Music in an Empty Room

F. Scott Fitzgerald had it down perfectly—shadows and music that never fade, shadows you sometimes find yourself still looking at, as if they are really there, as though time has not elapsed, music still there, still as it was, the room, you, him, as though there is still a chance, I mean in this essay at least, of getting a friend back. There is nothing I can think of other than a terrible incontrovertibly terminal illness worse than losing a friend. For me, when it happens, it is the loss of all previous friends all over again, all at the same time. A game of pain played by one's own perhaps too late in the day conscience, or too much need, or one's too late in the day wisdom, or the simple fact that it faded and died because this is Tuesday and there is no other real reason.

I don't understand friendships. I don't understand relationships. I am one of those persons who hide, who keeps little rainbow memories in the palm of his hand, when the current hurt happens. Then the self-recriminations start, after the anger, and one is looking for a way out of a hurtful very pained body. One feels nothing but emptiness inside. It is a territory as real as a place on a geological map. One can feel the size of it, how the baleful sky looks down, what the trees smell like, what the season is, Autumn always Autumn, and one just wants the hurt to stop.

I think it is because of my inability to keep friendships going, my self-immolation, or the other person just tired of me, or both of us saying good-bye with the same sadness, there is no where to run. There is of course counseling which I trust a little less than I would a hissing cobra two inches from my leg. And there are self-help books and they do no good for me because, they are usually witless, and I am tired of giving gurus money to solve my problems-which they never do—and thus helping to make them more money, which is all their cold-blooded little hearts care about anyway.

Other friend help, God knows, and I'm lucky to have some of those friends now, deeply and intrinsically fortunate, for I can remember friendships ending with no one around for me to turn to, to cry on, to say this just is not right, I deserved, even I, better than this. I deserve to be treated as a human being. But then of course so does the gone away friend. So do the kind coterie of people who reassure me of my worth and are happy that I feel such deep attachment to them. It's not often people have been happy to have me tell them they are of value too.

But with other friendships gone, especially my first secret love, because of my love, it is the most one can do to stop crying on one's bed for hours. People don't want you to be sad; the cruel ones; the "don't care" ones; not because of any intrinsic dislike of you, or that they are not good people, but because they just simply can't be bothered. When of course it's very understandable—get over it already, poor baby wha wha wha—mostly it's people who have had very bad pains themselves and simply don't want to revisit it-I am talking about more acquaintances than friends---

And yet, I remember in Lenny Bruce's book, that he says he didn't write, but it's Lenny's and I love it because I loved him, is this passage—wouldn't it be great if we could just all of us be in a room and leave the lights on all night long and talk about absolutely anything and no one would come in to tell us we're too noisy, or the electricity for the light is costly, so turn it off and get some sleep and we'd be happy and alive and feeling good? —It sounds very Lenny-like anyway. And I think that quite marvelous. Because I think we are all lonely.

"The Lonely Crowd." From a book of the fifties. Nothing original there. But it's all horribly true—we try to manufacture friends in electronics, we read books, we see movies, we hope not to annoy a momentary friend because they are momentary and skitter at the first hint of responsibility, of having to do something in kind for the friendship and that it's not worth it and takes too much effort, though it can take very little really, so we have to be very careful what we say.

In J.D. Salinger's "Seymour: An Introduction," Seymour says, would it not be lovely if we were closely related to everybody in the world and every home is our home?, therefore we would not always be looking for home, because it would be that house on the corner for instance, or around the block, and you could meet family inside and you wouldn't cry as much or be as lonely or lost?

My current loss is my loss and I know my faults and I try to think about them too much and thus make them worse. Friendships, I am told, should be free and easy and fun, but they've never been, not for me. I've not had many. I tremble at them. Relationships I have had infinitely less. I once asked a psychologist, who ran against type, and was a compassionate man, if friendships, even when they are going well, are supposed to hurt all the time. His eyes, which were always kind, became so soft and warm, and he said in a voice of such caring, "No, Barry, they're not supposed to hurt at all." And I responded, "I know it's odd, but they always have, and I truly didn't know for sure. I thought I would ask."

In a Stanford Whitmore written episode of one of TV's ultimate lonely shows, "The Fugitive," and a brilliant series with superb writers and directors and actors, led by the always missed dear David Janssen, Dr. Kimble tells a girl who is in love with a married man, who cares not a whit for her, all the promises and using her to the extreme, to consider this-- if she were to die, would her love attend her funeral? Or would he ask his secretary to send flowers for that stewardess I met on a plane once?" Janssen said it with such sympathy and kindness, later telling the man to stop hurting her or he "would knock him straight into" his "wall to wall carpeting," and it's so difficult to admit and takes courage to face it. Believing in, hoping for, wanting someone who simply could not care less. Monkey on a string kind of thing. Few people have ever been as kind as Janssen's Dr. Kimble. Stanford Whitmore can't write the world, after all. And David Janssen is gone.

