2006-03-06 - 9:42 p.m.
I quite enjoyed hanging out with my young friend Ganesh, who unexpectedly asked if he could join me when I told him that I was heading out to West Hollywood for my customary semi-weekly prance-and-jiggle with the go go boys and the gins and tonics.
“Ooooooh, I’d love to see some go go boys and have a gin and tonic,” he burbled.
Now, Ganesh is one of my newest online friends -- a quite delightful fellow who basically moved to Los Angeles from New York about six months ago and has not really found his footing yet. His long term goals are to get into the movie biz somehow, but he does not seem overly motivated in that regard – and, when I say he has “goals,” they are very diffuse goals indeed.
“Ooooh, I’d like to compose music for movies!” he was inclined to squeak somewhat vaguely a month or two ago. Or, “I would LOVE to get into digital special effects. I’d looooove that!” Of course, he has only the most marginal experience in either of these fields, and this is causing him to rethink his plans, as his actual talents contract to accept the opportunities available for him. Now I think he’d be happy enough being a production assistant on a sitcom, or perhaps even fluffing some shlong on a porno set.
It’s a truth that we often are forced to settle in this world. The sun will rise and the sun will set, and we all have to settle for what we can get. Look at me! Now I am all about hashing eighty buck scripts for this cheeseball production company, and I have no hope that things could get better. All three of my newspaper gigs seem to have inexplicably dried up: I can’t figure out what’s become of any of them, and the notion that this is the “silly season” in which there just isn’t that much writing work doesn’t seem to hold water. Paranoid fellow that I am, I look back over the recent months and try to figure out what I have done to deserve such a sustained professional drought, which is now about as long as I remember any drought being. It’s a gobi desert-sized drought.
Even the Little Paper seems not to be using me this season: I called them up, and the editor just brushed me off, promising to get back to me, which she never did. The Big Paper – well, they have always been spotty, but I think I got into trouble with the editor when he called me up with a question about some play, mentioning that it was like some other play, which I never saw.
“Wow,” the Big Paper theater editor noted. “How peculiar. That play won a Pulitzer. I’m surprised you didn’t see it!” I stammered and stumbled – but that was because he had the ill manners to phone me when I was drunk and half asleep. I am keenly interested to see when I shall get another assignment from him. It has been a couple of weeks.
I am rather fond of Ganesh -- and not just because he’s tall and lean and 27 and extremely good looking in a nerdy, bespectacled bookworm way that just sings someone who doesn’t know how hot he is. I like him because he’s sad. You may or may not have noticed that I have a total soft spot for sad men. I think a bit of diffuse melancholy is so attractive – and one thing I find appealing is someone who is aware that the world is not a perfect place. It may be my mistake, but I always read a soupcon of sadness as being a sort of psychological and emotional complexity. Someone who has a sadness about him has lived. Or he never forgets that things do not turn out well in the end. I myself was brought up to believe that noting ends well. How can it? Death is the last thing we get to experience – and since that’s so, every person’s story is a total tragedy.
Of course, Ganesh’s sadness rises from more tactile sorrows. The son of a first generation Indian American family, in which the siblings and parents are all doctors to a person, Ganesh has had to defend himself his whole life for being the Gay Black Sheep. And being part of that Indian American community, Ganesh deep down feels inadequate and insecure because he hasn’t wanted to achieve the glittering prizes as his other relatives. He’s defensive – but also deeply ashamed, which leads to a fascinating, if grim conflict in his personality. Like many people who are ashamed about underachieving, he is almost militant about his lack of affect, which occasionally slips over into passive aggression if one is not careful.
I don’t know why I find this sort of person enchanting, but I suspect it’s because I loathe expression emotional extremes. That said, I love sentimental Hallmark Drama clichés of recovery and how people integrate them into the way they live their lives. On his 18th birthday, I am told that Ganesh was molested by a family friend. The experience apparently unhinged him enough to become a heroin addict for a time – and then he became a young male prostitute, while attending an Ivy League college, to pay for his habit.
