A Very Long Essay (Only Click to Comment)

From my vantage point at the summer camp dance, the Los Angeles smog tended to paint the sky bizarre colors as the sun set. On that Friday night at dusk, the sky gleamed a rich hue of purple, which gave the impression that the world was either ending or beginning – it was hard to tell. Through the strange, variegated streaks of tincture and bodies, I saw a shimmer of white. I was instantly blinded. 1

After my vision returned I looked back in the direction of the coruscation and saw a boy wearing a t-shirt and shorts, surrounded by a gaggle of other white boys looking up at him with rapt eyes. His hands were moving and he was visibly telling a story. I wandered over, jealous of his obvious popularity, but mostly just interested.2

As I grew nearer, I began to notice every detail of his appearance. He had a shock of shaggy white-blond hair that extended down the nape of his neck and dark blue eyes, the color that I had always longed for but never been able to summon up from the murky hazel of my own irises. He was lean and tan and his teeth were even whiter than his hair.3

My first session at CTY corresponded with the apex of the Latin invasion, so I found myself straining to hear the boy over the nasal croon of Enrique Iglesias’ “Bailamos.” His voice was husky and had a classic Californian swagger in the intonation. I lurked momentarily, not listening to his words but just inhaling his persona, and then scuttled back to where the music was less audible.4

I tapped on the shoulder of a girl with whom I had class.5

“Do you know that guy, over there?” I asked, trying not to sound too involved. “The one with the blond hair?” I considered adding “and the eyes as blue as the sea and twice as deep,” but it seemed like that might have come off as obvious.6

“Of course,” she said, looking at me with contempt. “That’s Ray.”7

“Ray,” I repeated.8

“Yes,” she said, enunciating as though she was speaking to someone who was hard of hearing. “Ray.”9

I turned and walked to a private corner of the courtyard, then plopped down on the grass. I sounded out the name, and felt the way it stretched my lips and exposed my gums, contorting my mouth into something like a smile. I was intrigued by this Ray, but even more intrigued by my own fascination with him.10

I saw Ray multiple times over the next few days, but never felt ballsy enough to go up and introduce myself. I couldn’t understand the origin of my preoccupation with him, but I dreamed that I was in a world where everything was white-blond and perfect. One night, I awoke sweating from a dream in which I was cradling Ray’s shaggy blond head in my arms, running my hands through his rumpled hair, tracing the contours of his face with my fingertip. I felt sick and diseased. Precocious as I was, I was unable to contextualize my attraction; all I knew was an inherent feeling of wrongness. I couldn’t differentiate between sexual love and the sort of indescribable, spiritual attraction that I felt.11

I avoided Ray for the rest of the camp. Out of sight, I figured, out of mind.12

A year later, I returned to CTY feeling wiser, more insightful. I quickly realized that Ray was in my dormitory building, on my floor, his room just down the hall from mine. When I saw him again, he was standing in front of the door to the bathroom, wearing nothing but sunflower yellow boxer shorts. A surge of envy and lust flooded over me. Ray’s state of dishabille only allowed his charisma to ooze more thoroughly from his body like aromatic sweat, seeping from him with each breath. On the spur of the moment, I waved to him. He waved back and smiled. Suddenly feeling so gauche in my cargo pants and polo shirt, I scampered back to my dorm room in order to catch my breath.13

Ray’s clique of friends at CTY included a petite, Tara Reid lookalike named Lissa and a brown-haired debutante named Alice. Somehow, I wormed my way into this cadre of coolness, spurred on by their appreciation for my uncanny knowledge of pop culture. I grew to understand Ray as a person, not just as an object, and learned that he was charming and almost bewilderingly intelligent, with a quick wit and a wry smile. My nervousness around him eventually subsided; if I focused my eyes on something else instead of him when we were carrying on a conversation, I could forget about his appearance and pretend that he was just a normal person. But Ray wasn’t normal. Golden, magnetic, and overwhelmingly warm, I found myself disoriented by so many positive characteristics.14

I know that I loved him because of the complexity of the emotion, and because I never understood that it was love in the first place. When I met someone and felt an initial pull toward them, I was quick to capriciously label it as love, but the appeal inevitably faded when I discovered the blemishes in my paradigm of perfection. With Ray, the allure began as a merely physical attraction but grew to be a strange sort of appreciation, in which I was held captive by his virtues to a point where I was so appreciative of his existence in the world that it choked me. I was swollen with gratitude.15

The summer tasted like hard candy, like the sticky-sweet dust that clung to my lips once the flavor of bubblegum or strawberry had already dissipated. One lazy Sunday, Lissa, Alice, Ray and I laid out in front of the dormitory, our ankles cooling in the fountain as we argued about philosophical concepts too labyrinthine to even wrap our mouths around. Ray was patently existential, extraordinarily jaded at twelve years old, while Lissa clung to articulate idealism with as much certainty as a child who still believed in Santa Claus.16

