That First Freefall

"Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of man's being alone. It has created the word 'loneliness' to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word 'solitude'to express the glory of being alone."
Paul Tillich

Several weeks ago I was speaking to my friend Jim. Jim lives over on the coast, I’ve known him for nearly twenty years, and he cares for my horse, which he has been doing since the early nineties. So my horse is basically his, I just care for the horse’s registered papers. On many occasions I’ve offered to give Jim the horse but Jim will simply respond with, “No, Dickhead is yours.”

Somehow Khen, my surefooted, buff, Arabian steed became “dickhead”. This affectionate nickname is probably the result of “dickhead” being smarter than Jim’s fencing skills. But, I haven’t taken the time to point this out to Jim. I don’t really think it’s smart to verbalize or define these sorts of causal relationships-rather they are just unspoken and understood.

Because, I’ve known Jim for such a long time, we share a frank honesty in our friendship that is very unfortunate. I've come to recognize that it is unhealthy for any two people to know one another for more than an hour. With Jim and I, our relationship has had many stages. I’ve been his employee, I’ve been his confidante, and I’ve watched him transition from chorus leader to construction company owner to father to caretaker of numerous stray animals. I’ve also born witness to the many different relationships that the two of us have been in. Unfortunately he has also born witness to this history, so it can make for a very uncomfortable accountability. Especially when we get together and start talking about the past. Which for some reason we are addicted to doing.

One of the hallmarks of my relationship with Jim is he has often offered advice that I’ve consistently ignored, disagreed with, or stubbornly refused to listen to. This goes back decades. Jim is one of the few people on the planet who has had the pleasure of telling me “I told you so” more often than my parents. For those keeping track, that’s a lot of “I told you so’s.”

So getting back to the story, Jim calls me up out of the blue and I'm thinking the horse has died (Khen is like 20 now, which is pretty old for a horse.) but thankfully I learn he hasn’t. The horse is fine, and surprisingly enough, the horse has spent the entire week inside his own pasture.

Jim and I catch up because he announces he got my Christmas card. I guess May is a really good time to call when you get a card in December. I know that this is just how things work with us, so it’s all good.

As I am talking to Jim, my friend Timmy and his friend Rob are way down the cliff below, cutting down a beetle killed bull pine. I’m sicker than a dog, breathing is a big challenge, I should be inside the house but I’m not. I can’t help but stand out there in the wind, watching all the action. Occasionally, I tell Jim to hold on, as I cough, or squint to see if the tree is still leaning, or pray that what I just saw happen, didn’t actually really happen.

The dead tree the guys are working on is a 50 foot tall, two-topper. It is rotting, it having succumbed two seasons back to beetles and a lucky lightning strike. One trunk is also leaning precariously over a dirt road. This road, with the accomplice-like aid of an army of unpredictable and stubborn bull pines, has already claimed one vehicle. Not wanting to take another hit on my Homeowners policy, I pace back and forth as the chain saw whines and protests.

This is how we multitask in the Rockies, we chain saw and fight illness and talk on cell phones. It’s all very Deadwood, minus the gunfights, if you are up to visualizing these sorts of things.

The chain saw is screaming, everyone is looking up and as the first part of the tree cracks- then falls, it lands exactly where it is supposed to drop, complete with a giant whoosh and a thud. Timmy and Rob shoot me a thumbs-up and begin notching out the remaining leaning trunk.

Jim goes back to talking about life on the farm, that business sucks right now because of the mortgage meltdown and that nearly every person he meets on Gay.com is either tweaking on meth or is in rehab from tweaking. He talks about the mothers of his daughter and takes a left turn on lesbian culture. Startled, I realize, as he talks about the wonders of having children with lesbians, that his daughter is something like 18 years old now.

I’ve known Jim even longer than that. That I am old enough to know adults who weren’t even born when I was in my young twenties, well I refuse to know how such a thing is possible. I deny that I am old enough to know people who are now adults. This is not how it’s supposed to work when you’re gay. Everyone is always supposed to be older than you are. Forever. Reality-it's all too much for me and I sit down and wonder if maybe I should try to position myself under the path of the next tree to fall.

Jim keeps talking, not even to bothering to acknowledge that because of him, I’ve just realized I’m aging must faster than is healthy for a gay man. The daughter I knew before she was born is already dating men old enough to be hanging out on manhunt, myspace or facebook. How lovely.

