The Curious Affairs Of Atherton Bartelby

I took some time away from the office this week (two days) to decompress, relax, and finish unpacking all of my crap in my new place. As per usual when I do something like this, I did not want to return to my office. However, I received motivation for doing so while on DaBus this morning, when I remembered this evening’s activities (judging the MTV VMA with Bartholomew at his place), as well as the fact that my office closes at noon tomorrow in order to get an early start on the long holiday weekend. So I suppose these two items are making my first day back a bit less soul-destroying.

Also, I have a lunch date. With my MySpace Hottie. With whom I conversed for several hours on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings. Who seems like a very cool, intelligent, witty guy (submitted as evidence, his first text message to me, on Tuesday: “Ah, hooky: a time-honored tradition. Once I’m out of this Grove of Learning I’m going to catch the last of the sun in Waikiki. Feeling very Brontë minus the moors: all mush and hyperbole. Heathcliff!”). At the very least he promises to be a fabulous new friend, not to mention a highly necessary distraction from pining away for Bartholomew.

Finally, I received a MySpace message on Tuesday from someone I never thought I would hear from again: Tristan. This made me smile, and kind of restored my faith in humanity a little bit.

It was nice.

I’m in such a good mood (now) today that I think I’ll treat myself to some Palomino bread pudding after lunch. Snap!

So I had kind of a fabulous weekend, which is funny, actually, since the entire weekend was so fucking hot and muggy. I guess I was having too much fun to care (but I certainly noticed). I spent a fabulously lazy Sunday at Bartholomew’s place, making our Emmy picks (he beat me by one…bitch), eating an alarming amount of Chinese food, fanning each other in the heat of the evening, and hugging each other and hopping up and down on his sofa during the previously-referenced Original Angels Emmy Incident.

Since Bartholomew was busy with his Crazy friend on Saturday, I busied myself with hanging out with my housemates and a few of their friends at our first “official” house party, complete with black lights and my roommate Trevor spinning acid jazz on his rig. We barbecued hamburgers, sucked on artichoke leaves, and I was crowned King of Absinthe Shot Preparation by all. I played poker for the first time in my life, and pissed everyone off because I had a huge stroke of Beginner’s Luck and collected nearly everyone’s chips before the shirts came off and the dancing began.

I’m not sure whose camera holds the shirtless dancing photos, but apparently it wasn’t Phi’s, since I am rather unfortunately overdressed in all of the images on mine. Hopefully they’ll turn up in my e-mail in-box before the day is through so that I may properly commit them to the annals of the Internet.

In short, a positively fabulous weekend.

In other news, an item called a “body board” has been added to my shopping list for the month of September, in order to finally make it out to that little island with Bartholomew before the impending winter tides make the channel impassable. First, a snorkeling set. Now, a body board. I fear I am finally turning into a Beach Bunny. And I’m actually kind of OK with that. Weird.

Oh hello. I am sipping leftover absinthe from last evening’s house social function and wondering if anyone else in the world besides Bartholomew and me fucking spontaneously ejaculated upon seeing The Original Angels on-stage, at the same time, for Aaron Spelling’s tribute during the Emmy Awards this evening.

Oh. My. God.

*dies*

“Well, it’s a small world,” Bartholomew’s friend Crazy said to us on Monday, under the glaring noon sun of Bishop and King Streets, referring to his imminent relocation to San Francisco. “I mean, how crazy is it that I am standing on a street corner in Downtown Honolulu with two guys who used to ice skate at Glenbrook Mall in my hometown of Fort Wayne Indiana when they were boys?”

I arched my right eyebrow and met Bartholomew’s suddenly sheepish gaze before turning back to Crazy, smiling, and wryly agreeing, “Yes. ‘Crazy,’ indeed.”

“I hope you don’t mind that I told him that,” he said, as we continued our walk back to our office. “I just got so excited when he called me from Glenbrook Mall while he was visiting his parents last week that I just blurted out our entire shared history of the place.”

“Why would I mind?” I inquired, smiling. “I find it endearing that you think it’s as cute and as random as I do that we once shared the same ice rink without knowing it.”

He smiled crookedly down at me, still sheepish, squinting against the sun. “Good,” he said.

Crazy (and by gifting him with said moniker I in no way mean to belittle mental illnesses; Bartholomew and I alone could fill a textbook with our own) has been an increasingly annoying fixture on the Bartholomew / Atherton Drama Scene for the last two months, usually Reason Number One for altered, rescheduled, or outright canceled Bartholomew / Atherton Plans. In the five years he’s lived in Honolulu since moving from San Francisco, he has inhabited three different apartments, moving each time because (he claimed) neighbors of each residence would scream “FAGGOT” at him. After deciding, finally, to abandon Paradise and return to San Francisco two weeks ago, following his mental health retreat in the midwest, he checked into a hotel. And then another. And then still another. All because of the tenants in adjacent rooms who screamed “FAGGOT” at him through the walls. (These claims made even more incredulous by the fact that the last hotel was the fucking GAY CABANA in Waikiki, as well as his words to Bartholomew as he was helping him clean out his last apartment: “That voice you hear? That’s the guy who always calls me a faggot,” when Bartholomew couldn’t hear a single thing.)