“I just think that it’s all bullshit,” Lissa said, closing her eyes and pushing her shoulders back. The spaghetti strap on her tank tone slipped down onto one arm and she quickly adjusted it, the nervousness in the gesture betraying her sanguine tone. “All of this God-is-a-fallacy shit. I’m sorry, but I don’t think that belief in the existence of God equates naïveté. I just don’t.”17

Ray rolled up his sleeves and ran his fingers through his hippie-child blond hair.18

“But don’t you think it’s inevitably going to get dogmatic to an extreme point?” he asked. “I mean, the existence of God is a poignant ideal for awhile, but then you get into all of these tenets of faith like sin and it just seems to be utterly antithetical to the entire point of spirituality-“19

“I’m not arguing for one religion in particular,” Lissa said. “I’m just saying that, you know, God has a plan for all of us.”20

“God has a plan for all of us?” Alice said with the slightest hint of contempt. “Don’t you think that’s a little bit convenient?” 21

I decided it was time to put in my two cents. “Yeah, and when you make statements like that, there isn’t a lot of room to allow for free will and the innate human need to succeed and improve – if God has a plan for all of us, then what’s the point in making an effort?” I dipped my fingers into the cool water, watching the droplets cling to my fingertip like beads of blown glass I’d seen once in Venice. I wished desperately that I could prove or disprove the existence of God right then, just to wow these children with my intellect and sagacity. 22

No such luck.23

We traded books and read them in the middle of the night, meeting at breakfast to dissect their contents, full of eager ideas and conclusions. I spent the night in his room one night and lost myself in the conversation, but the attraction came rushing back as he fell asleep and I listened to his breath in the hushed dormitory. Our discussions were lively, deeper than our ages should have provided, exploring the nature of philosophy and relationships, religion and sex, literature and growing old. The intimacy that I felt with him terrified me, challenged me, and inexorably altered my perceptions.24

Ray and I grew closer and I fell deeper in love with his remarkably blue eyes, the way he always knew the words to every song. We traded contact information before leaving. On the plane back to Portland, I wept quietly into my single-serving packet of honey-roasted peanuts and plastic cup of Pepsi. The stewardess came by and offered me a Kleenex, touching my shoulder sympathetically.25

“Is this your first time leaving home?” she asked.26

“Yes,” I replied.27

I lost Ray, then – although his phone numbers stayed firmly in my cell, I felt that we had shared something so sacred there was nothing else to be said. Any further words would have been an afterthought. I understood that I could never again capture the sort of closeness that we had once shared in those small, darkened dormitories with the broken air conditioning and the sagging mattresses, juxtaposed against the bright sky of Los Angeles that was so unlike the temperate forest in which I had grown up. Our relationship became a husk of what it had been. I thought of him often, not in fervent bouts of rumination but in passing, briefly, looking back with a smile on my naivete and presumption as I matured. 28

Life threw a broken heart, innumerable lovers, a variety of drug addictions, natural processes of aging and separation from family, and a plethora of other dilemmas and obstacles my way over the next four years. My metaphorical umbilical cord stretched and finally disconnected with the resounding snap of a transition into adulthood. Over Christmas vacation, I found myself in Palm Springs, California, at my friend Kelly’s vacation home, the first time I had visited California in a long while. On a flight of whimsy, I called Ray and asked him if he wanted to meet midway between Los Angeles and Palm Springs. He volunteered to drive the three hours to my neighborhood himself, and I happily agreed. Yet I had a sense of foreboding about this reunion. I had boarded the plane back home when I was 12 shimmering and precocious, still prepubescent and utterly artless. Now, I was a chain-smoking reformed drug addict with adolescent acne and the jaded slur of someone who had seen the uglier facets of life. 29

On the day that Ray was to visit, I smoked a pack and a half of cigarettes by 5 o’clock, took three showers, and had two mimosas to no effect. Kelly offered to come with me, but I knew that this was something I had to do alone. I met Ray at a restaurant called Red Robin, identical to every other T-G-I-Friday’s, Bennigan’s, and Fuddrucker’s in the country, complete with garish decorations and greasy food. I sat down and ordered a cocktail, which I swiftly drank, then demanded another. Went out for a cigarette, came back. I felt imprisoned in this tacky Mecca of barbeque bacon cheeseburgers and mudslide pie, surrounded by overweight suburban Americans who bent over their fries slathered with chili with the look of starved animals, gravy dripping down their chins, the sagging hopelessness of it all. I was drunk and frazzled. I could feel my teeth sweat.30

And then the door opened, and a boy wearing khakis and a hooded sweatshirt walked in, and he was so grown-up that I hardly recognized him. He walked over to where I sprawled surrounded by the carnage of my consumed margaritas, and he offered his hand. For a moment I wondered who it was, and then I saw the impossible royal blue of his eyes, and I remembered the maudlin sound of Latin pop music and the perfectly clear water gushing from the fountain in the center of campus, the way the air always smelled fragrant like watermelon and lime, how even inside the sun clung to my skin, embedded its gold in every pore. A foreign peace settled over me, and I smiled stupidly at him.31

“Let the rhythm take you over, Bailamos,” Enrique Iglesias sang over the Red Robin speakers. And although these words did not exactly burn like fire in my heart, I rather liked them nonetheless.32