The Night Before
Charlie's downtown. He's trying frantically to secure a passport. He put it off until the last possible moment, and is therefore having to pay dearly for the emergency. Yesterday his sister met him at the Passport desk, hoping, as a family member, to lend credulity. They told him she was 'insufficient'; that he had to provide corroborating evidence 'on paper'. He stormed out of the office.
Oh my God. Charlie has to unearth from his mountains of memorabilia something resembling a valid ID. His room is cyclonic. He can't find his birth certificate. He lost his driver's license years ago. Tax returns are tucked away like pack rat leavings in the pitiful folds of year old newspapers. All he can find are a few old love letters and bank statements. He combs through the entire catalog on hands and knees for remote scraps of identity; sits cross-legged on the bedroom floor scratching through snowdrifts of bills, canceled checks and letters for written proof of his existence. I can hear him alternately cackling and braying at the exposed Piano Factory brick walls.
'This is outrageous! They're out of their fucking minds! This is insane!'
This credential credibility is insulting and filled with mixed messages. One teller tells him one thing, another another. He yells at me as we cross the street outside the Tip O'Neill building, near tears.
'I'm not going. You go,' he cries. 'Call Evjan and tell him.'
'YOU tell him.'
'No way. This whole trip was your idea - your way of grifting a free ride out of your best friend.'
'That's so not true.'
'Yes it is.'
'No, it's not!'
Getting nowhere.
Evjan (Tupy - my dearest friend, our benefactor and host in Switzerland) urges me on with transatlantic calls:
'He's got to do it. Make him do it. Do not fuck this up!' (And the clincher: 'You have to come over here before you're too old to enjoy it.').
Initially I hated writing in the big fat Dear Diary. Too many blank pages. I was going to wait until we were up in the air + over the dark blue Atlantic before I wrote anything at all. However, an unexpected episode with a person - Devin (pseudonym) horned in on my pathetic love life. I am compelled to write about it. As if our whirlwind week together was some New Age hippie prelude to the trip overseas.
Devin
...shows up at Jacques to see my show. When I try to snag his phone number, to set up a homodate, to just fucking interact with him, an inpatient reporter from the Herald waits to interview me. She taps the tip of her pencil on the bar. 'Tick, tick tick...' My machinations piss her off. She gets back at me with a description of the 'pick up' in her article the following day.
Devin is flattered I guess, but it's definitely weird. Although I got his number, and the infatuation heated up, in a mere eight days the whole fantasy played itself out. Not unrequited. Not consummated. Not much.
The night before we caught the plane to Brussels - in a caffeine frenzy - I vacuumed the apartment, rearranged the furniture, did a third laundry, packed, made goodbye calls, snapped on the news, clicked up the generic Urban Outfitter chili pepper lights, lit a candle stump, and as I gulped down a Rolling Rock I realized, in a drunken epiphany, that Devin and I were kaput. Friends of his are driving down from Maine tonight to visit. I am not invited. There is no place for triangulation. Rick-along-for-the-ride, staring at gorgeous face with focused, cat-shitting-in-the-cat-box, look-at-me-you-bastard intensity will not occur. Not tonight. And probably never again. He says he's sorry. He's good at that.
'I'm sorry, Rick.'
I believe him. Love the Voice. I miss him already. I'm history.
Chapter 2