After the Myths of the After-Hour Gods

This is the beginning of something that I feel I must do.

I have done this before.

Once upon a time the urge to write about the party grew so strong in me that I started to write about it and could not stop. It was a blog. It was something I did at work during the day to memorialize the nights that were making me into something I could never have even imagined myself being. The blog was great. It was well-written. It was lengthy. It was ideally Proustian. It was laden with doom, frought with scandal, terrific with announcements of Fantastic Beauty. We were, back then, gods and goddesses and our blazingly immortal permanence and graciously accepted presence in the then-pubescent Scene was the stuff of a mythology that would inevitably fall into the void of times-spent-and-gone if someone among us did not write it down. So I wrote it. Passionately. Daily. Explicit. Sincerely. I wrote it for my friends. I wrote it for my lovers. I wrote it for my enemies. I wrote it so it could never be erased. I wrote it so our failures could be measured against our victories and a sense of having determined virtues could be felt, if only facetiously, conveniently. I wrote it because I knew it was great stuff to write about. I wrote it because that is what I do.

It lasted about a year. When the subject realizes it is being observed objectivity is obliterated and a blog about people who party fails to be what it can be when the characters act like they're being portrayed, when the distance between page and the party is brought to miniscule porportions. Suddenly Mel didn't like being villified anymore. Soon Erica wasn't partying anymore. Terribly, nervously, I made myself confused about the feelings I had for some people and the way the story seemed to need me to feel about them. Unexpectedly I found myself living in the party house. It was no longer a story about my pursuit for something akin to popularity, it was about my posture as someone sitting in front of the artist who was hidden by the canvas. It ended when I realized I couldn't sit for the picture and paint it at the same time, not in the way I wanted to.

And for nearly a year, over a year now, I have not written a blog.

I tried once. I failed.

This one will stick.

No one will know about it for some time. Lauren will be the first to know. Maybe Miranda shortly thereafter. But I do not want this to happen. Ideally, I will capture them doing what they do, and me doing what I do, without too much attention drawn to the words being used, the words that could be used.

...

I don't know how to start. I had already begun this with imagery childishly conjuring the first time I had heard about the parties from an aquaintance in highschool who really had nothing more in common with me than a seat we shared on the bus. The version of a beginning suddenly mutated into a beast about how I moved to the city to find the party, which isn't true really at all. It was a story. It was a version of things as they happened.

I don't know how to start.

I could tell you what I did last night but really that will be the basis of almost every article ever afterward. This can't be that.

This must be the telling of one particular story, the story to begin all stories.

But already I'm blowing out the flame trying to breathe life into it.

Okay okay.

Who am I? I am the third child of three. I am the tallest. I am the thinnest. Out of the men in my family I have the most hair on my head, though most of it is turning grey. I am 27 years old. I am a Leo. Oh and honey, I am a Le-o. I have an attractive nose. I do this thing every so often, when I'm trying to look clever and sly, that I call "cocking my eyebrow." It is the action of raising my left eyebrow up, pushing the right eyebrow down, somehow alluding to the cocking of a gun, perhaps, as if my body language were such a lethal weapon.

I have been relegated to the status of slut in my life. I have been a doting partner to a man for a few years too. I have been an escort. I have been a recluse.

I don't drink, as a rule. I love gin and tonic, I suppose, and I prefer it with lime, in the summer, on the patio, in the sun ... with friends, and not to get stupid drunk, that's a phase I have moved beyond.

I am a nice guy. There are people we meet in the thick of the city that can reveal to you aspects of human nature you never thought you'd know in people. Betrayal, hatred, anger, futiilty, superficiality, fickleness, transparency: some of the people you may love the most can be the greatest obstacles in your path, tapping them lightly on their shoulder to politely ask that they move out of your way may cause them to turn on you in just such a way that they are revealed for the monsters they are. Just the same, so importantly, just the same, the monsters we perceive in other people can be more often than not rooted in the monster we are ourselves, and those that we fear can in the end be the catalyst to one's own salvation.