Jim continues talking. She, the daughter, is in love. Jim’s not all that sure how he feels about this and besides, he being the scheming gay father figure that he is, Jim has this way better guy already scoped out for the daughter. The replacement guy is a kid that he thinks would be way easier on his peace of mind.

I will learn over the next few minutes that fathers, or at least “real” fathers, spend a lot of time worrying about the guys their daughters get involved with. This totally includes gay dads. Actually, truth be told, gay dads are probably the worst about worrying about the character of the young fella’s that come a courtin’ their girls.

A gay father totally knows the drill-way better than any straight guy ever could. A gay dad knows how guys on the prowl think. Gay fathers understand how cruel and irresponsible and wonderful and sweet talking and captivating another guy can be, because well duh, they’ve dated these men and worse, been these men. They’ve loved and been loved by the litany of what’s out there. They’ve been burned by these men. And yes, they have burned men a few chaps themselves.

A gay father knows both the fragility and callousness of the male heart. So he knows exactly what his daughter is in for. Which, if he is any kind of man at all, should keep him up all night worrying, complete with a loaded shotgun by his side.

Jim was still talking, and as usual, I was trying super hard to listen. Yet, I was distracted. Beneath me, the guys were still hoping to fall the tree up the cliff and off the road. Sure enough the huge pine was not cooperating but was leaning way out over the road.

I started praying. "Please Lord, no cars. Not like the last time Lord, OK? Lord, you hearing me?"

Then Jim said something that again refocused my attention. Redirecting my thoughts from the next liability claim against my homeowner’s policy back to Love American Style, I pondered throwing the phone off the cliff.

“Every person, in order to grow up, has to have their heart broken once. You can’t grow up if you don’t.”

What the #$#&$^#*? My friend Jim had just gone all cynical and ugly and totally, hopelessly gay on me? What about Cinderella Jim? Don’t you want Cinderella for your kid?

Now any reader who's ever read my work knows that I don’t really like reality. I like to live in Timmy land, that completely naïve and unrealistic far away magical land where people meet and live happily ever after. It’s a wonderful place where people are shelled in twinkle dust and hope. It's a place where the downtrodden get their innocence and dreams back even after too many dances with single parented pregnancies or Bloody Mary’s or domestic violence restraining orders.

I have many failed relationships that point to this lack of respect for reality. But far be it for me to just sit there and allow Jim to burst another soul's bubble. Why did he get to be all wise and all knowing and fatherly? Didn’t he want Disney on Ice for his daughter? She spinning and circling and falling in love, safely in the arms of some kind of wonderful? And make that fall last for forever! Why couldn't that be his wishlist gift to her, a legacy of happily ever after?

Why can’t someone get it right the first time? Why does a person have to have their heart broken-“at least once” to stumble into adult hood? Is pain the price we bear to receive eligibility in a stake in enlightenment? Why do at least 50% of all relationships have to land into the infidelity column by at least one party?

The tree crashed smack dab in the middle of the road.

I nearly dropped the phone. I peered over the edge of the cliff. Timmy and Rob looked nervously up the hill to see if I’d seen that things hadn’t exactly gone as planned. I waved. They waved and shrugged. Below them branches and a huge tree trunk blocked the road. The road would be impassable for hours. I expected all sorts of phone calls coming my way any minute. Life was good.

Sitting back down on the edge of the deck, Jim was still going on and on about his theory relating to virgin hearts. I took stock of my life and decided to accept my present status. I also thanked the Lord that if that damn tree was going to land over the road, at least this time it didn’t land on a vehicle, with someone in it, which yes, that’s exactly what happened the last time.

I told Jim I needed to go and that I would call him back. This bit about a broken heart is what’s good for ya left me unsettled. I needed to sort all these relationship do’s and don’ts out. I'd run this theory by my most trusted authority, “the committee of Tim’s smart friends who don’t listen to their own advice”. I needed to have their take on this for additional vetting.

Several days later, nearly all of my friends from "the committee" had reported in. They all agreed with Jim’s take on first time love. To a name, every single person said that a busted, stomped on ticker is what make the heart smarter and the bull shit meter thicker. That we each need to go without sleep for a month and lose twenty pounds, and cry at every country western song before we’ll have a clue as to what kind of love will sustain and nurture us.

I promptly fired the committee. What did they know anyway? All of them were in their 12th or 30th lifetime partnership or marriage. None of them knew the bliss of happily ever after ever anyway.

Another friend shared with me a story that added even more fuel to the fire.

