I had three minutes in which to turn my life around. So, in a desperate babble, sitting in a wraparound booth at Knickerbocker’s Bar & Grill in the West Village, I spilled my guts to Dr. Diana Kirschner, romance expert and author of Love in 90 Days.
She was one of a handful of “gurus” that had been brought together by Susan Shapiro, my former journalism teacher, and the author of the recent novel Speed Shrinking, which she was celebrating that night with a speed-shrinking/book party.
Growing up on the Texas-Mexico border, I was taught that you didn’t “shrink” your troubles, you made them bigger and more romantically tragic, grabbing a cheap bottle of mezcal and singing of them with hot tears percolating in your throat. Now, as a 39-year-old gay man living in Manhattan, who hadn’t found a mate after two decades of dating, I was a bit skeptical about Dr. Diana, but still told her about the Bird, as I called my current, flighty boyfriend.
He’d been generous about letting me, currently unemployed and homeless, stay at his spacious duplex in the East Village. Never mind that he already had a roommate. Soon, he’d be moving to a new luxury high-rise apartment on the Westside, and while he offered to let me stay with him a couple days out of the week, he warned, “Just don't bring your crap.”
Yes, I understood that because he was moving to a studio with less than 600 square feet, even he would need to downsize all of his own belongings. But it hurt to hear him say he didn’t want to give me any space in his new place.
“You need to have a serious talk with him,” Dr. Diana said, scripting the ultimatum that if he didn't commit to me, if he didn’t allow me to physically take up space in his life, then he was going to lose me and miss out on the best love and sex of his life.
Yeah, sure, if he even remembered the last time we’d had sex.
Years ago I'd made a similar ultimatum to Andre, which was why we were no longer together. Dr. Diana reached across the table and held my hand in both of hers. “ I want you to be with a person who loves and cherishes you,” she said, reassuring me in a way that I hadn’t felt in—oh—forever.
Toward the front of the restaurant a voice boomed over the microphone for everyone to move on to the next booth.
I addressed my job woes—losing my freelance writing gigs—to Francis Flaherty, an editor at The New York Times and author of the book The Elements of Story. He suggested I get out of journalism and try writing a book.
Astrologer Sherene Schostak, author of Surviving Saturn’s Return, gazed at me with unsettling empathy as I told her about how I recently applied for food stamps. She assured me that the coming lunar eclipse on August 5th would bring great change.
When I got to Katie Gilligan, an editor at St. Martin's Press, the person at the microphone announced we now had two-minutes per shrink. I quickly confessed my fantasy of becoming the Latino Nicholas Sparks.
After the event, back at the Bird’s apartment, feeling spent from over-sharing, I decided to grab my things—my so-called “crap”—and head to a friend’s place in midtown, where I was also splitting my time.
But as I packed, feeling pathetic that I was carrying clothes in a Key Food grocery bag, I lingered, and the later it got, the more suspicious I became. The Bird should’ve been back by now. Even if he had gone to the gym.
The longer I stayed, the more I was reminded of those terrible nights in my twenties, when I made surprise visits to my boyfriends’ apartment, only to have them surprise me with an emotional blow to the gut.
There was that night Blaine met a strip-contest winner the week we’d decided to spend some time apart. And the night Brian had come home, high on crystal meth and who knows what else, after hooking up with someone he’d met in a public park.
Other than going to my friends with these miseries, I never sought out professional help, thinking I should be able to handle this.
Three hours after the shrinkapallooza and still no Bird, my imagination grew wilder, and I knew I couldn’t spend another three minutes waiting.
As I stood on Avenue A, waiting for the M14 bus, I spotted the Bird on his bike, wearing a tank top, gym shorts and his safety helmet. I thought about shouting his name, but he made the corner and shot down East 5th Street to his apartment.
I got on the bus. There was no way I was going to miss this ride. At this hour it would be morning by the time another one passed through. We pulled away from the curb and cruised up the avenue. It wasn't until we were making the turn onto East 14th Street, that my phone rang.
“Where are ya?” the Bird sang.
Oh, somewhere on the corner of 14th and Feeling Sorry For Myself. He thought I was still at the book party, but I told him no, I was on my way to midtown.
He whimpered, said he planned on cooking something “yummy,” as he liked to say. “I thought you were going to be home.”
Home? I considered what waited for me in midtown: an empty, one-bedroom apartment, with windows that opened onto a parking lot where car alarms were always going off.
I felt a nudge from Dr. Diana and jumped off the bus and walked all the way back to the Bird's place. I looked at the moon and the stars above the tenement rooftops, determined to help my destiny a little, and have that talk about “home.” Heading downstairs to his basement bedroom, though, I found the Bird frowning and wanting to talk about something else.
He pointed an accusatory finger at the curtains drawn over the windows. “What’s going on here?” he snapped.
I explained that his roommate had been outside that afternoon, chattering on the phone, and to block out the noise, I’d untied the curtains.
He grunted, unconvinced, suspecting I’d had an afternoon tryst. I laughed at how ridiculous we both were, wondering who’d hurt him and how, and whether between us we had enough bad boyfriend material for a book. I just hoped it would turn out to have a happy ending.
—Erasmo Guerra's essays have appeared in The New York Times and The Texas Observer. He's been a regular contributor to the New York Daily News and Gay City News. His first novel, Between Dances, won the Lambda Literary Award.
