For AXM Magazine, November 2005
My yoga practice is getting out of hand. I spend two hours a day chanting and jumping and folding and releasing. I’m so evolved that it’s making me nervous, because for every minute I’m bending, I’m letting go of something else. I’ve given up booze and caffeine, and I’m working on sugar, which, when eaten even in small amounts, makes my right eye twitch. Meat tastes positively hairy, so I haven’t touched a sausage in months. I already live in a dwarfed space, and everything I buy is only to replace something broken or embarrassingly old, like my teeth. If I continue purging at this rate, I’ll achieve monk status by 2007. Gay toothless monk status. Gayer? Gayest.
My minimalism infuriates my sister. Liz has power sunglasses and a huge SUV. She’s corporate and proud to be a cog, because it affords her purchasing power. If I visit her in San Francisco, and we go shopping so I can watch her hoard, I barely make eye contact with an object before she buys it for me. That’s how I attained the lovely necklace that hung on my closet door handle. I can’t find it now. Maybe I gave it to a trick. Or wished it away.
Yoga is the opposite of consumerism. It’s about restraint. The practitioner must always be, if you’ll pardon me, at arms length from his practice. There is a distance, in varying degrees, between me and my props, the wall, my mind and my spirit. It’s not a lack of commitment. It’s a lack of purpose.
I’m removed from my practice the way a brain surgeon is removed from his. A brain surgeon can’t think about what he’s doing. If he ponders, even briefly, the gigantic responsibility he’s undertaken, he’ll freak. He must just pick up a saw and start sawing, while perhaps repeating an old Love Boat episode in his head. He moves with precision through each moment, distracted by canned laughter. For him, there’s no finish line, only Julie with her clipboard, a luxury liner cutting here and slicing there. Anything could happen, which is the thrill of a headstand. I might never come down.
Obviously then, I’m unnerved by marriage. Where’s the element of surprise? In matrimony, everything is so endlessly planned, down to the outfits and toasts and train reservations to Holland. I hate the humorless Dutch. Can’t we just have lunch with friends at the Ivy and exchange rings over dessert? Guess that sounds cynical, unless someone else is paying. Then instead of a slight ceremony we’d be a camp floorshow, less Niagara Falls and more Las Vegas, which appeals to me because gamblers never know when their next meal is coming, living life capriciously, as daring as a backbend.
I have to believe that any love affair I have is like my comedy act – vaguely improvised. I’m making it up as we go along, and invariably nothing matters because I’ll die alone, hopefully in full Lotus.
I know what you’re thinking: Who’d want to marry some grizzled, decaying has-been comic anyway? Believe it or not, someone does, and I can’t shake him. He’s all over me, calling, emailing, visiting London, all of which I’m enjoying immensely. Finally I have a stalker.
Milan’s a Gemini from Prague who has a family and a deep fear of solitude. He wants to divorce his wife and marry me. I’m tempted because he makes me anxious and angry, which after twelve years of therapy I recognize as love. And I’ve fucked everyone. In fact I’m on the second round. I’m like the sexually obese – at this point, I’m just fucking to fuck. I want moderation, calm.
But once I say “I do” to Milan, in front of his son and my mom and all my exes, then I’ll have to love him all the time. He’ll be here, staring at me, looking for the love in my eyes. And I’ll have to produce those eyes full of love, because I signed a document stating they’re full and in his estimation I’m a good person who practices yoga so I can’t lie.
Nor can I remove myself. He won’t let me! I’ve always been a voyeur, but Milan is so in love with me, I might never have another moment alone.
Now even sex scares me. If we wed, do we have to make love every time? Or can we still screw behind a dumpster in Hammersmith? Will I have to watch him when we have sex? Sometimes, even now, he gets mad about that.
“You never look at me when we kiss.”
I can’t! I opened my eyes while I was kissing Milan, and when I saw him staring back at me I was so freaked out that I almost leapt out of the porno booth. Sorry, toilet stall. We met at the gym. That’s the thing, see, he knows I’m dirty, and as his bride, do I have to suddenly be clean, wearing white and throwing rose petals over myself? And must I do so sincerely, without any requisite eye rolling?
All this I study, in repose, legs crossed. I’m supposed to be relaxing my mind, but my brain twists as if a surgeon were ringing the blood out of it. By mimicking heterosexuality, will I be mocking it? What choice do I have, when my role models – Liza Minnelli and my mother – have both been married so many times it’s amazing they haven’t married each other. In my mind, everything is temporary, including this jackpot called marriage. Milan’s offering four cherries. My plastic bucket is full of coins.
So why am I feeling squeezed?