The Ghost of Patrice Rushen
Love always begins at the moment when a scream into the void is met with an affirmation. It also ends when those affirmations stop and we learn to realize that the void might be within ourselves.
Nearly four years to the day after that first affirmation, here we sit at a bar in a restaurant with white walls, Edison bulbs casting the subway tile in a lurid light. This look was once unique to New York but had now colonized every restaurant from coast to coast. This both feels like and is the epicenter of that epidemic. Cold air leaks in but coats are still shoved into every available nook and cranny, as everyone is all too happy for the respite from their protection. The music is faint, the chatter loud and fueled by artisan old fashioneds. I sip my martini, dodging the impaled olive, and hear a familiar tune by Patrice Rushen.
Have you heard that there’s an ad
Listed in the classifieds
Kind of brief, it only says
“I’m lookin’ for the perfect guy”
I remember when we first met. I had recently tried to scale down a relationship I’d fostered with a man who I discovered was married, something that could have been fine had I not discovered it. It was late January, a sunny Saturday, the day before Katy Perry performed at the Super Bowl. I did not feel like a firework. My scream into the void that day took the form of Grindr, the lascivious app that one might think of as today’s classified ads, at least now that Craigslist had been neutered of that purpose. Except your phone number has been replaced with an Instagram handle, the currency of payment is subjection to ToonBlast ads, and your perfect guy’s attributes, once intentionally cryptic so as to not alienate anyone, are more fully specified.
“No fats, no femmes,” I read over and over, knowing that I am at least somewhat both.
“Sane only,” I read, knowing I am definitely not that.
Don’t you know that I’ve been lookin’ for you?
Haven’t you heard?
I’ve been lookin’ for you!
Haven’t you heard?
My screams that day were met with his affirmation, if only in the most carnal form. Then the weeks and months passed through a tide of thousands of messages and we became softened to each other, our screams quieting as we opted for affirmations instead. Largely in the form of the nail-painting emoji in message form or free marijuana, which he grew himself. Our love language only worked through digital and chemical enhancement, a world that was never really real, though the real world always finds a way to deconstruct the contrived.
Frustration, confusion, and the same loneliness we once had alone now gnawed at each other in an oppositional frame. The reminders of our loneliness and mortality were no longer abated by each others’ presence, they were made worse.
These were the screams of people who had not abided by the instructions to keep their hands inside the car during the roller coaster, but who also chose to ride it again and again and again in the same way, even if they risked losing a limb. Each time, thinking it might be different, but knowing it would be the same ride.
At this juncture, hoping that the dust has indeed settled, I am hellbent on affirmation from someone who has once loved me and seen my absolute worst. My parental denials turned into a vendetta. I want desperately to love him the way he wants to be, even if only as friends. So, naturally, I do the opposite by paying for a dinner the day before his birthday, a happenstance that combines his two least favorite things. An accidental crime of convenience, but a crime nonetheless. We do not want to buy the photo we are taking in the penultimate moments of this roller coaster. We are posing for it anyway, as we both secretly know this is the last time we will ride.
I ask if he has ever heard this song. He has not. He does not even know that Kirk Franklin sampled it. We are seated at our table. The music moves on to something less repetitive and without disco flourishes. In a few weeks, he does the same. Fading into the distance, he finds pleasure with other men, the kind that completes him. Ones that don’t require audible screams, just whispers.
I drag him around the West Village, but he has no appreciation for Showtunes,so instead, we subject ourselves to karaoke at Pieces, where we watched a man with limited English proficiency belt out My Heart Will Go On with the conviction of someone who believed it in every tongue.
A gentle touch, a tender heart
A smile to brighten up my day
I need warmth and a lot of love
With kindness spread along the way
Yet again, I am screaming. This time, at the phone, at the computer, at anyone who will listen. This is a day when Mercury Retrograde and the incompetence of others has fucked with my ability to do even the slightest thing. Maybe it’s my own incompetence, but at least I am both arrogant and caffeinated enough to believe that cannot be true. It’s July, and the mercury in the thermometer is not aligned with any astrological phenomena that might be impacting me.
It begins with my landlord, who I call though it is three in the morning where he is, in the middle of a contrived oasis in the middle of the desert half a world away. He has forgotten to pay our power bill, which comes with the requisite misery of staid, suffocating air in a rowhouse. I am an embarrassing public display in this cafe/grocery store/liquor store, a sick amalgam of ventures that can only be present in the condo-laden new urbanism of today. In a past life and in a more subdued form, it might be known simply as a bodega, but this is allegedly upscale, so the prices are quadrupled. The one true upgrade is that there are places to sit, and there are no cats (to which I am allergic). I suppose my landlord is not the only person in a contrived oasis in the middle of a desert.
But, in the corner of my eye, I see him. He’s tall, wearing a hat that I would eventually learn he wears for the practical element of protecting his bare head, but also as a masculine virtue signal beat into him by his father. Upon my departure, I fire up Grindr. There he is, we exchange numbers. He would have said hello, but he was too shy, he says. We set up a date. He has a Nigerian name that rolls off the tongue and flutters the heart instantaneously.