I have had the basements of houses flood and all the family possessions down there be ruined with dirty water. I have had my house burn to the ground when I was in grade ten and everything went up in smoke, everything about the life that we had at that time, having lost everything, I know well what it means to start over. I have had to move from house to house to house at the whim of a house-building father and a mother with a real-estate fetish. I have starved before, staring up at a blank wall wondering how I would come across anything to eat before I writhe in agony. I have hit the bottom before and wept snotty sobs till there was nothing left and realized that I was my own master, that my dreams are all I have, and that if I don't do anything to reach them my dreams will be rendered moot and I will be nothing like I want to be, I will be moot. I have been evicted in a snow storm, my stuff hurled out onto the street because I believed that by simply being nice unpaid bills would disappear. I have cheated on the man I loved more than anything. I have seen the other side of the world, I have taught children to read in a language they were born lacking the physical characteristics required to speak. I have had rooms filled with crap and then reduced it all to a plastic bag that contained the stuff of my life. I have carried that bag across town in the pounding heat in search of a home. I have found that home, been removed from it, found it again, only to lose it again, and found it again only to have the house turn into a den of monsters, only to leave it and find another home. I have climbed out windows to call for help, pleading with cops to save me from the mad man that I lived with, either of them, as I lived with two, and I may have been mad too, but I wanted to be saved from them. I have soothed the pains of love-struck cowards, and I have hushed the loud dellusions of passion-fevered femme-fatales. I have been awakened for the wrong reasons, I have been prevented from the sleep I need. I have bent over backwards to help out those in my life I hate to see starved, flooded, burned, driven mad, lost in the world, lost in the city, I have bent over backwards with such effeminately supple ease that at times it might seem that I was almost comfortable with the indulgent abuse of my good nature. I am a nice guy. I may be mean. I may at times say things that are so terribly hurtful that it would seem I'm a ridiculously heartless bastard. But for the ones I love I would do anything. I would do anything ... I do anything ... And when I exhaust myself, leave myself with none, and I am tired of them all, and they seem to move on without me, without acknowledging the effort I make to smile for them, to be for them that character they love, I fall upon the side of my bed and I moan with my hair being roughed by world-weary fingers and my eyebrow sercretly cocking, loading itself with a bullet of body language when no one else can see, "I'm such a nice. Because I'm such a nice guy."

I am gay. Oh man I'm gay. I'm really the gayest man I know right now. I mean. I used to surround myself with porn. I envied the sexuality of what it is to be gay. Being as that I am from some cottage-country paradise, a solitude never to be tarnished with more than one gay man at any given time, I didn't even know I was gay until I stopped feeling too insulted when called Faggot on the playground. I didn't even know I was gay then. I didn't even know I was gay when I was sleeping with my cousin at the ripe age of fourteen, and he and I were like twins, innocent, virgins. I didn't even know I was gay when I was masturbating to the whiffs of cologne plucked from the fibers of boxer-briefs looted from the football team's change room after drama. I didn't even know I was gay at prom when all the other guys were makin it with their dates and I was simply being nostalgic with my prom date, the first real woman in my life. But then all of a sudden I knew I was gay. I knew it in College. I knew it because I started to have sex with people. And once I started I couldn't stop. My attention was taken from the procurement of porn magazines to the deciphering of secret languages in public washrooms where men in college towns found skinny little twinks like me with a death wish and a student loan that seems to pay for everything. By the time I was an established, independent young man living in the City's small downtown, I had lost count of the number of people I had slept with (being as that I was entirely unsure how to count the orgies, if by number of people or as one circumstance no matter how many people were clamoring over themselves to be there), I had not only lost count of the men, I had lost track of the purpose. Bored with the convention of meeting boys on dancefloors drunker than I should have ever been, bringing them all home, going to all their homes, their beds, their kitchens, their bathrooms, their foyers, I started to stray from that path and walked right into the a labyrinth of sexual deviance. Prostitution, and the general submission of the "boy" to the "older man" for the purpose of financial or some sort of tangible reward.

And you might say somewhere in there, with these elements all mixed up in me, I started to show my hard-boiledness. I started to turn sinister shades of horrendously cynical, my heart turned to stone. I sang in my soul the threnody of my childhood in minor keys of jade. After all that long journey I'm somewhere near where I am now.

But this is not really all that I am. I grew up on the side of a massive man-made lake, called Centennial. I grew up with adults. I grew up in their schedule. Though we moved often, my parents and I, never far, maybe one concession road to the next, sometimes staying in one house for a few weeks, once as short as five days, we always had our distant cottage on the shore of that titanic lake. The cottage had been, when I was still a wildly-imaginative brat, only one building erected in a campground of cottagers and campers in tents and trailers. That campground, when I was young, had been successful, flourished with summer parties the whole community attended, potluck feasts an extended family of over a hundred would attend. Summer nights filled with humid dreams of a young boy would end with the first purring motorboats at dawn making their way to the shoals to catch pickeral for lunchtime snacks. Those boats were the fathers of the campsite. The mothers would visit each other, would sun themselves on the decks. Children would clamor to the beaches to spend eternities scaring each other with the legends only such a deep, dark, man-made lake could contain. And on Sunday afternoons, as the campers packed up and left for the week, returning to their lives in cities and towns with jobs that afforded them the luxurious campsite where we stayed on, my father would recline as the sun came out for one last warm blast of the weekend. He would say to us, my siblings and I, my mother there too, "I wonder what the rich are doing this evening."

