salut, j poore

andy pink, pillowtop, wyoming —

shacks to sunglasses, wikis to cardboard boxes — and beyond —

patrick from starbucks had the day off today. i found this out quietly the other morning as i was cleaning up the vomit. i decided not to bother with the starbucks today — though i did check for his bicycle out front — and went to the gym: proper work out, perhaps a bit too much chit a chat tap a tap, but all in all: i look fucking amazing.

i wanted to write an entry for mr poore, in honor of the goner. i first thought about a faux biography — to tell the untold tale of an unfixed man. but i couldn’t really come up with anything. i thought about telling the story of how we first met — i really liked him at first but he was inexplicably put-off by my put-on arrogance — but to return to that old fuss — it didn’t seem therapeutic to raise hell about the late 70s. in the mid-80s jared p and i made up — over diet mountain dews — and vowed: let’s never drink diet soda again. wise thought, jared.

i like mr poore, i will miss him and wish him the best. but how can we remember the better days and the lost years?

***

there is the story about how mr poore introduced me to my first wife. this actually is a really sweet story — not just because the marriage failed but because it was an index of a humble generosity — but with wit and confidence — that is a mark of the best of the human in mister poore. as it turned out, both jared and i were wrong about betty. looking back, my sense is that betty was borderline (or at least something axis ii). i tried and tried with betty. first i moved out of the house to give her space. then i met a guy — billy — who could keep up with me sexually. then i borrowed a series of large sums of money from betty’s parents. i really wanted to make it work with betty. but after she angrily moved to vietnam with her kitten, i really started to doubt myself and my choices. was this new hypersexual guy really the one? billy had his own issues: trust fund, bourgeois guilt, “listening problems.” but he did have enviable coping skills (he had done *both* cbt and dbt). the sexual chemistry was right, he was white, he was blond (at my request, done well), but in the final analysis: he had leprosy and was med noncompliant. he was also uncut. enough! at about that time i started to really miss betty and her viet cong cat. the choice was clear: either force billy to take his lexprosy b.i.d. and try to get his circumcision covered by medicaid and/or an assistance plan from eli lilly or borrow more large sums of money from betty’s parents and take a tugboat to laos. it was a hard call and my moods were so volatile at the time that i wasn’t sure if i had misread the fine print in the pi sheet for lilly’s circumcision assistance program or whether my marriage to betty was a 6-yr long hallucination. so i called up mr poore with my usual vacillation, unsure of principles and commitments, values and mores, rights and wrongs, heterosexuality and homosexuality, i said: “jared, what do you think, betty’s south asian pussy and borderline personality disorder or billy’s uncut dick and skin lesions on the arms and legs?” calmly, with both respectful gravitas and a tinge of cheeky irony, jared asked: “which sucks less?” i paused. definitely betty, i thought. so i stayed with billy.

fucking insatiable.

***

the point is: i want to thank mr poore for seeing me through some difficult times and not giving up on me. i am now free of both betty (she is dead) and billy (he is dead) and i have really fond memories of crazymeds and the bunch of fucked up weirdos who share their suffering on the boards. thank you — i will aways remember you fondly the next time i go completely crazy.

best of luck, old boy — as the famous french philosopher and poet, d. diderot, said to his transgender boyfriend during the first trimester: “you either make money or you make waves — bring a paddle boat” —

peace, billy and betty