Nealing Before Me
by Brin (kneegrowburrito@hotmail.com)
There have been two great loves of my life, Noam Chomsky and James Brolin. James had been my rebound.
He accompanied me last year on my book tour of New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Tacoma, Washington. We’d both had a taste of success that year, him with his marvellous cameo in Traffic and me with the runaway success of my book, I’m Sick and Tired of Fucking My Mother Over the Coffee Table: A Tribute to Doctor Phil. But it was in Tacoma that James broke the news he was returning to Barbara. Being fiercely homosexual and an avid contributor to Aids Quilt projects in Bolivia, Ghana, Mozambique, Montreal, and Tacoma, Washington---it has always troubled my soul and boggled my mind that Barbara’s output in film and music is lost on me. Of course I’ve always found her a staunch professional and admired her shunning the swell and heave of popular opinion in not having a nose job.
Losing James meant not simply losing the sumptuous charm and masterful rhythm of his fellating; it meant severing contact with Josh Brolin and Josh’s lovely fiance (since she lost all that nagging babyfat), Minnie Driver. Facing a weekend without the skyline of Venice, Jame’s terse, moody poems written on dinner napkins left under my pillow, Josh and Minnie’s laughter recalling Ben and Matt’s (bastard for leaving her) acceptance speech at the Academy Awards when they informed me it was in fact written by the two Olson twins after a benzedrine binge when Full House left the air waves---it was too much for fragile heart to bear.
After three successfully unsuccessful suicide attempts, (four bottles Tums, removing the rope and plunging into a bumper car course, imbibing sixty Mcnuggets) I found Neal Pollack in a Havana bar, El Floridita. He was making a run at Hemingway’s house record of fourteen Papa doblés. As he sipped from his fifteenth I was as taken with his very brown, brown eyes as I was repelled by his show of hubris at trying to best Papa.
He turned to me and placed his meaty paw on my leg and ran his fingers majestically along my thigh. I took hold of his wrist and our eyes collided in one orgiastic spasm, equal in measure to shaking the hand of Mel Brooks backstage after opening night of The Producers and congratulating him on casting Matthew Brodrick, despite my suggestion, and despite the appalling HBO series his wife starred in.
His fingers probed further up my leg until, at the end of the rainbow, they found their treasure. O it was death by a ceiling fan for some fourth rate poet, for both of us.
“My, my,” Neal smiled, very brown, brown eyes seeming somehow unassailably browner still. “You’re a Canadian."
“But I’m still a New Yorker at heart. I did the commercial with Tony Bennet proclaiming it---though it only ran in Boston.”
“Who is your preference, Ginsberg or Shelley?”
“Hard for me to say, Neal. There’s only one thing I care to measure, tsk tsk. Buuuut, if you force me, I’ll explain. Ginsberg and I had a fantastic weekend of lovemaking in the heart of Washington Square in Frisco. Shielded by the swarm of Tai Chi practitioners, the gentle drum of rain, the slant of sun, I managed to support myself against poor Ben Franklin’s chilly statue knees while Allen attacked me from the rear. It was there I finally understood the value of acrostics in relation to Billy Shakespeare, Rumi, and Sports Latenight with Vince Gellini.”
“You’ve said nothing of Shelley.”
I lay hand against Neal’s cheek. Simpatico sigh. It was heaven.
I took a sip from his Papa doblé. The six drops of maraschino were there all right. Spectacular. “Are you alone?” I asked.
“Well---Byron, Whitman, Decartes---artistically speaking I’ve never felt...”
I placed my hand behind his head and drew his chin toward my lips. His whiskers tasted of deep dried, unripe bananas---I noticed the crumbs and renounced the inexplicability---but it was the smell, a palatial bouquet of every board game I’d ever played with Noam Chomsky, the cool intelligence, the premature jowling, the hair horseshoeing back over his fine scalp.
Neal and I quickly made a B-line for the Ambos Munos Hotel. We stormed up the stairs (Neal carrying me in his arms), kicked down the door of Hemingway’s old room, where For Whom the Bell Tolls had been written; I handed Neal my Tangierian dagger from its happy, shining sheath, and in meticulous Arabian war cry he sirened “LALALALA” and parted the rope over Ernie’s bed in one ardent blow.
Eden.
My legs tossed up, the romp lasted for a quarter of an hour. He had the sheer force of Mailer’s prose tempered ever so delicately with the raw emotion of Thomas Wolfe’s, but the humour was all Ted L Nancy, Seinfeld’s charming if pathetic comb-over to return to the small screen.
The love I felt for Neal entered my heart on rollerskates. Seldom have I found the path to ample semen and unconditional love one and the same, but Neal showed me, as with Todd Bridges, that one should never give up. He showed me that I could find a friend inside the lover.
The only unsettling matter was Neal’s periodically referring to me as Wally when his love making salvos grew more severe, ie. “Accept my rhythm, Wally! Who’s your grandpa?” (this over my sodomous screams of delight "TACOMA!")
Thank you, Neal. Thank you, America, for your favourite son. He truly is a man among men (though I haven’t the slightest inkling as to the meaning of that phrase). It doesn’t matter, of course. For me the whole of the world pales to those ever-inquisitive, brooding, very brown, browner than a brownie, brown eyes.
