“It takes talent to cry on the linoleum floor of the kitchen like that” is what I remember Melanie saying to me. If it wasn’t those exact words, I wouldn’t be surprised but what really should have happened was an over abundance of laughter at the grown twenty seven year old man crying on the kitchen floor. In the movie, I expect the question to be delivered like Wesley Snipes to John Lequazamo in To Wong Foo, “Mid-twenties gay man on the linoleum floor; why are you crying?”
To know why I was there, on the kitchen floor, bawling like an infant who wasn’t quite finished drinking from the tit, you would first have to know how got on the floor, why I got drunk, and how I had ended up back in Madison from Los Angeles. All of these events leading up to the fantastic pity party on the floor.
Despite some really awful events in LA, and a laundry list of weddings from June to November, I decided to take a break from LA and head back to Wisconsin, get a job and save money on airfare for what I had hoped would be the final run of summers with back to back weddings. I figured after being away from home for almost six years, it would also be a good idea to center myself.
I told everyone in Los Angeles that I would only be gone for a year, but once I took a management job with one of my role models, I knew it was going to be a bit longer than a year. In this time of settling down in Madison, I was getting to spend plenty of time with some of the most important people in my life. Three of them women who I had been the main man in their lives since we became friends many-many years before. One of them, Dolly, was getting married that November but I hadn’t quite processed that her fiancé John was taking over as the leading man in her life.
Adjusting to her marriage happened quickly though because I loved her husband, but also because I was still a large focus in Melanie and April’s lives. I had moved in with Melanie and April just lived across town so I was with them all of the time. It was great being in a city where I had full access to two of my favorite people. We were able to be ourselves and have all the fun that could be had at this point of our lives. Getting April to leave the gym at midnight to go drink with me; Melanie proclaiming her love for gay men while getting kicked out of a gay bar; both of them uniquely finding themselves in a new space while still growing with me. It was fantastic! Well as the protocol for gay male and straight female relationships go, “men who don’t put out get put in” and both Melanie and April found excellent men that matched them perfectly and put out. I was already on the decline of my identity and with two of my partners in crime finding new leading men, I was in a spiral. The reason I knew I was doomed was that I loved these men for April and Melanie just as they did. I knew these men were not going anywhere and this was happening all at the same time.
One night, not wanted to handle reality, and feeling especially full of self-pity, I opened a bottle of red wine, and another, and another. My sound track to this festive occasion was Norah Jones’ first album. The equation is now crystal-clear my friends to how I found myself crying on the kitchen floor.
Before I go on with this story, I must add an odd physical attribute I have when I cry hard. I have had it since I can remember. Even as a kid when bawling so hard, I would take in quick deep breaths, nose would be running, and I could only get one word out at a time. So when Melanie found me bawling on the floor and asked me what was wrong, my response was “I(breath),realized(breath), that(breath), you(breath), girls(breath), don’t need(breath), me any-mooooore!” Classic! When I look back on great moments in my life, this moment on the kitchen floor is not one of them.
It was that part after though, when Melanie got a glass of wine and sat there next to me, held me and whispered that she will always need me. That picture sits there warming my soul. Once we get those people in our lives that resonate to the deepest part of our soul, we keep them, hold them, and always remind them we love them. That is what Melanie did for me that random spring night. I still picture us sitting there, me pulling myself together and us both realizing that the next bottle of wine is not going to open itself.
