it up, a British woman’s robot voice came on (you’d customized the settings – you liked her voice better than the standard American robot default) and we got our bearings and set off again, this time in the right direction.
As we neared your neighborhood, I saw for the first time all the sights that would be become so familiar and now altogether lost – the Beautiful Life, that I was about to begin and even now feel I can nearly touch, with you. Through the heart of the city and then east toward the Sunset. That little fork in the road, the Haight to the left, the park to the right. Past the ballfields and playgrounds, the green, rolling, gorgeous expanse of Golden Gate Park. The left turn off Lincoln onto 7th Avenue, nearing your home. UCSF and the hospital to the left, crossing the trolley tracks of the N-Judah. The little coffee place and Crepevine and all the charming spots we’d come to spend time in together there to the right, just blocks from your house. Sutro Tower and the hilly road toward the Mission rising in the distance ahead. Fog enveloping everything, cool and iconic and like stepping into a dream. Quite right.
I followed your car until it came to a stop at the right curb just shy of Kirkwood. I saw a garage door open as you got out and directed me, like one of those guys on the tarmac leading a 747 into its proper gate, to the narrow parking space reserved for your car in that tiny eight-car garage underneath your building.
There was something oddly timeless and inexplicably familiar about walking through the garage to the sidedoor leading out of the now sudden darkness of the basement, its illumination clicking off on a timer, and climbing the creaky wooden back stairs to your apartment on the third floor. Coming back in to the main stairwell from another sidedoor and onto the pale pink-tinted-off-white carpeted floor, the big mirror below in the foyer, the wide steps and tactile texture of the white stucco walls – it all seemed like I’d somehow been here before. I had the strongest sense of deju vu, my little sweetheart. Did I ever tell you that? And then reaching your door at the top of the steps and the end of the hall. The frosted glass and dark wood there customized, decorated with little decals and icons of your love and life – a red Routemaster double-decker London bus, a big pink and white heart bearing the slogan “Make Love, Not War”. We’re home.
Like all good parties, or maybe just the ones that I go to, we wound up in the kitchen. I loved how perfectly cozy it was. The little breakfast nook table along one wall, a couple of high spinner stools tucked underneath. All the sweet little touches of sundries decorating the periphery – your black and white Kit Kat Clock, eyes and tail synchronized in a tick-tock ticking, the vintage pin-up calendar by the refrigerator door, pretty curtains over the floor to ceiling shelf unit holding all your little “treats”. I liked the color of the room. The walls an inviting sun-bleached shade of yellow. And the absolutely exquisite and intricate tiling everywhere from floor to counter to sink and the window overlooking the Sunset itself, the Spanish mission-style roof of a lovely church in the near distance, the ocean visible from afar. I came to know that these warm and lovely touches were largely the work of your mother. And you spoke so proudly, so lovingly about her and your father. It was terribly effecting, my sweetheart, how clearly and unabashedly you loved your parents. I’d encountered the oddest phenomenon in the years before I met you – it was almost a point of pride in other people how quickly they would disavow their folks, keen to tell you how estranged they were, as if that were requisite to being independent or hip, some curious badge of honor. Refreshingly, that was not you. You loved your parents. They were accomplished and thoughtful, devoted to you and breathtakingly kind and generous to everyone you brought into your circle. It’s a bit shocking that that should be so extraordinary – that you would stand out as someone who didn’t routinely have to run-down your parents to assert your own validity somehow - but there it is. Thank god for them. And thank god for you.