“I’m so sorry Crazy has fucked up our schedule this week,” he apologized over nachos, flautas, and pink lemonades at Las Palmas during our Friday lunch. “But I picked up two cases of beer and lots of munchies for our Friday evening, so hopefully that will make up for it.”

“Oh, please,” I said. “There is nothing to make up for, really. I completely understand about the Crazies in our lives. By the way my ex is sitting at that table behind you.”

“Oh my God!” he exclaimed, then turned around to surreptitiously steal a glimpse of the one ex of mine he had yet to see. “Ay dios mio! Que gordo!” he exclaimed again, upon seeing him. “Was he always that fat?”

“No,” I sighed. “Tragically, he picked up all of that extra weight after we broke up.”

“Oh my! And why does he no longer speak to you, again?”

“Because he still thinks I stole my other ex from him.”

“Well that’s just…well…Crazy!” he said, and we both laughed. “Shall we take our fabulously skinny asses back to the office? Perhaps leave the restaurant holding hands and skipping like a Happy Gay Couple?”

“Oh, totally!” I said, still laughing hysterically.

Four hours and a bus ride later saw us firmly ensconced in his Inner Sanctum, barefoot with beers and The Boys. It was to be a Friday evening of drunken revelry, making our picks for this Thursday’s MTV VMA (“Um…I think I’m going to have to recuse myself from the ‘Rap’ category…I don’t recognize any of this shit.” “Um…me, neither. RECUSED, Darling, RECUSED!”), and watching the amazingly intense “Running Scared” on DVD. In short, an evening of fun, sans Crazies.

And we almost succeeded.

Until around 10:30, when The Boys turned into mad dogs, running toward the front door barking ferociously. “Um…Atherton and I are spending the evening together. What’s up?” I heard Bartholomew say, muffled, from the front room. And then, “I’m so sorry. I think I’m going crazy,” Crazy slurred, stoned and way too drunk to be driving a rental car up Bartholomew’s hill.

“‘Going?’” I repeated sarcastically under my breath, as I sighed, rolled my eyes, and grabbed two Negra Modelos from the refrigerator and stashed them in my messenger bag. “I am so sorry,” Bartholomew whispered, his hands on my shoulders in the dimly-lit hallway. “I’ll drive you to your bus stop and wait with you.” I smiled up at him, patted one of his hands, and told him not to apologize for something that was so clearly not his fault.

“I’m so sorry, Atherton,” Crazy slurred at me, head in hands, as we passed him on the way to the front door. “I’m just feeling really crazy right now.”

Perhaps it was the beer that made me less empathetic than usual. Perhaps it was him fucking up yet another of our evenings. Or perhaps it was simply anger, upon seeing, after all I’ve done to work on my issues, and all I’ve seen Bartholomew do to work on his, this 50-Something gay weakling doing absolutely nothing to work on his own.

I reached the door and turned pointedly around to face him. “You know,” I said, “Norman Bates said that we all go a little mad sometimes.” I paused, until he looked up to meet my eyes, feeling Bartholomew’s eyes on me from behind. “It’s just that some of us are a bit more vigilant than others at taking the necessary steps to keep that madness at bay. Good luck in San Francisco.” And I turned to walk out the front door.

“I’m so glad you said that,” Bartholomew said, as he raced The Bull down the hill to my bus stop. “Really? Are you sure it wasn’t too cruel?” “Perhaps. But he still needed to hear it.” “Well. I hope he fucking listened.”

I thought about this latest encounter with Crazy yesterday morning, in my front yard, over coffee and a cigarette, as the sun rose over my own hill. I thought about my other, countless encounters with other Crazies since the beginning of 2006. And I even indulged my own peculiar and fabulous brand of Crazy: remembering, again, that ice rink in Fort Wayne Indiana’s Glenbrook Mall, wistfully (and, quite possibly, falsely) remembering slamming into a much taller, skinny, brunette ten-year-old boy just learning how to ice skate, as I was coming out of a double axle.

And I couldn’t help but feel thankful that my brand of Crazy does not include hearing imaginary voices calling me “FAGGOT,” and that The Year Of The Crazy is finally (hopefully) nearly over.

“I’m so sorry again about Crazy,” Bartholomew said, during an abbreviated mobile conversation on his way to drop off Crazy’s rental car yesterday morning.

“Sweetie,” I said, “there is no need for you to apologize for anything. When is his flight tomorrow?”

“12:30. So I’m stuck with him until I drop him off…at, like, SEVEN!”

We laughed.

“Can I pick you up after I drop him off? So we can finally spend the day together?”

“Yesssss,” I agreed. “Fabulous. What shall we do? Besides judging the Emmys?”

He paused. “I’ve been thinking…”

“Yes?”

“Isn’t your new house like right by the Salt Lake ice rink?”

My mouth fell open, shocked, once again, to find that our minds were in precisely the same place at the same time. “Yesssss,” I replied.

“Feel up to teaching me how to do a double axle?” he chuckled.

“Darling.”

“Yes?”

“That sounds…perfect.”

And, just like that, all of our Crazies were gone.