Paris - San Francisco - Kentucky

I was standing in line to drop off my bags for a flight from Paris to San Francisco. Bonnie "Prince" Billy's new album was singing through my headphones. I was calm even though most of the time I'm a wreck when I travel. I don't know why I was so calm: that Icelandic volcanic ash had just blown over the day before, and I was going to San Francisco to meet the body of Darrell, a man I've chatted with on-line for over a year now, to celebrate my dear dissertation director's retirement, and to see Brian, a dear old friend. After that, I was destined to Kentucky for family duty. Two things happened already while I was in line to assure my departure. Listening to B"P"B, I said to myself that his songs show him skirting along the edge of asshole, and I smiled, realizing that wasn't such a bad place to be. I like to be around an asshole, in a less figurative sense, of course, but still. Then a title came to me: Extravagant Gestures. I thought maybe it would be a good title for a short story collection. I wrote it down in my little notebook. Now that I'm back in Paris, I realize it's the title of this blog.

The day I got in to San Francisco, I settled fairly quickly onto the stoop in front of Brian's Duboce-Triangle house for a cigarette and coffee. Brian, like a lot of gay men, has had some health concerns and questions recently, and he had told me on the phone before I came that he had managed to quit smoking. "Give me a cigarette," he said as he made his way down the stairs with the scones we'd bought at Thorough Bread, a nifty new-to-me café on Church. When I protested, saying that I didn't want my smoking to necessarily encourage his, he said, "Yeah, but it smelled so good, and I've been smoking on and off anyway. Plus, I kind of knew this would happen while you were here." It is true that it is one of our habits when I come to San Francisco: to sit on the stoop and smoke while the buzz of something I think of with pride as a general human whoredom particularly rampant in that fair city by the bay rattles its way through our lives. Brian likes to feed my participation in that beautiful whoredom. He often knows my tricks personally, tells me details about old tricks of mine that he sees around, or about the lives and habits and loves of the new ones. He also tells me about his own. He told me that last summer, he had managed to forge a perfect rhythm of regular fuck-buddy visits. A venerable homo-tradition that he's had trouble settling into, since he's not so much a bar fixture as a writer and teacher who needs nine hours of sleep per night. It was nice to hear about that settling into place for him because God knows he deserves it. I told him several of my recent adventures in Berlin. They made him miss my blog and want to come and see for himself. He told me things about Darrell, because they moved in the same circles years ago, something I had suspected before this trip but was delighted to discover with a certain amount of precision. He told me that when I told him I'd been chatting with Darrell, it made a kind of instant sense to him. This turned out to be a good thing, because it helped him be understanding when so much of my San Francisco attention was devoted to him. Brian and Darrell both knew Philip well. Brian and I racked our memories. How many times had I met Philip? In 2000/2001, Thierry and I had come to see Brian's New York début as a playwright. It sealed our already very strong friendship. Did we really see Philip only that once for the drink we had at the Starlight Bar? That New Year's I stumbled home so drunk from the party we'd gone to. When was the last time we saw each other? Brian consulted his archives while I looked at the picture of the three of us from that year (when Thierry had so much hair!) taken by our friend Judy and now sitting on the table by Brian's reading chair.

I had been in recent touch with my good friend Naomi on facebook, so when I got to Kentucky, the only priority besides family duty and stumbling my way through the aftermath of the affair that had rocked me in San Francisco was to see her again. (I say it was an affair, but we're working on another name for it). When we met for a late-morning coffee, Naomi told me she figured the last time we saw each other was in 1998 in New York. This meant we had a lot to catch up on, so we only touched on the important things. Things like our husbands and her dogs. My desire for a dog and the sketchbook Darrell showed me that was full of them. Things like my previously smoldering disappointment at how hard it would be in France for Thierry and me to have access to raising a child and how much I'd let that disappointment work its way through me in analysis. How I've gotten to a point where I realized that what was important was less the child itself than that I be out there in the world, accompanying newness, where who knows what child might pop into my life. Her MFA and our writing. How nice it will be to see each other next time I'm in town. How I had two titles I was working with, one for a short story collection and the other for a blog. One is "The Conditions of Song." The other is "Extravagant Gestures." Which I'm writing right now.