The day prior, he calls. I think that it must be an accident, but it’s intentional, as he wanted to confirm the time and place, and let me know he might be a little late. He’s touring new houses and isn’t sure how long it will take, but closes with an affirmation that it was good to hear my voice again. Again?
This time I wait in the apparel store with whitewashed, exposed brick walls and fluorescent bulbs, dawdling between the cases of watches and browsing at shirts printed with Michelle Obama’s face, appearing as both Our Lady of Guadalupe and a Russian Orthodox Icon all at once. Not even this insufferably hip space can escape DC, and I have no one to blame for this setting other than myself. This could not be more different than the scene five months prior, and yet, I hear a familiar tune.
Don’t you know that I’ve been lookin’ for you?
Haven’t you heard?
I’ve been lookin’ for you!
Haven’t you heard?
I nervously check my phone, and he has indicated he’s on his way. Relief.
His smile and laugh are both subtle and inescapable. I have no intentions of bringing him home with me upon the onset. I am not looking to engage with anyone in this way, but I embrace the strange coincidence of our meeting. Kismet arrives on her own time.
He convinces me that ending up at my place is the best course of action for both of us that night. Once there, he dives in to my collection of wigs like a child in a ball pit. He mourns that he has never done drag or even played around with his femininity, and references Alexander Chee’s essay on it. In my room, he finds a respite from the performance of masculinity he embarks upon daily, and I find myself believing I am more loveable than I’ve given myself credit. Also sweet respite.
Unmentioned is the fact that he was preceded by a song I last heard in public with the man that preceded him. There was no need. Those moments were enough to make me forget.
In the soft light of morning, he slides his clothes back on to his body, after mentioning he feels shame for not having the caliber of underwear so many men of our orientation do. He calls me an “avenue of mysteries.” Little does he know he has written my epitaph, and that I caught a glimmer of belief that he might be around long enough to mourn me when that information becomes important and we are both less concerned with underwear selections or our bodies at all. Only one of these things will be true.
Well, anyone can plainly tell
That love is what I want to feel
So my heart is reaching out
To one who’s sensitive and real
We spend the next weeks exchanging looks and books and body fluid in a way that felt as though we’d known each other for years, not hours or days. That swirl of anticipation, hope, and vulnerability. And these are things he seems to share with me. A buffet of affirmations. No screaming, only quiet whispers in the night into open ears and hearts.
We read Lucretius, intertwined, and in his arms I believe I am the stuff of stars. I see the entirety of the universe in his eyes, even in the low light.
We kiss to Etta James and he discovers my most questionable choices, namely my primary Gilli-stanning. “I’d never thought about her before, really,” he says. To my temporary chagrin, neither had America. Days later, she drops out, releasing a video explaining as much as my therapist tells me that I need to set some rules and boundaries, against my protestations that things are different this time, maybe, just watch. I won’t make the same mistakes again.
Summer lingered longer than necessary, he did not. He slipped away as a melting glacier might, and just as in real life, I didn’t know how to halt its final evaporation. I kept screaming out in search of him, only to be met with the void that I feared most: nothing. I hear nothing, see nothing, and eventually feel nothing, inasmuch as that’s truly possible. I am screaming into the void again, hoping a reprieve or an explanation or an apology was on the way.
Don’t you know that I’ve been lookin’ for you?
Haven’t you heard?
I’ve been lookin’ for you!
Haven’t you heard?
I leave a bookstore where I had made the return of a regrettable purchase, a book of philosophy that asserted that working at Goldman Sachs could potentially be noble. I see him out of the corner of my eye in the twilight talking to another man, much older, much shorter than I am compared to him. I pass by, but choose not to engage in person, but then feel as though I need to scream, and not just as a metaphor.
Messages are rapidly enjoyed that say that I think I saw him, that I was returning a terrible book, and then an admission that it is very awkward to run in to him given the circumstances. Also that there are few men of color walking around in Wash U sweatshirts, meant as a truth but probably received as an insult. Later, eyeing the messages again, my phone is cast into my pocket out of frustration, resulting in a pocket dial and my continued mortification. His ghosting seems like cowardice, and it is. .
This is a moment where a romantic comedy converges into a horror film; in one I am the clumsy, well-meaning protagonist, and in the other, an incorrigible stalker. Neither are images I like for myself, nor are they true. Do I mean it when I say I won’t make the same mistakes again? Scream at the top of my lungs, so loud that Voyager can hear them? Or will I come back to earth and finally face myself and the reality that these men cannot fill a void, nor was it fair for me to ask that of them.
We are both cowards. Him for his silence, and me for my refusal to believe I can find someone who actually loves me.
Looking at my face in the mirror, I hear her once more, this time in my head.
Don’t you know that I’ve been lookin’ for you?
Haven’t you heard?
He had. He had.
I’ve been lookin’ for you!
Haven’t you heard?
“I have,” I tell myself in the mirror. “I have. But do I believe it?”