Bonfires, summer storms, heat waves, Dad's cold beer, the simplicity of Mom's love, my sister teaching me to read in the shade of sentinel pines with the sounds of the waves applauding my swift comprehension, my brother pinning me to the ground for calling him a name, both of us laughing as our screams of hilarity went unheard, unechoing in the distance that surrounded us. Years of it.

And then the campsite closed, and shortly thereafter, my father's construction business went bankrupt and we moved to the cottage even though the place where it was died a little more every weekend that the trailers were taken away and the store was closed and locked up, and the parties dwindled into feuding rivalries and the beach was abandoned to the mess of weeds that grew thick in the stagnation. In the end, our place stood alone on the shore of that great lake as testament to how much things can change. But during these years, when I was in my teens, stealing underwear from athletes while they practised, while the Simpsons had their first few seasons, while CDs became mainstream, I was walking in the bush, I was stretching my muscles as I toured further and further into the thick hundreds upon hundreds of acres of wilderness. I put my hands in the earth to garden. I floated silently in a boat on the surface of the lake on Wednesday evenings after school, after supper, while other kids in my class were learning how to smoke cigarettes, were nervously forcing themselves into their first sexual encounters. I was alone. And on the weekends the cottagers would come and drinks would be mixed, fish fried and the memories of the Great Years would be orated by the men of the campsite as only the legends of heroes are told in places where heroes have lived.

When I went off to college my parents sold the cottage, it was the new cottage by then, the old one had burned to the ground in the middle of winter. I was ruined. The last strand of permanence was gone. My parents moved back to the town where my siblings had been raised, my father started working on construction again, and my mother became secured herself in the sado-masochism of Nortel. I went to college and did a crash course in debauchery. I barely passed my first year, at the end of that year I told my parents I was gay, over the phone, on a Wednesday at seven. I had at my feet, comforting me, encouraging me blindly to finish this, the woman who had been my partner in my destruction, the then-woman in my life.

Having splintered my family's hope for me I resigned to a distance from them that I never really mended. They proved to be far more emtional in the coming out than I had anticipated. I was instantly the black sheep of the family, I had done a deed even worse than my brother dropping out of high school, starting smoking, and it was even considerably worse than how he'd gotten our father's sole business rival's trashy daughter pregnant and was obliged to marry her for the sake of the fathers' reputations. I was even worse than my sister who seemed so arrogant that a damnation as long and lonely as a spinster of the old days seemed imminent with her every fault. I was even worse than the adulterous aunt, my mother's sister. I was even worse than the uncle who kicked my grandmother out of the farmstead she'd inherited only to sell it off and leave my grandmother without a home, a history, or any sense of self-respect in her own final years. Not merely for being gay, but for saying that I was, and believing that there was nothing wrong about it, was like saying I had a terminal disease that cruel goons might smell on me in my weak moments and use against me as they slaughter me. Me.

The nice guy.

My parents were being ridiculous.

And time goes on.

Sure, sure, I seemed to leave a bad taste in my parents' mouth when I fucked up a teaching contract in China by simply being too nervous, by simply being too Romantic and opting to come home to the man I loved instead of sticking it out in the post-9/11 China contract negotiations. But things changed after my stint in China. What changed after China was the Last Chapter of my Family's Growth.

When I went to China my sister's wedding was over-shadowed by my departure. Many people in the community, having seen my family survive the bankruptcy of my father and the burning of the house and the disastrous marriage of my brother, supported the strength of my parents as they finally married off their daughter in a gorgeous outdoor ceremony and then the next day sent their youngest to China.

