You Can Always Be With Me

I'm supposed to be working on my audition monologue, but I can't. I'm sitting next to Jesse, stuffed to the gills with Italian food (we dined at Piccolo Angolo). And I'm in the loveliest cafe on the loveliest of corners in the West Village. And I think I am blessed (perhaps also touched-with-a-capital-T, but certainly blessed). I am lucky.

I am also wondering when I am expelled from my heavenly Manhattan Co-Op Board Hell, whom do I have to kill to get an apartment in the West Village? (I would say "fuck", but historically, that wouldn't get me very far in this neighborhood...though the demographics certainly have changed).

I had a long embrace with Frank and Jesse. Just to be in conversation with them, just to be in their presence, it's like...no, it IS love.

Maybe we should just go get gay-married or civil-unioned or non-heteronormatively-affirmed-in-our-love-and-commitment-to-each-other or whatever the three of us can do and have kids and take over the world. Or, if not that, at least we know we can always meet each other for dinner and laughs.

And there is great music playing in the cafe. And I am happy. I have goosebumps. It is warm, but not too warm. It is my first summer in New York in years.

And here it is. And here I am. And here are two people who have changed my life immeasurably for the better. Two people whose continued presence in it helps to ensure that my life continues to be an adventure, a giant love affair, a dance on a
precipice overlooking a valley full of wild plants and trampolines and cushions and different colored lights and tiramisu with music playing and rivers made of tea and coconut water.

Let's buy Frank a teapot.
Let's plan a trip to Miami.
Let's always be together, even when we are apart.

And now Jeff Buckley is playing. And it's a perfect, breezy night.

You can always be with me.

JOSEPH
You can always be with me
the way you are with Bleecker Street
or Bank Street
Broadway south of Houston
those shop windows
Debussy
Mallarme
Fanelli's on the corner of Prince and Mercer
the little store nearby where you can find
star fish
butterflies in little boxes
driftwood
and in the antiques store
the things from Asia
inlaid wood
a thousand little drawers
you have a good sense of mortality
in these streets
stopping in the cafes
looking at the light on the buildings
in the late afternoon
when it is already nighttime down below
lights coming on in the shops
and still afternoon in the sky above
this is how I spend my time
I can see it again and again
and never grow tired of it.

I love to quote Chuck Mee (above from Hotel Cassiopeia).

And I look over and see some guy in front of his laptop bobbing his head and mouthing the words. And I am quietly singing along. And this is the moment when we would - all of us in the cafe - start singing together if we were in a play about love or people in New York City or loss or some other heightened, epic thing in a contemporary, urban, vaguely hip setting. Like the "Bridge Over Troubled Water" section of The Devil On All Sides (except we're not in the middle of a war and we're not in the former Yugoslavia and this play would already be really maudlin, I fear). And thank goodness for that impossibly long "oooooh" at the end of "Hallelujah" - just long enough for me to finish scribbling this paragraph.