I wanted, very much, for a year-in-review to be my first blog post. Well, I haven’t finished it. Too much has happened, too much needs to be said… but first, digested.
This is my favorite bit of writing to date, “The Pear, the Quarry and Paul.” Enjoy:
There are certain moments, cast in such specific light, that trigger a phenomenon that I’ll struggle, now, to describe for you.
It’s a process of reinforcement, of bolstering the mind and soul. Without proper understanding it could be confused as duplication or rehashing, even nostalgia. My argument is that of something more.
Where to begin? A description of the inciting events? A clear explanation of the passage that precedes this one? As time is a theme of this piece, we will begin here and now.
The only fruit I ever crave is the pear. I more regularly indulge in berries; blackberries or raspberries. But it is the pear that, when I am reminded of and pursue my want for, I am most greatly rewarded. There is a familiarity there, some unrememberable association from early childhood that allows me to simultaneously walk through many times and places. To relive sweet, life-rich memories. A multitude of Davids finding happiness at once, over the fields of memory. I, now, sit with the slices – silvery, green, a wet cream opal – of this pear, but with it I travel.
With this idea of the pear, let us now travel.
In the tumult that was college I took my best friend home for a weekend. She had been and continues to be, my rock; Diamond hard, as rare as an emerald, more valuable to me than either. My treasure.
Somewhere between Danbury and Westport we ended up at a mansion party with throngs of my then, still childlike, younger friends: physically beautiful, mentally free, high school attending princes and princesses. I was drawn to them, and back to them, by their ability to both capitalize and squander their exquisite powers of body and privilege.
Drunk on a bottle of Cristal, belonging to someone’s absent mother, cheers erupted around us.
“To the quarry! To the quarry!”
Swept up on wings of debaucherous adventure and Connecticut-style rule breaking we piled into cars and pursued. I remember nothing about the ride save for sitting backward in the trunk of Volvo station wagon and starred sky.
Twenty or so of us parked along the road beside a forest. In the almost hushed tones of paranoid drunks, we spread the warning: entering private property.
We commenced with a winding hike through the moonlit silvers – turning evergreens into still lifes, trapped in the mangled arms of deciduous neighbors.
Every so often we would lose a couple to a shrub, and after a questionably long, late night trail tour, we found the quarry.
With a fringe of onlooking trees and a cliff face rising opposite our position, we stood on the gravel shore of a mirror of the sky.
As a true representation of youth, we sought to destroy it. Quickly we stripped. The true adventurers, shoeless, ran through the trees making their way for the cliff. Maggie and I ran straight for the water and with all the force we could muster shattered the plain of the mirror, over and over – rippling the land and sky into waves, plunging through cool waters, crystals, time both our own and time belonging to the forest – to the family that carved out the quarry, to the rain the filled it and the ground water that fed it, to those that did this before us, to the animals that drank from it – traveling so fast through space and time we touched the event, or the creator that provided it, this mass, with life. All in a moment. There were thousands of smiling Davids, all held within me. This one vessel touched every great summit. More importantly, and the point of this exercise, a new me was created: one who will always walk happily through the quarry with Maggie.
I pull you now to time just before the pear.
The tumult is far greater, far more real than anything experienced in college. My struggles have deepened, and with them, the stress carried in my jaw and the recession in the light and set of my eyes. My ability to make justified assumptions or envision days beyond the moment I live in.
But the pear and the quarry visited.
This isn’t turning into a love story. It remains a life story, mind you.
I introduced Paul to a world I walk in, sometimes, like a prince. There, Le Royale, none the less, I was surrounded by people – and I say this without ego and a genuine lack of truly knowing why – who have made efforts to covet me. People who’ve made clear a desire to both fuck and date me. People, who I suspect, like me because I am still mysterious, because I withhold from them. Because I reject them, holding out for something different.
Again, without ego or exaggeration, this night was difficult for them and none hesitated to let me know.
My crime was showing vulnerability. With Paul, others cease to exist. The backdrop and supporting cast smear like a priceless painting left in the rain, with only its subject – him – so beautiful that the elements themselves are scared to touch.
Carelessly drunk and mildly addled by the treatment I quietly underwent at the hands of others, I danced with Paul. With ego, I do say that three ladies all commented that we were some version of the best or most adorable dance couple that they’d seen. I was equal parts disturbed by plans I overheard about “dividing and conquering” us, and at peace being there, at peace, with him.
With that as my set-up, we fast forward to the crux. The climax. The pear.
The bathroom window was open. The lights were off. The tiles glowed silver, the same light that bathed the quarry, only years younger. (If light, as I suspect, can age.) The same light that glistens in the nectar pockets of my pear now.
Thick, warm clouds of steam rolled out the window – sailing four stories down, dispersing in the air, delivering his scent to as many lungs, human or not, in every corner of the world. He mixed with the air and settled with the sea.
His skin was the tone and texture of marble. He was the moon.
I was naked, not yet in the shower. Self conscious. Terrified. Not wanting to destroy the picture. I don’t recall ever seeing anything quite so beautiful in my entire life. His posture. His proportion.
And when it all became to much, when life brimmed over with an exquisite awe, and I stepped in, I traveled time.
To his quickened breathing minutes before and the release of cages of Monarchs in my ribs, fluttering about singing with the voices of songbirds.
And I was six, naked, collecting shells on a sandbar with my father steps from our hotel in Molokai.
I was looking at myself, in Paul’s eyes, when we first met.
As life continued to pour forth I revisited first love and first kiss. I drove alone through the hills that nourished me as a young artist.
I was dancing around the fire pit in Thailand, wearing my robes, kicking up sand, covered in sweat and soot and dust, stomping my feet to the musical instruments our villagers had crafted. Flailing my arms, undulating rhythmic and tribal and as the surreal reality of that memory pushed my very limits of happiness, I was in my imagination.
Paul and I were naked, running through mossy forests of mythology. Younger. Boys. Spirits. Of the trees and of the water. Powerful, especially in our pull over people. Devilish, oft times unaware of why or how. The world was new, but we were timeless. And he smiled.
So we kissed. Then and there, in the present of the shower. I was not surprised to discover that his lips were as cool and soft as ever.
My pear is gone, but inside me right now, you will find a David eating it, a David at the quarry with Maggie, and David with Paul. In each of them, you will find a silver imprint of unknowable better versions of me.
My close friend, and sometimes mentor, Ian shares the spotlight of an iconic 1980’s Patrick McMullan photograph with his then boyfriend, Tom Ford. Over the past few months I’ve become obsessed with the photo and all the meaning that I’ve applied to it. The photo was taken outside of Studio 54, when both were in their early twenties. Today, Tom Ford is a fashion icon. Ian is an incredible and incredibly successful artist. But there they were, still children in my opinion, together at a party.
