Last night Lary finally slept with a gay man. And before I go any further I'd like to say that, after all the time I wasted breaking into this man's house looking for evidence he's a big huge homo -- and failing, I might add -- you'd think it'd be harder for him to come right out with it. But no, he came right out with it.
"I slept with Daniel last night," he said, "or I tried to, anyway."
It was 5 in the morning at the Universal Studios Hilton, and I was downstairs in the lobby reading the last chapters of a crappy paperback, trying to deal with a bad case of jet brain. I swear, fly me anywhere west of Texas and I sleep as soundly as a cocktail waitress in a cocaine factory. That morning I was downstairs reading because my own hotel room was full of sleeping women -- not gay, mind you, but then we can sleep with each other without getting tagged as such.
"You wanna know the worst part about sleeping with gay men?" Lary complained. "It's all that whispering."
Evidently Daniel and Grant had decided to get up in the middle of the night to try on all the clothes they bought at thrift stores the afternoon before. Grant tried on his "man skirt" again, which he thinks is very masculine, as well as his black-and-white polka-dotted faux-fur porkpie hat and his orange upholstered "man bag."
"That looks great on you!" "You have got to wear that!" Lary could hear those two whispering.
Giant Michael was there, too, in the other bed. Earlier Grant had dictated the sleeping arrangements. "It'll be boy-girl-boy-girl," he insisted, and the hetero contingent didn't argue. They know Grant's motto this week: "Faith over fear, don't choose the wrong f-word."
So, yes, one gay man was relegated to each bed. Grant immediately tagged the giant Michael's bed for himself. Michael is 6 feet 8 inches tall after all, and tall men are known for packing a python in their pants, not that that's a bad tag to live with.
Anyway, they were all in L.A. to be in the audience on the "Tonight Show with Jay Leno," but you'd think they thought this was "The Price is Right" or something, seeing as how they were set to storm the stage in case their name got called. Even Lary got so excited he actually entertained Grant's suggestion he wear a hazard-cone colored jumpsuit like the kind prisoners wear when they pick up trash on the roadside.
"It's perfect," Grant shrieked when Lary tried it on, and I must say I agreed, but Lary decided against it, saying he didn't want to be pigeon-holed as an escaped convict. That surprised me, because I'd have thought he would have loved that tag. I swear, you think you know people.
Like I remember I tagged my brother-in-law, Eddie, for a loser the second I was sober enough to get a good look at him. That impression lasted for about eight years, roughly, even though he'd been cleaned up and productive for most of that time. He quit smoking, even, and had pretty much done just about everything else to wipe away the last remnants of dirt-clod to reveal the diamond underneath, but when I looked at him I still kept seeing the troubled person I'd tagged him as years ago, whereas my sister never saw that. She always saw the diamond inside.
When Eddie asked her to move with him to the middle of the Arizona desert to build a spiritual retreat, she hardly hesitated. He called it Angel Ranch, and he had dreams of people coming in droves to commune with nature and meditate. When I heard their plans I laughed so hard I thought I'd shoot champagne out my nose. "Jesus God, are they gonna fall on their asses or what?" I snorted.
But damn if Eddie didn't build that ranch, built a series of rustic cabins surrounding a courtyard with his bare hands. He dug a manmade pond, powered the entire compound with solar energy, and created a copper-accented sculpture garden on the property. I visited them there on occasion, and at sunset the statues sparkled against the barren desert ground from which they sprang, and if I were a spiritual person I might have meditated, but I was not.
Though a few droves came to commune with nature after all, Eddie's dream didn't last. Those two lost everything, even the Indian blankets on the bunks in the cabins surrounding the courtyard. They had to leave it all behind and drive away with hardly more than what their car could carry, passing under the decorative archway Eddie had carved as a gateway to the property. Eddie didn't look back, but if he did he would have seen the copper-accented sculpture garden shimmering in the distance, glowing like a diamond in a sea of dirt clods, and I think that's when I finally started to take my tag off of him.
But others remain. As of today, though, I will probably stop breaking into Lary's house, and not just because he has finally given me a key, but because I've decided Lary simply is who he is and there's no need to look further. "I can't believe all I had to do to keep from getting tagged," Lary said in the lobby that morning, "was sleep with a gay man."
hollis.gillespie@creativeloafing.com
Hollis Gillespie's commentaries can be heard on NPR's "All Things Considered." To hear the latest, go to Moodswing at atlanta.creativeloafing.com. And look for her new book, Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales from a Bad Neighborhood (Regan Books/HarperCollins).