While I'd been in China Nortel crashed. My mother's life was ruined. And the ruining of a simple person's life reveals the skeletons that till then had been kept out of sight, out of mind. Suddenly my mother snapped. I was living at home at the time. It came to pass that everyone except my father knew of her affair with her manager of thirteen years from Nortel. A man we all knew too. A man my mother mentioned at the dinner table every day. At the funeral for a friend of the family, during hunting season while my father was out of town, my mother had reached her own bottom. It was during the singing of the hymn that we'd all sang at the funeral of her mother. My mother broke the silence afterward with the clamor of her heels on the cathedral floor as she ran like her life depended on it from the house of God. Not knowing what to do, but also being a fan of mania, I ran after her and found her in the park across the street. Autumnal leaves blew in a sun-lit wind and she told me she was leaving my father. It was the single most powerful thing I had experienced. My mother admitting her weakness. She was unhappy.

Though it can be said that sides were picked and the family was put through one of its most personal and terrifying crisis, really it was all because my parents had grown idle watching their children going out into the wilds of life while forgot how to do it themselves. A year after we were all torn to peices, my mother having moved out and in with the villain of that saga, after she went on anti-depressants, anti-psychotics and regularly wrote us defamatory letters accusing us hypocrisy and blauze lovelessness, and my father fell into a slovely life of drinking and gluttony, nearly killing himself by way of a bad heart, only a year after that day in the courtyard of the cemetery with my mother, my family was all back together again, better than ever. Everyone had their faults, and suddenly we were all equal. We were the black sheep family of my father's family, and in our union we were stronger than ever.

I had been sleeping with a straight couple all summer long in a cabin near my parents' place. It was the last summer of some part of myself that could such things. It was the last summer of my lack of responsibility, the last summer of me living there in the mess my parents emberassingly picked up the pieces of. But finally I'd been brave enough to ask, to pursue it, and I got him, the man that I had loved all along, for years by then, I'd had a transcontinental, multimedia, long-distance, close-up relationship with the man that is all that I know about love right now, George.

I moved in with George and with that move I was back in the city. And for a year we were a great couple. We did not own a television and we often spent long winter evenings lovingly enveloped in each other, him with a crossword and myself with a volume of Proust. I was adopted into his circle of friends very easily, older than myself by an average ten years at least, his friends were all successful, all professionals, always having dinner parties, never expecting, but always getting a bottle of wine from every guest, just as we did, just as it seemed it would always be, forever and ever, because we loved each other.

But from along came the summer and with the summer came a restlessness in George that I had seen in him before, that I had loved in him before, that had at one time inspired me to go off to the ends of the world just to prove to myself they were real. He wanted to finish his education. He wanted to do his masters in Calgary. And so he wanted me to come along, to get a job out there, to move out of Ottawa, the City, I mean, the CITY, and start all over again out there. The summer months crept along like a guilty conscience on the soul of a nervous boy. I knew I would never be able to afford such a move, I knew I didn't have what it took to abandon my reflection of myself that I saw in the City, I knew I didn't have what it took to be left alone with George, without a Proustian circle of friends, I knew I didn't have that kind of love, but, because I'm such a nice guy, I would tell him I did. I did not want to see him hurt ... but I saw the dagger, and I used it, sloppily, sweating the urban heat of ember avenues, the sun gone down, and my soul ripped to shreds by the fact that while he'd been away on a business trip, on my birthday, I had fucked someone else. I had destroyed us.

And though it can be said that it did not end well, and that sides were picked and that opinions about the sorts of people I was surrounded by were made and were being made about me (and I believe are still being made about me), and though it was really only a matter of couple of weeks before he packed up and left for Calgary as if on a honeymoon meant for two but with only the lack of me at his side, and though it can be said that I was a fool for being so childish about the whole thing, giving up George being like tearing up a blank check that some might think I connived to get my hands on while others suspect George would have given me out of unadulterated love, all in all it was for the best.

Two months after George left I was in a place of my own. And it was from that place that I went to visit some friends that I had kept from my Proustian years and took the first pill.

The first pill.

And went to the first party.

And danced the first dance.

And heard the music, and felt the beat, and let the beat into me.

And danced all night, till the sun came up. Till the sun went down on the other side of the day. Till the moon was soaring across the sky. Till my eyes were stained with the lights of disco balls as big as the promises made by some girl I went to highschool with after she told me on the bus one morning about the parties she'd seen in that city that seemed so impossibly far away back then.

I had no idea what was about to happen. I was alone. That's for certain. But I wouldn't be for long. Soon I would involve myself entirely in the Party. I would become the Party. The Scene in Ottawa would know my name. The Scene in Ottawa would hope that I was coming. Would gush to see me dance.

It's all very connected. I am connected by the dynamic of history and chance and gall and, really, it doesn't hurt that I'm this tall thin guy, full head of hair, nice jaw-line, sturdy cock, eye brows that dance, and