Savage and Tender

That title's the way I described the way Kiki sings "Moments of Pleasure" in analysis today. I know you like that one. And I think I know you like it like that, too. My shrink wanted to know about the "and." As I write you this, I should be asleep. Because I'm exhausted. But I'm not. Because I had a lot of fun this weekend. And I have a lot to think about. Like: Should we go to Madrid for Sleazy Madrid? One of the nicer moments of pleasure of this weekend happened on the couch toward the end of our first night out. T was sitting on the sofa next to D. And they started chatting. D was waiting for his (boy?)friend, V, to get done with his business in the backroom and was pooped. So he wasn't up for the action T was offering him. D lives in Madrid. V lives in Alicante. I was on the couch next to T, telling him D was pretty sexy. And then V emerged beautifully all of a sudden. V stretched out on the couch and put his head in my lap. I started massaging his head. Caring for the aftereffects of the pleasures he'd just had. And enjoying the contour of his skull. And the shape of the lids over his eyes. And the fact that we were in a place where you could just emerge from a backroom and stretch out in a total stranger's lap and take a nap. We shared a cab home. D and T texted each other messages for the rest of the weekend. And we ran into them briefly in the bathroom at the huge party the next night. Just tonight, I found out that Wolfgang Tillmans was there at that big party fisting someone. I found that out because in a chatroom I told B (you remember him from the other day) that I'd seen Wolfgang Tillmans's big retrospective at the Hamburger Bahnhof on my last day in Berlin. I think it might have been major. All his care for the world. And his care for the constellations of his moments of pleasure. The ones he's photographed. And real stars, too. It made me dream of a practice like photography that you could later fool around with and make make different kinds of sense. I don't know if writing can do it. Quite like that, I mean. I mean, look at that moment up there. There I was in this former train station with white walls staring at a picture I'd never seen that was part of Tillmans's Turner Prize winning installation. Lots of others I recognized from around. Books. Probably some exhibits. But there I was all alone after T had left me, after all my and our moments of pleasure, looking at someone who had the same haircut I'd had T give me before we went. Rolling around on the beach. Like he was happy he was born. Like he was being born. Like he was just rolling around in the sand having fun. And in front of that picture? Two lesbians in some kind of intense moment: because they knew him? Because they were involved in understanding their constellation thanks to all this? Because they'd remembered something they'd forgotten?

This is all only a first constellation of last weekend. It was a good one. The weekend, I mean. Berlin Easter seems to be becoming some kind of a ritual for T and me. Haircut and sacred substances and all. Up until now, I've been really bad about access to the substances. This time around, I contacted someone who contacted someone and we met up with someone at a train station in ex-East Berlin. I even understood all his directions in German. Good substances, I think. Did us good, at least. But they don't seem as essential as they sometimes have. For example the week before, when I didn't have any. And realized that what I really wanted T to understand was that the need for substances that I was forcing him to do something about, like ask around, was actually because I wanted to hear him speak. To have him realize how much I need him. All that was what fed the crazy sex from the other week I was talking about a couple entries back. There were obviously a few more steps. Like the way it hooked into my inability to allow him to seduce me like thirteen years ago now. That's what I meant when I said it was crazy the shit you carry around without even knowing it. Forgetting to remember that you'd forgotten. Last Easter, there was a moment at the same huge party we went back to this year, where apparently Wolfgang Tillmans was off fisting somebody somewhere, when T wandered away, as one does, and I had a little freak-out. I wasn't going to let him go alone this time around. So I didn't. We took our pill and clanked our beers together to staying together. For that night. And for longer, too.

And you know what? There's good people out there. I think that was my favorite moment of your radio interview, when you said something like that. The fact that one of them happened to be "me" was a merely incidental narcissism, I think. It's true that there's good people out there. When you catch them at the right moment. With the right amount of darkness and light. Letting go of their fierceness. Letting savagery be tender. I was able to say that that's what the "and"'s about to my shrink. I think I was maybe getting somewhere. Who knows where. I do know, though, that it's in this world. You just have to draw the right lines between the right stars and end up with the right constellation. It helps you remember what you've forgotten. And maybe? Helps you find your way home.