I wasn’t drinking in those days. I’m not now, again. Although there was a time after your passing - “if not now, when?” I used to say, disconsolate, wishing only to perish – for a couple of years where I tried drowning myself in alcohol. I’m sober again, my sweetheart, as I was in those days with you. And that night, knowing that I didn’t drink you asked if I’d like a glass of milk. Of milk! Who would think of such a thing? Well, you would. You even joined me. You didn’t have a problem with drinking. Indeed, you didn’t believe that I did once you got to know me. “You’re not a alcoholic”, you said, eventually and more than once. “You should be able to drink with my family at Christmas or even just when you’re with me. You should be able to drink on those occasions – when you’re happy. When we’re together. Just don’t drink when you’re sad”. And like most everything, my darling, you are doubtless right. It’s just that now without you here, it’s not a good idea for me to. I’m often terribly sad. Maybe always now. I need to be careful. Have my wits about me. Listen carefully to intuit your invisible presence. I’ll be happy again, though. I’ll happy when I find you, as I know, as I so deeply feel and have faith that I will and forever.
But that first night, we drank milk, didn’t we sweetheart? We drank milk and ate a cupcake or two and listened to the Beatles because you knew we both liked them, what little you knew of me, what you’d learned, you employed because you wanted to make me comfortable and at ease and happy. No one ever went to such lengths for me from the very start, from the very very start. And we sat together now on one of the little couches in your living room, the rest of the party going on around us and we talked and talked.
There’s a poem by Mary Oliver, my sweetheart, called “Wild Geese”. “Tell me about despair”, she says, “Yours, and I will tell you mine.”. We did that night, my love. In just the year before, I had lost my mentor and friend, Curt and you had inexplicably, tragically lost your beloved big brother, Jesse, who had passed away without warning in his sleep. I think there may have been something a bit unmoored about us both, perhaps loss had left us both a bit adrift and floating among the shiny, noisy, unaware around us, we came to find each other. Don’t you think, my love?
Huddled there together that night in your living room, I think of it as our beginning. Nearly none of the cast turned up. And one of your neighbors, one you’d not even really known before you told me later, stayed on for sometime a bit beyond protocol and asked if she could take a few of the cupcakes with her to give to friends. I think that might’ve been around the time we took the cue to walk together downstairs, the back way, the secret staircase, to the little garage and outside.
We didn’t have our first kiss that night. It came a bit later. I can’t wait to tell that great story, my little sweetheart. But we didn’t kiss this night as we stood there with the door open on to the warm, clear beautiful San Franciscan late-winter night. You hugged me and we looked into each other’s eyes taking each other in unafraid and full of wonder. You helped air-traffic-control direct me out of the tight little parking space and you handed me your Garmen device and punched in all the info so I wouldn’t get lost trying to find my way home. I didn’t know it yet, exactly, but I had, my love. I had indeed finally finally found my way home. You had found me and here I was. Home.
Don’t you know that will always be the way of things, my gorgeous girl? No matter how much longer I may have to stagger on in this life without you, it is only for the home that is your bright spirit, I long. It is for you that my heart aches and my soul pines. You are my True Love and my True North. May your magnetic invisible presence guide me the rest of the way through this journey and take me to The Forever where you are.
On that February night that I think of as our beginning, your voice and kindness set me on my way safely back to the little room across the city from you in Bernal Heights. The little room you would come to visit soon and we would tell each other so much more and where we would truly come to fall and to fly, to fly, my love, as I long to fly to you now. I let myself in and settled down on the inch-thin futon on the floor there, thinking about the lovely evening and, you, my lovely new friend - a bit mysterious, so very kindhearted, deliciously witty, mindful and serious, too and impossibly beautiful. A bit more than a friend, it might seem. And so suddenly deeply dear to my heart. So very very dear, indeed.
And just then a text came through. And another in quick succession. Your first messages to me. “I forgot to send cupcakes home with you!” the first exclaimed. And the second, “I made the chocolate ones for you.” I replied quickly to thank you and say it was alright, you certainly didn’t have to do that, although it was terribly thoughtful. And you sent a reply, words that strike my heart even now with their breathtaking kindness, bringing tears to my eyes, my perfect love, my true one, my gorgeous girl, my little sweetheart. “Accept the things”, you wrote, “given with love”. Yes, my darling. Forever, yes.
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