Pride Diaries: Part I
The Days of Disenchantment
Wednesday: Mercury’s Day
Who knows what had compelled me to buy tickets for “Pool and Bears” a so-called sunset rooftop pool party to kick off Pride. I really could have used that time to do other things; my brother and his kids are coming tomorrow, I’m on double-deadline, and god forbid I honor my commitments to space, sweetness, and sensitivity.
No, this day, I valiantly chose mania and shame, riding from deranged highs to vicious self-recrimination as I pedaled to “Pool and Bears.” What am I doing? Another stupid party, in this strange land, where I’m…what? The night’s entertainment? After everything I’ve learned, after the calling that’s gone out for me, am I really doing this again? Self-betrayal, self-recrimination, you know the drill. This is a great way to go into a party.
The way to get there made Minas Morgul look like the yellow brick road. Finally, after climbing the stairs of Cirith Ungol, I disembarked from the grim autobus to what looked like a condemned Soviet shopping center. Indeed, after an elevator ride with gay men who looked as though they’d lived through Stalin’s entire thirty-year reign, we emerged to the highest level of some sort of bus-station loading center. Honestly, we will likely never know where I was.
It only got worse from there. The two decrepit gays in front of me, whose harnesses seemed to hold their bones from falling to the floor, held up the line as they tried to find their printed party tickets. As in, they had to unfold them to scan the QR code. Finally, I asked the ticket-scanning cryptkeeper where the lockers were. But there are no lockers, I was informed.
The small room I entered was your everyday human-trafficking studio, with a DJ in the dark corner, and couches of sad bears, sitting and staring. A spare table was affixed with two bowls of cherries. That ought to hold us over.
And then I stepped out on the balcony, which was somehow smaller than even my most claustrophobic railroad apartment in Bushwick. And the pool…oh, the pool! It was about the length and width of your kitchen refrigerator. This isn’t my Texan size-ism acting up — I’ve been to SoHo House (it was 2017) and I know from tiny. This was about the size of one of those industrial rice-cookers you can buy on the Bowery. The bears plunged within looked like lobsters in a tank.
I walked to the bathroom and burst into laughter. Real, beautiful, life-affirming laughter. All that build-up. I was certain, walking up, that this party had sealed the deal, cutting me off from the gods and guides forever. I’d lost my privileges to a meditative life. What greeted me was so…nothing as to not matter. I could feel Mercury laughing at me too. You think we give a shit? It was a relief. I chatted with a former bathhouse incubus, then some tourist from Vienna. He explained to me that his aunt was married to the brother of Burt — as in, Burt’s Bees. Apparently, he was a fascinating man, which I discovered while hearing Burt’s entire life story. I got up, ate a cherry, and got the hell out of there.
On the bus ride home, I saw, through the window, my friend Amit, with one of his two boyfriends. They stood over their bicycles, kissing blissfully; both spectacularly beautiful, at the nexus of life and love. They weren’t shlepping around shantytowns to party with the dead and the dying in busted USSR factory complexes. They weren’t hanging on between states of near-catatonia and jacked-up lunacy, wondering if the low hum of nausea they felt was a sign that worse was coming. They didn’t have to cling to toxic uniqueness and delusions of grandeur as an excuse for uninterrupted singledom.
No, they were young, hot and in love. Their country was melting down, and amid the protests and partying, they found a chance to live cinematically.
I did what I have always done, since high school, when I’d “happen” to bike by a straight crush’s house. I got off at that exact stop — though it was far from home — and walked right by them. Amit is a friend of mine; we had been texting just this afternoon. But I didn’t say hi, and they didn’t see me. It was a small victory, but not for my better self.
Thursday: Jupiter’s Day
The parade was…whatever you’d expect a Tel Aviv Pride Parade to be. The anti-occupation girlies went hard, as did the Google flotilla. A disturbing reproduction of Marsha P. Johnson stared at us, trapped on a float with circuit gays who didn’t deserve her. The sun was obscured by clouds. Music was sparse. It was too entropic to feel offensive, or exciting.
I came home with a headache, and precious few hours before my brother and his kids arrived for their ten-day stay. I headed to the beach, and for the first time ever, treated myself to a meal at one of those restaurants on the sand.
There wasn’t a single soul in the water; the gay beach, on Pride day, was all mine. The spread of my arms in the water, under that cotton candy sunset, with a sandwich waiting for me back at the table: it was mine. I’ve made myself a bit crazy these last two weeks, wondering if I should stay here, feeling the same archons crawling around in my mind, restarting the whir of dissociation, uncertainty, dissatisfaction. I’ve felt it again, that specter of death which hunted me for months and months in NYC and LA.
So it’s as the guides said, in my Akashic reading. I’ll start with home, then go from there. I have to travel on, to find more of these stolen moments of beauty which I may enjoy alone. I prayed to Jupiter for the courage, and the resources, to make it so. I knew I’d go back to my dissociative static, but even a few moments of silence, carried in the water, was enough to point me forward.