I blow a breath out, set the phone down, throw on work-out clothes. I scoop up the phone and jog down my apartment stairs and past the Donut King, into the biting cold, toward a track that’s six blocks up. Even as I run, I’ve got the phone pressed to my abs. I turn the volume up on my phone, press it to my stomach, and squeeze it like it’s the phone’s fault I fucked up. Fell asleep with him on the line.
God, I hate this. Hate that I can’t call him back. That I don’t know why he called me.
It’s been more than a year. I keep track of him as best I can on his church web site and the good ole gram, but I’d gotten all that shit with him down a simmer. Now I’m at a fucking boil again…
Friend of mine’s been bugging me to do this boxing thing with him. That night, I go do it—but I keep my phone tucked into my sock. The next day, I fuck up big-time on the cheekbone of a bust I’m doing for commission. Takes nine hours to fix, and by the time I’m done, my back and shoulders are on fire. By the time I’m done, I’m back in the wee hours, and he doesn’t call.
He’s not going to call back.
By the evening of the exhibition, he’s still weighing heavy on my mind. Sometimes I think about my work this way—obsessively—but that I can do something about. This is different. This is fucked.
I wear my long hair down the night of. It’s sort of wavy, but not frizzy—good hair to wear long, at least according to my friend Adam, who cuts it. It’s a multi-artist event, therefore packed. I look twice at every blond dude who strolls by me.
All my pieces sell. Before I glance over the buyer log, I send up something like a prayer that his name will be there.
It’s not. Of fucking course it’s not. I’ve gotta stop this shit.
I delete my Insta, and when my buddy Strauss invites me and some other friends to a lodge up in the Adirondacks for a few days, I haul ass into the snowy woods and paint in the glass “sunroom” when I’m not drowning in whiskey.
I go home and feel more level. I reload the gram. Homeboy’s doing events for a book tour. I see several pics of him smiling with strangers and delete the gram again. I can post pictures of my art to my website.
It’s all good.
His book is about forgiveness. I don’t read it, but I read reviews. I can sort of see why he does this shit. The book has 9,128 Amazon reviews, with an average rating of 4.6. My guy is a fucking star. One morning, I turn on the TV because my place feels too quiet; he’s right there on Good Morning America.
Shit. He looks good and happy. He looks like he’s in his element. I turn the TV off.
Days crawl into weeks, and New York gets its Christmas on. Almost everyone I know is making some sort of pilgrimage for the holidays. I bring roses to Mom’s grave and decline Xi’s last-minute invitation to a potluck at his boyfriend’s house.
It’s all right. I do Chinese Christmas Eve like Mom and I did when I was a kid. I get the moo goo gai pan like she used to—a great, heaping plate of it from the same place we used to in Brooklyn. I don’t live there anymore, but I can pay the twenty-four dollars for delivery.
As I’m eating, I realize something that makes me stop: the last year of Mom’s life, she got sesame chicken. The last year of Mom’s life, she was getting pension, and I sold my first batch of reprods for a new Manhattan hotel chain. She got my moo goo gai pan and got herself sesame chicken.
I get all fucking onion eyed thinking how moo goo gai pan is kid fare. I bet she didn’t even like it. It was something I liked that we could split…which saved money.
I watch all the Christmas shit on TV Christmas day, and fall asleep on the couch. Someone wakes me with a knock on my door, and I nearly have a heart attack. I check the peep hole, and my heart falls so hard, I can feel the fucker in my thighs.
It’s not him. It’s Davida, one of the other artists at the co-op where I started sculpting sometimes. She gives me rum and peppermint sticks, and that night I consume both while watching ET, which, for reasons I don’t understand, is playing before Home Alone and after National Lampoon’s.
A little after midnight, I tuck in and turn up the phone’s volume and set it by my ear. I fall asleep watching snow flakes drift down past my window, cast in green and red from streetlights, glowing blue-white from headlights.