As it turns out she was once head over heels in love. It was in Germany where I guess they still allow that sort of thing- what with all the castles and dungeons they have over that way. My friend told me that when she was young and naive, she was in Germany serving time being a nanny. In the midst of being so in love, everything was going just fine, when a wicked hateful aunt told her that although she was with the love of her life, this was not the man that she would spend her life with.

I gasped. “Get out! Nuh uh. Tell me your aunt-tell me she did not go there."

My friend nodded. Over drinks, she then told me this horrible story about being so in love and then it ending and she losing like 49 lbs and going premature gray and having to leave Europe before she murdered that aunt. She told me that all of this happened in the same month.

My friend wandered around Asia for nearly half a decade. It was all a very horrible, very romantically disparaging and yet, she explained it was among the most wonderful journies of her life. I listened intently to the story, which could have been an Oprah book of the month club selection, if only she’d just written it all down.

My friend confessed that in the end, her aunt had been right. The love of her life should not have been and could not have been her partner for life. Now years later she was OK with the way things worked out. Even more important, my friend confessed she would not have the life she had now if she’d not gone through all that heartbreak and wandering around. She had to lose herself in another person to become devastated enough to find out that she had always been her own best friend. Her children, her current life partner-none of that was in the cards if she’d continued to cling to the Love of her Life as her only option to a path filled with happiness and fulfillment.

There was a lull in the conversation, while I thought about all of this. Part of me really hated the finality of the Paul Harvey “rest of the story”. In all this ending and beginnings hoopla. I hated that my friend didn’t get to stay with the first love of her life and live out 90 years of unbridled passion. That she didn’t get her very own castle, and maybe have nanny’s of her own one day. Part of me really wanted the old aunt to be wrong. I wanted that old woman to have to live out every one of her last days witnessing an example of the “love of a lifetime” lasting.

Remember what I said earlier about me not exactly living in reality? Are you getting that yet?

I didn’t know what to say. Finally my friend turned to me and asked, “So Tim, have you already met the love of your life?”

I could write what everyone is expecting me to write because of all the happily ever bullshit that everyone knows I am addicted to. I could go on and on about my present relationship and lie my ass off and say “oh yes, I am so living with the love of my life right now. I could go there and it would be simple and make things all neat and orderly and consistent.

But I can’t. Besides anyone that really knows me knows that my life has never been the stuff of orderly, neat, and most of all consistent.

I do believe that I, like my friend, had already met the love of my life long before my present relationship. And also like my friend, the love of my life is not who I was meant to be with. More important, the magical and amazing thing I am learning, which I am also so hating to learn, is that whether it is first love or the love of a lifetime, neither are guaranteed as sustainable. That passion and energy, as wonderfully addictive as it is, does not really renew us or as Tom Cruise is famous for saying in the movie Jerry McGuire, “Complete us”.

Like my friend, when the love of my life went away, it was a horrible and gut wrenching experience. I’d have done anything for a different outcome. I lost a lot of weight, bought a lot of Hot Wheels, and dreamed about alternate endings. I didn’t wander Asia but I did wander Seattle. I barely escaped that period of my life without a tribal tattoo or a Stranger Subscription. But thank God I did.

If we stay in that place of first love or cling to the love of a lifetime as our only perfect ending, I worry that such bliss stagnates and keeps growth at bay. One has to be desperately unhappy to find true happiness. One has to embrace one’s own company before the company of another is fulfilling. I know that sometimes the “Love of a lifetime” truly does have staying power. But I think if a couple peaks at 18, in all things love, or better yet we peek under the surface of those who found such relationships, we’d find more than a few dark times. Times of confusion, distance, uncertainty, struggle, and crash and burn moments. Times where those "perfect" relationships nearly suffered fatal blows.

I may end up with all those Cinderella fans really pissed at me, but I’m starting to think my friend Jim is right. Again.

I still think Disney 24/7 would be a great way to live and I still believe in magic and happily ever after. I just have to be straight up about what happily ever after revolves around. It isn’t so much the one-time, perfect pairing of two hearts. Rather happily ever after is centered on the wholeness of one heart. And maybe if one heart is whole, then against all odds, that heart will attract a similar energy.

As writer Anne Lamott once said, the perfect relationship or marriage is when both parties secretly think they got the better end of the deal. Unfortunately that sometimes means you have to endure a few lousy deals before you even know what a good one looks like. And, more importantly, that it’s one that’s worth keeping.