Yosemite

I resumed my journey meeting people from the Sondheim list and their partners. I always felt a pang afterwards, wondering why I could not have the type of relationship they had. I thought Eric was all I deserved; all I could hope for. Outwardly I was genial when I was meeting people from the Sondheim list, but inwardly I was managing my condition the best I could. Somehow it was easier being away from Singapore, I was not perpetually reminded about the crushing inevitability. In hindsight some of these meetings were precursors of my life to come.

Andrew and Steve were the first gay couple I had met. Seeing taciturn Andrew and mischievous Steve together reminded me of the adage that opposites attract. In the car, Steve turned around from the passenger seat and asked point blank ”Are you gay?”

I was so startled that I stammered a confession, instead of the carefully calibrated redirection of being potentially bi or exploring out of curiosity.

Andrew tried to hush Steve, but Steve persisted and spent the rest of the car ride gayly grilling me on how much gay lingo I knew. I wasn’t offended, and in some ways was a release as I had never explored or experienced being gay up until Eric.

“Oh my God! He knows about rice queens!” Steve laughed. It was a term, but a term that would haunt me in later years being fetishized or discriminated against by gay white men. I also realized I did not know a lot about being gay.

Another gay couple that made an impression on me was Daniel and Heath. Their home was humble but was full of love shared with dogs and cats. It did not conform to the mainstream idea and expectation of what a successful gay relationship looked like: nice house, nice car, and nice vacations. Those things were out of my reach, so seeing Daniel and Heath so happy together with what they have gave me hope I could be happy someday.

The one thing that made me uncomfortable was when Daniel called to one of the cats in his Southern accent, it sounded like he was calling her “you ruttin’ puddy”. I am no prude, at least by Singapore standards, but I had the same reaction as Victorian women who clutch their pearls.

I sent Daniel an email afterwards “It sounded like you were calling her ‘ruttin’, was that what you said?”

“No, I was calling her rotten” he LOLed.

When people ask why I rescue special needs rabbits, I can trace it to meeting Chris and Amy who fostered a menagerie of animals for an animal rescue in their apartment. I loved animals but was never allowed to have any in Singapore, so I slept with stuffed animals.

I was quite taken by the rabbits. From the dwarf rabbit that I thought was the cutest thing, to the large rabbit the size of a dog we had to take outside on a walk. When I accompanied Chris on the rabbit walk/hop, we heard a yippy small dog around the corner. When it rounded the corner and saw the rabbit that was about twice its size, it froze. The rabbit was unfazed and just did whatever it wanted. That was how I learned bunnies can be pretty badass.

Most of my budget was spent on tickets to Broadway musicals – I was on the Sondheim mailing list after all.  I saw the original production of Rent, Bebe Neuwirth leered at me in the original Chicago revival, I had goosebumps experiencing Julie Taymor’s original staging of The Lion King. I even got to attend the Tony Awards in person. One of the NYC list members conducted the Phantom orchestra and had industry tickets he could not use and offered to sell one to me. Since the Tony Awards is black tie and I did not pack a tux for 2 month trip to kill myself, I scrambled to find a tux rental at such short notice. All of them were out. I was able to attend because Andrew came to the rescue and shipped his tuxedo to me from Sacramento. He still talks about the time his tuxedo attended the Tonys.

I loved musicals not because it was the stereotypical homosexual thing to do. Because unlike popular music or classical opera, some of the songs (particularly those by Stephen Sondheim) captured the complexity of what I was trying to express but not brave enough to put in words.

When a Sondheim list member offered me their couch to crash on, I sometimes stayed up all night viewing recordings they had I could not find in Singapore. Eric took me to see Gypsy. Mark in DC who worked at the Library of Congress, took me into the vault and showed me Bernstein’s original manuscript for West Side Story (the original version of “One hand, One heart” that Sondheim later rewrote). I saw the LA production of Follies with David. David and I felt an instant mutual connection when we met, it was the closest to “love at first sight” I have experienced since. But he had a boyfriend and I was hung up over Eric. Watching a show about being haunted by one’s ghosts seemed apropos.

I was happy to be finally able to be close to, to geek out on musical theater, something I could only long from afar in Singapore. But I found myself increasingly drawn to the long Greyhound rides between cities, the fleeting landscapes that tantalized with possibilities, the strata and scars along the highways that hinted at what was past. It gave space to my thoughts to what comes next for me.

The Greyhound trundled across Montana and pulled over at a rest stop. The passengers got off to stretch their legs. It was the middle of nowhere. I gazed at the expanse of green meadow flecked with yellow that stretched into the horizon of distant blue mountains. I looked up and suddenly realized, in Singapore I had never seen so much sky.

---

I continued to write to Eric, but his replies became shorter and more detached. Love borne from dependency seeps into one’s cracks. Somehow I became his Fosca, I changed my itinerary and went back to him towards the end of the trip for more of his freeze-thaw cycles. He took me to Yosemite. We hiked Yosemite Falls one day and Half Dome the next. As we were circling the base of El Capitan one evening, he pulled me behind a copse of trees and french-kissed me. My granite resolve crumbled – no matter how he treated me, I could not get over him.  

I felt no one could understand or love me in my broken state. We were two kindred clinically depressed souls with few friends, we would take care of each other. I would have given up everything to stay with him in that limbo in that dim living room if he wanted me. This terrible desperate love that leaves me weak and causes me pain. I became Fosca’s song.

“Come back again” he said on my last day, leaving my heart hanging like the valleys of Yosemite.

<< BOUCHER-HERMIT | GEOLOGY OF HEARTBREAK | PETRIFICATION >>