Ganesh eventually got himself off his Hooking And Heroin Habit by falling for an older man, who was himself somewhat unhinged. Being that both gentlemen were, by this time, cut off from their families, the pair spent four years living in a barn in the Maryland Countryside. Then they broke up. Ganesh then moved out to LA to Make It In The Movie Biz, while the boyfriend, by all accounts, spiraled back into drug abuse and has become a big time prostitute again. Goodness! I LOVE this stuff.
In spite of it all, though, Ganesh is an affable, extremely diffident, and oddly emotionally unformed kid – sweet and genial, but borderline pathologically shy. And when I took him to Mickeys, I was really very surprised by how socially inexperienced he seemed to be. You expect a former prostitute to have some social awareness, but the dear fellow quailed and qualmed about being in a crowd, even though his eyes bugged like a cartoon character upon glimpsing the perfectly proportioned dancing boys.
“Hummana hummana hummana,” he burbled upon slipping a buck into the waistband of one such boy. It was charming to watch his tongue flap and a sheen of lustful sweat form on his forehead. How delightful! I bought Ganesh a gin and tonic to thank him for driving me to Weho – and he kindly returned the favor, buying ME a gin and tonic. And so it went, until we were both of us as drunk as Bacchus on Saturnalia Night. And we chatted and chatted and had an exceedingly pleasant evening, as the sea of boys swept around and through us.
However, in spite of the presence of the pleasant young companion to delight my soul, the highlight of the evening, I think, was glimpsing one of the cast of Project Runway picking up a drunken hottie and seemingly taking him home to do the ole dirty in and out burger with him! There never was such a scandalous situation! I was so pleased to see it. Mind you, I would have been even happier if the Project Runway contestant in question had been one of the more important designers – Santino or Nick or even Daniel Franco, all of whom live out here in the City of Angels. Alas, though, it was only John, the designer who was voted off so early he almost manages to retain his total anonymity in the outside world.
If you ever want to know how disturbingly small the gay world is, and how we deceive ourselves that there are more of us than we think, you have only to go to one of the Santa Monica Blvd gay bars on the weekend. Everyone is there – from bums, to porn stars, to famous writers, to reality TV icons. One week, you see Brent Corrigan traipsing down the boulevard. This week, you see saw John Project Runway on the Mickeys patio thingy, chatting it up with this floppy haired young fellow whose eyes were clearly all a-glitter with lust at the thought of bedding one of reality TV’s top gay celebutantes. It’s always an adventure, even for someone as comparatively out of the loop as myself.
As John slunk away with his Trick Du Notte, I gently grabbed his arm and burbled, in suitably abject Project Runway stalker fan style, “Oh my! I am soooo sorry they voted you off so earrrrly! I would so have enjoyed getting to know you better and learned more about your designing!” John’s roundish face, complete with the two chapstick lids in his ears, lit up with an expression that was a sort of swiftly shifting mix of “Ugh, I hate being recognized when I am just here to get laid!” and “How nice to be complimented!” OK, it was more the former than the latter, particularly as I am the sort of plumping, fashion disaster troll whose compliments under such circumstances would be rather less than meaningless.
“Uhh, thanks, dude, nicetomeetya,” he murmured and was on his way, blinking boytoy close behind.
Ganesh drove me back to my place – which turned out to be a dangerous operation, as we were both quite drunk and it was indeed a bad thing to be on the roads in such conditions. And we hung out for a while, waiting for him to sober up so he could drive back to Redondo. Of course, I contemplated making a pass at the young fellow – and I actually think he would have not turned down an offer for some sexual congress. But I also clearly saw that this was not the sort of thing the fellow needed from me. He needed a friendly companion, an engaging confidente, and not a sleazy Friend With Benefits. And so I cheerily played that role, not adding even an ounce of flirtiness into the mix. It is my impression – or perhaps it is just my fantasy of the meandering eyes of a drunken boy -- that he was ambivalent enough to not be sure what he wanted himself. And as you know, dear blog a licious blog, I am not mean enough to take advantage of someone’s ambivalence! At least, not someone I know beyond the level of a 20 minute trickums.