Mostly I try not to remember and I always remember. I think "In Cold Blood" must have hurt Truman Capote less to write than it did for him to write "A Christmas Memory." It seems nostalgia and childhood are the hardest things to look back on, that it takes more courage and tenacity and insight to write a story of Buddy and his cousin Sook, than it did to write of the murderers in Kansas. To this day I can't even remember "Death in Venice" without crying. And in the gay world, it's such a fragile thing. I guess recently I had my first example, with lots of exemptions and taking it and turning it inside out a few times, to fit the premise of what I consider one night stands or one afternoon stands to be: Terrifying and then the leaving without a word. Him. Now the circumstances are totally different in most respects, but the leaving without a word to me, without a goodbye, without something for god's sake—I will not make this more than what it was, that would be silly, in fact the whole thing was, but the thing of it was this:

It was a tiny cameo of friendships, not all, thank God, but many, that end just that way. And in a gay friendship, I used to think the person, because he was gay, would be more sensitive and more understanding. Now of course I have had only a few gay friends. Many gay persons have been very nice to me and are kind. But two of them a decade ago really knocked the flooring of the planet out from under me, and have left me scarred. I figure there are vast numbers, maybe again, everybody, who has experienced this and much more with much deeper sadness and pain than I, and for what it's worth, I deeply am sorry and wish I could hug you and tell you it's going to get better—

But I can't. Both of course. But it's not going to get better. It's learning to adapt somehow. I have never learned how to adapt. I wish humans weren't so messy, I wish emotions weren't so goddam confusing, I wish we could really say to each other what we wish to say, I wish I didn't have to lie to friends because they would leave me if I didn't, I wish pain didn't have to exist, and I'm blowing in the wind now, because of all the horrors going on all round the world, that didn't need to be in the first place and it's Dr. Strangelove insanity, if it doesn't somehow be solved and controlled by people of good will and understanding, but still, our pain is the worst of all, because it's ours.

I've yet to find a way to forget Joel, my first heart break. I lose him every day all over again. I have little doubt what I wrote about in a story on Literotica, will be what happens to me when I die. I'm banking on it. Truly. Now that I'm closer to death than to life and its beginnings and the newness is wearing off, no matter how I try to stop it in flight, I think I can hold on for a while, that I can let my dreams wait for me a while longer, because I've certainly waited endlessly it seems for them. I have come to the inescapable conclusion that life truly is a cheat, that I am little less and surely definitely surely a lot more selfish than most, that I see my own faults about as vaguely as pretty much everyone else does not see theirs that well either. That most of us are simply scared spitless most of the time and have not a clue...honest. Some fake it better and try to find out in more sophisticated ways with more complex minds, but it's all the same at the base of us. We're scared and we want to go home.

This current friendship that has just ended, that I wish so to put together again, is making me fumble words. And I'm trying, Dr. Phil, "to work it out" some this way. Instead of constantly annoying people round me with it because it's got to get boring as hell to them by now. I think it's always a losing world and the next breath is hardly something to take for granted.

I mean it's set up to be. We are forced to age. We do not do this on purpose. And we are forced to twirl like a dervish or sit and sulk or let pride be our undoing and not trying to fix a friendship when there's a chance, no matter how slight. I've had a friendship end on a misunderstanding on the other person's part of a sentence I wrote him containing ten words. He misread it or didn't read it fully and our returning friendship was destroyed. He exploded in anger. I never could explain it. It was so stupid. Surely, there was more to it I never knew, but officially, that was what ended it. Madness.

I react to friendships ending like I do the friendship with Joel ending—the end of the world, dark hot wool socked in summer night that will cling to me forever more-and then my childhood friend Jimmy, that ending when we were in our thirties, because I clung too much, among other things. Mostly I try not to make trouble, mostly I cry in my stories because I think life is a terribly sad business. In person I am something of a clown. I did not make that role for myself. I was gifted into it.

A deeply kind friend says I am too accommodating, that I am too much of a giver. Some, I think, yes, much of the time, but I also see myself as selfish and flash pan too often, and constantly scared and constantly timid and constantly missing Joel who I will not miss for much longer, I sincerely hope.

Years ago on the Donahue show, Ayn Rand was a guest. She was quite elderly and had lost her husband to cancer some time before. I had not read anything of hers but "Anthem" and did not care for the philosophy terribly much, so never tried "The Fountainhead" or especially the endless seeming "Atlas Shrugged." A woman in the audience stood to say it was nice meeting her and to tell Ms. Rand that her books had meant a lot to her and then very politely thanked her. Ms. Rand got absolutely furious, and just said truly hateful things to someone who had just complimented her. Phil Donahue asked her why; it seemed so cruel of her. Later she explained that she did not believe in the afterlife, that her dearest friend had been her husband, later on I found out what an embittered and battered life she had struggled through, because of the controversy and the opponents of her belief. She said that if she did believe in Heaven, she would take ten seconds to find a razor blade, cut her throat, and be with her husband forever more, for there was nothing for her here. Thus her reaction made a horrible kind of sense, though then I didn't see it. I now see it.

There is a bit of dialogue from the movie of "In a Lonely Place" I would like to end on. It comes at the end of everything: "I was born when you kissed me. I died when you left me. I lived for two weeks while you loved me."

Two weeks. Two years. Dreams. And magic. And still believing. I've been fortunate. When it all comes to smash again, I think "Joel." I think my friends of now and how deeply I need and them and care for them. But still deepest in my heart for a long time, I think "Joel" and my two years of getting to be alive. Thank God for memory. And damn him for memory too. Or for me holding onto it with such tenacity.

Thank you for reading this. Like I say, I figure I'm hardly the Lone Ranger in this kind of thing. If I've helped for a second or two, I did try, for that was one of the reasons I wrote it. I hope deeply I did not come on like that psychologist smart butt, lard head on THE TEEVEE.