David Byrne
I’ve found it convenient to divide my twenties by its heartbreaks, of which there were four.
The first was initiated by a trendy coward I met in college. B was a tall, skinny chainsmoker whose Ukrainian accent had been tempered by a decade in San Francisco and a steady diet of The Simpsons, which was how he’d taught himself English. He rarely smiled, but when he laughed it was loud and unrestrained, as if he had temporarily lost control of his body. We never dated, nor did we ever officially stop being friends, but we haven’t talked since 2013. I’m sure he’s still in the Bay, doing whatever gig jobs have replaced working in record stores to fund his experimental music career.
To be clear, I pursued B—I remember waiting impatiently for him to log in to Facebook so I could message him—but I don’t remember how we knew each other, or how we ended up sitting on a dock built into the rotting bilge of our university’s arboretum one spring afternoon. It seemed natural, once it was happening. There was a divine coincidence: He mentioned Huysmans, and it just so happened I had A rebours with me in my bag. He looked golden in the sun.
I could tell that B really liked me. Back when I still slept with men, a lot of them really liked me at first. Men are easy, if you have the stomach for them. Not that their goodwill ever lasted long. Once they got to know me, men realized I was crazy and most of them didn’t like that. I wondered how long it would take for B to get scared of me or sick of me, to simply disappear.
We started spending a lot of time together. A few weeks later, we blacked out on Four Loko, the now-banned caffeinated malt beverage prototyped as “energy beer” (Jesus tap-dancing Christ) and fucked on the football field across the street from the studio where I lived with my boyfriend. The studio was supposed to be temporary; my boyfriend wanted me to move with him to Iowa City at the end of the school year, where he would be pursuing his master’s degree. He wasn’t concerned with where or whether I would finish my bachelor’s, not that I blamed him—I’d already dropped out once before. He told me I wouldn’t have to work in Iowa. I could just write and keep house while he went to school.
In keeping with the nature of blackouts, mine prevented me from remembering anything about the football field sex other than that it happened (as a 32-year-old, I marvel, aghast, at my irresponsibility. Was there a condom? Did B cum inside me? How did no one see us and think to wonder if that drunk girl getting railed in the field was okay? Big-time howling fantods over here). But this newest void was the excuse I was looking for. The next morning, hungover as shit and covered in B’s unhipsterish hickeys, I told my boyfriend I wouldn’t be moving to Iowa with him. Dressing for the hot summer morning in a sweatshirt with the hood all the way up—you know, to cover the hickeys—I didn’t tell him what had happened the night before (Oh my god. I just remembered that there wasn’t a condom, and that directly after breaking up with my boyfriend, I walked to Rite-Aid, hood still up, for a box of Plan B).
Graciously, my now ex-boyfriend didn’t challenge my cowardice, though I knew he knew. Even so, I felt more relieved than guilty. I had been with him for more than two years at that point, and while I cared about him and our mostly monogamous relationship, B was the first person I’d ever really wanted. B and I shared a birthday. We had just turned 21.
Though at first the breakup alarmed B, I assured him that he didn’t bear any responsibility for it, and really, he didn’t. My obsession with his beauty—he was like an Eastern Bloc Lux Interior, but pretty—was separate from the termination of my first adult romantic relationship. I met B right when I had begun going into remission for my autoimmune disease for the first time, which also coincided with a higher student loan cap for school, which meant that I no longer had to work 40 hours a week on top of a full course load. Instead of toiling myself to death, I was permitted the luxury of going into massive debt for the privilege of upward mobility.
Suddenly, I was healthier than I’d been in years, with time to sleep and energy to spend time with people other than my ex, free from disabling pain. I started making more friends. I started cutting my hair shorter and experimenting with men’s clothes. I started to wonder if maybe I wasn’t as straight as I told myself I was. I started fucking a lot of men, and considered fucking other kinds of people, too. I still spent time with B, but his presence in my life was indicative of the paradigm shift that had made room for my desire in the first place.
Momentous as it was, it’s a change I wish I remembered better. I console myself that the substance of memory—especially of places deep in the past, percolating in trauma’s cauldron of amnesia and substance abuse—is a highlight reel, anyway. I remember B and I going on long walks, arguing about satanism, dropping acid to watch Tsukamoto and The Golden Girls, making flippy floppy in my studio when my ex was gone. I remember that he took it upon himself to expose me to music, to post-punk and New Wave, like the Talking Heads, which was fun and catchy but a big step sideways from earnestness—ideal for trendy cowards like him (I wasn’t trendy, just a coward). You can easily do uppers to David Byrne’s hooting invocations, but you can’t really fuck to them (B did a lot of speed, something else he exposed me to). New Wave was empty, low-stakes music for empty, low-stakes relationships.
It was all very college, the vast majority of it surely embarrassing, but I still wish that I could remember more of it, in more detail; as it is, only the big stuff sticks around, plus or minus a few filaments—thus my method of partitioning my youth by heartbreaks like doric columns or too many bookends.
Which is why the strangest part of it all is that I don’t once remember having sex with B, a person I was in love with and, on some level, sexually obsessed with. I remember many of the moments directly preceding sex with him. I remember that he was uncut, which he told me was because it was dangerous for Jews to circumcise their children where and when he was born. There’s one fragment, in medias res, a snapshot from the static, when I thought he was going to put his foot on my head, so I moved my body lower, to make it easier for him to step on me. He laughed, rocking back on the mattress. What the fuck are you doing? he demanded.
I found myself impossible to explain. Most of the men I slept with got upset when I made it clear that I wanted, or expected, them to hurt me. That was usually around the time they started to think I was crazy. Figures that that is the one thing still floating around my sexual memory palace, at least when it comes to B.
Even though it was obvious to both of us that my feelings were bigger than his, B and I remained friends. Then he started dating this girl, and suddenly he lost my number. He ghosted one of the other people he was sleeping with, too, an older gay artist who had built a little town in his living room populated with slutty deranged Barbie dolls with names like Miss Poupée. B couldn’t very well be friends with the fags he had sex with and date a straight girl! Girlfriend is better, after all.
I had made my peace with B’s romantic disinterest in me—it’s actually one of my greatest talents, unpining. The real heartbreak was in the ease with which he threw away my friendship. And maybe, a little bit, because he had picked a girl rather than someone like me.
David tweets at @k8bushofficial.