Dating Confessions by You "You think I have a drinking problem, but the problem is that you are so boring that I have to drink heavily every time we hook up."
So I met this guy at school — or maybe it was at a punk-rock show, some kind of music, I don't remember — but I know I'd seen him around long before we ever talked and the thing was, he was great. He had light-brown skin and an easy smile, strong arms and paint on his clothes. He painted on big canvases in a warehouse in an illegal squatters' space downtown. He looked into my eyes when he talked. He was hard in all the right ways but I guessed he'd be secretly adoring, maybe up for adventure.
We drank cheap beer together because that's what spoke to the Bohemian in us. Why go for frou-frou and fancy drinks? We were not of the bourgeoisie, not yet, not then. I lived in a studio apartment. He — let's call him Kerouac, for the hell of it — might not have lived anywhere. Maybe he slept in his painter's squat. Maybe he walked the streets.
Let's call him Basquiat, or Pollack, or Henry Miller. Why not? You get my point: old-school romanticism, the wild-man artist. It was all over him. Kurt Cobain? No, it wasn't like that. He wasn't so troubled, at least not in any obvious way.
One day in my studio, we were drinking beer and stacking bottles into pyramids. We were drawing together,
He leaned over and used the side of an oil pastel to run a long, broad line of red down the thigh of my worn jeans.
in the light of my big open windows. Other people came and went, dropping in to share their stash, their company, their aimless ways. I had a pack of oil pastels. Basquiat and I, Kerouac and I, we had almost as much paper as we had time on our hands. We drew and we drank, and before the sun even moved below the mid-afternoon roofline of the city outside the windows, we were smashed.
He leaned over and used the side of an oil pastel to run a long, broad line of red down the thigh of my worn jeans. I felt the heat of his hand as it followed that line, from my crotch to my knee, over the curve of muscles and bones.
What could I do?
I wrapped an arm over his shoulders, pulled him close. I drew a blue smiley on his shirt. Basquiat's shirt was thin and slid over his skin, his body, his pecs.
Oil pastel is smeary and thick. It stays put and travels, both. The day was warm, the apartment sweltering, and the pastels were soft under our hands. He, this man of mine, drew long eyelashes down my cheek, made the oil pastel into makeup, but it wasn't good makeup, wasn't willing, it was erratic. I drew on his face too, and when he pulled off his shirt I drew on his shoulder, down over his hairless brown chest. The pastel crayon tugged at his skin. It snapped in half. We squirreled around backward to look in my broken mirror and laughed, because we were turning ourselves into clowns, into art, into a perfectly matched pair. When we knocked over a beer bottle pyramid, it would've been better if we weren't sitting on the floor, because not all the bottles were empty and beer ran like a river over the warped wooden floor boards. It ran fast under my leg, over our drawings. I laughed and screamed, jumped up and peeled off my soaked, pastel-smeared jeans.
He took off his pants. Then his boxers, and his cock, first hanging, edged its way up, up, stiffening, to say hello. I pulled off my T-shirt, bra-less. The windows were open, light pouring in. It was our first time naked together and I had his drawings on my face and he had mine on his body and we saw ourselves in the slice of broken, green-tinged mirror: Adam and Eve, with a pack of crayons.
