The Treaty of Friendship

February 14, 2013! That's when I first met BB.

Here is what I wrote about him:

You May Think This Entry Is About Industrial Architecture, But Really It's About Sex

I spent a very interesting day with a very interesting guy doing one of my favorite things in the world – no, not making love, but walking around a postindustrial apocalyptic landscape and looking for architectural talismans, clues to transience, proof of what was once there and what will one day be there in its place. I don't know why I find this so fascinating, but I've been doing this since I was a very young kid, and mostly alone because the only other person in the world who shares my preoccupation with this is Ben. BB was very happy to tramp around with me, and I think he enjoyed himself but I suspect what he was really enjoying was me enjoying myself.

The Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn is utterly fascinating and filled with weird things – like this Russian sign over the nondescript door to this most unprepossessing little building. What the hell was this? We were close to the maritime reach, and Greenpoint was a big shipbuilding center well into the 20th century with light industry, satellite foundaries, glass factories, rope factories. I'm thinking at one time this must have been one of those bizarre little sailors' halls for Russian merchant marines far from home. But who the hell knows?

I liked BB a lot. I think he liked me, but the dynamic got more unsettling the farther we strayed from small talk. I'm a big fan of small talk. I don't actually like process-oriented conversations unless they're specific planning sessions about who is going to take out the trash, who is going to vacuum and who is going to cook dinner on Tuesday. I am of the opinion that real communication takes place in the interstices. It's not what is said, it's how it's said. I particularly don't like process conversations with people I've just met.

Of course, BB is someone from the Online Dating Site. He's also polyamorous, has lots of girlfriends including a primary. And of course, we talked a lot about sex.

We went back to his apartment, which is just a terrific apartment – converted industrial space with a large piano and tons of books and interesting art on the walls and this wire on which he had trained an ivy plant, which had obviously been there for years and years. Amazing view outside his front window of the water treatment plant which has four minarets just like a Russian Orthodox church. Or maybe they're stylized sculptures of giant garlic bulbs.

We sipped a very delicious port, and nibbled baguettes and prosciutto and a nice runny Camembert, and talked somemore about sex. Listen. I'm gonna have to get back on the bicycle sooner or later, right? So I told him I would probably end up having sex with him at some time in the future but that I would take it slow and then when it happened, I would make the moves. And I would have to say that this made him… nervous.

At a certain point, he started talking about his "super power." Which is apparently the ability to make women come merely by telling them to come.

BB is actually the second guy I've met in NYC who has this super power, by the way. I have no reason to doubt him. He's very charismatic. But this whole I-make-women-come-but-I have-to-masturbate-to-orgasm-myself thing squicks me out a bit. It's kind of like: I want you to lose control, but I'm not gonna lose control. The Dom thing, in other words.

The Dom thing is not my thing at all.

I crave mutuality.

The most times I ever came in a row was 11. I kept count. I think I was supposed to lose myself in the sheer rush of sensation, and to a large extent I did, but you know, I'm always observing. The perp in question is actually a middlingly famous guy so I won't name him. He pleasured me exactly as though he was winding a clock with a kind of clinical degree of interest that made the experience – despite the physical pleasure – rather… degrading, I suppose would be the word.

Anyway, by the time I left BB's apartment I had decided I wanted to be his new best friend, but that I didn't want to have sex with him.

BB is just a terrific playmate. I could have real fun with BB, and who knows – maybe I will. But my favorite sex has always been very uncomplicated sex – the physical contact, the contours of someone's naked body fitting to my naked body, the smells, the tastes. The animal passion of it. I really don't want to be programmed to orgasm like Pavlov's dog. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It just ain't for me.


Now!

A very interesting thing happened after that: BB found my online diary. I have no idea how! I may have mentioned that I kept one, but I certainly would not have given him the link. In those days, I patrolled the boundaries between my—ha, ha, ha—real life and my online journal a lot more rigorously than I do today. I don't have to patrol the boundaries today! Absolutely no one is interested anymore in long form prose.

BB was aggrieved! The entry had sparked a somewhat lively debate. Resolved: BB is a jerk, Yea or Nay. I think the debate squicked him more than the actual entry.

He commented on the entry!

Can't say I'm enjoying this

So I'm the "narcissist" "Dom" etc. y'all are talking about. Patrizia spends 4 hours hanging out with me, and thinks she's got it all figured out. Fine with me, except it might be nice to be kept in the loop one-on-one.

I'm not going to 'answer' what has been said/surmised about me. I don't enjoy being the object of ill-informed (not necessarily wrong) projections about who I am, but since short of the Vulcan mind-meld, projection is all we have, I'll have to live with it.

I just would have preferred to have had some of this conversation directly.

BB

Then he called me. "Do you want to talk about this?"

Well, I didn't really. I would have much preferred him to remain an amusing character on the page. But I felt I kinda owed it to him, so we met. Can't remember much about the conversation except that a Treaty of Friendship came out of it, and thereafter, we would meet every couple of weeks to tramp around Greenpoint.



And a month or so later, something else happened that was pivotal:

If You're an Artist, Move to Pittsburgh or Detroit

Had a really fabulous time w/BB last night.

First we did the urban archeologist thing, traipsing around Greenpoint, which is just so filled with interesting things to see. The hipster scene is fully entrenched. The Yuppies are ju-u-ust beginning to tiptoe in behind the hipsters. In ten years, unless there's some kind of major economic collapse in NYC, Greenpoint will be fully condo-ized, filled with bright, hopeful little shops selling upscale, over-priced cheeses and kitchenware. So it's a kind of transient scene. In a way like strolling through a large, interactive Tibetan Buddhist sand painting with graffiti and secret gardens behind barbed wire. The wind blows gentrification.

If you're an artist, you want to move to Pittsburgh or Detroit. Not Brooklyn.

Back at his house, BB had prepared this truly scrumptious North Indian meal from scratch that included an amazing green mango curry and a rather wonderful peanut/habanero chutney followed by home-baked carrot cake and whipped cream. I gorged myself.

All the time, we kept up this fabulous conversation – about our respective lives, about the world around us –

The most fabulous thing actually happened after he drove me home, though, and I discovered… I had left my fucking purse at his loft.

Stupid, no? Muy, muy stupid.

999 guys out of 1,000 would have said, "Oh, too bad. Come by and you can pick it up on Friday. Unless you want to come back now and take the subway home." But BB just turned the car back toward Brooklyn and kept talking — I think we were discussing the history of repeating rifles in America on a parallel track with the Ganesh-ification of Lawn Guyland.

I couldn't tell if he was pissed off at me or not –

"I feel really, really stupid," I said.

"And guilty too?" BB asked.

"Oh. Well. Yeah! That's a prerequisite for feeling stupid, isn't it? I mean guilt and stupidity. They kind of go together like Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr –"

"Well, good!" said BB. "I'm sure I can use your guilt to my material advantage at some point. If not in this lifetime, then the next. I don't really get too bent out of shape about stuff like this. Shit happens. You go with the flow. Of course, if it turns out you left your passport or green card at my house, you'll have to walk back from Brooklyn."

BB is like the most perfect playmate ever. Just loads and loads of fun. And this is really what I want in my life. Playmates. That's what's been missing.

That and the $126 million Lotto payoff.

I was totally blown away by how cool BB was about doing a U-turn on the Long Island Parkway & cruising back to get my purse!

Most people would have been far more begrudging. Not me, I will add. I'm always pretty cool about that kind of stuff, too. So, it was obvious that BB & I resonated to the same cosmic frequency.