There once was a boy…

…who made me watch all the Marx Brothers movies – I barely knew who they were at the time, and this horrified him.

…who made me watch Double Indemnity when I was 17 years old.

…who loved WC Fields and Mad Magazine

…who knew me when I was a kid – we were kids together.

…who was my first male friend

…who took me out on dates, which consisted of going to movies, and then walking to get ice cream afterwards – such innocence

…who would come over to my house for our dates, and my little sisters would hover on the edges, giggling, acting crazy … he will be the only person on earth who dated me when my siblings were still small children …

…who called me “Squealer”, just to tease me

…who did plays with me in high school – but his talent was always far and beyond anything which was appropriate to those environs … I suppose you could say the same of me – we were both restless for the outside world at very young ages and we recognized that in one another

…who would take long walks with me, over the university campus, at night, the two of us talking, about Abbot and Costello, and Artaud, and Arthur Miller, and how much we hated high school

…who was my boyfriend. In a way, I will never have such a boyfriend again. A teenage boyfriend. A boyfriend who can’t drive. A boyfriend who made a big deal out of buying me an ice cream at Baskin Robbins, hugely magnanimous with his teenage wallet, a boyfriend before adulthood. A boyfriend before life got complex. Before I knew that love could do rotten things, before I had any experience, before I had any battle scars of any kind. A boyfriend from an innocent time.

I hadn’t seen that boyfriend in 18 years, since our innocent times wandering around our university town, eating ice cream and talking about film noir and Groucho Marx. I cannot imagine experiencing such innocence now. Because you can never go back. Some things are not meant to be un-learnt.

Paradise Lost.

That old boyfriend from adolescence lives here – which I have known for some time now – only I never really thought about it, or concerned myself with it. He was so much relegated to the “Past” file folder in my mind. But in the last couple of months, that changed, and recently, we reconnected. We saw each other for the first time in 18 years. We laughed at the sight of one another. We were awkward. We were on the shy side of hysteria. And within 10 minutes, we were talking about film noir again, and talking about libertarians, and talking about movies we had seen, we talked about vaudeville.

It was a strange thing – more moving than I expected. A night which unfurled a connection over the stretches of time.

Sitting there, drinking scotch, looking at his familiar face, so weird, he looks EXACTLY the same to me, I suddenly felt close to that 16 year old I once was. (Only she would never have drank scotch. She didn’t drink at all. Never touched the stuff. He and I would go to pizza parlors, and have two big cokes, and a pizza, your basic high school romancing. Only our discussions were about Barbara Stanwyck and Billy Wilder’s camera moves…) But now here we were in our 30s, drinking scotch together, sharing a shepherd’s pie, everything is different, we are both so changed, and yet I felt completely haunted (in a good way) by the young girl I had been – the teenager, with red cheeks, freckles and glasses. I had almost forgotten all about her.

My old self. That innocent girl, who didn’t know yet the damage love could do. Who freely went out for ice cream with this boy – now a grown man across the table – unafraid that she might be hurt, unconcerned that this man could do her any damage.

There she was again, sitting next to me.

Dammit, I have missed that girl!

It was a night of a time-warp, a night of long distances passed, a night which bridged space somehow. I couldn’t sleep when I went home. I couldn’t believe that I had seen him again, conversed with him like that – stepped over the intervening long years – years where I never thought of him at all – and picked up that friendship again. We couldn’t pick up where we left off – impossible. Also – who would want to? We are adults now. We aren’t teenagers. We both have long stories to tell. With not-so-happy elements. We have experienced loss, our dreams have not come to fruition with the same fullness that we had discussed in high school, as we walked over the quadrangle with ice cream at 10 pm … We have had to make bitter compromises. Like all adults have to do.

I want to make myself clear: I wasn’t in love with “this boy” in high school. It wasn’t so much about that. It was an intellectual connection, a connection based on art and movies, and also based on our own ambitions for ourselves.

I thought that he could rule the world, should he so choose. And he pushed me to be better, to be brave, to take risks.

All when we were kids.

He made a huge difference in my life – and what a joy it was – to finally have the opportunity to tell him so. After so many years. Years during which he thought I despised him. Years during which I thought I despised him.

And now we will be working together again. On a project in January.

He is still pursuing his goals. Thank God. Thank God he has not given up. That, come to think of it, would have bummed me out. He can’t give up!! And when we were catching up with each other, and he heard that I was still writing, still acting – his face lit up. “You’re still doing it? You’re still pursuing it?” “Oh yeah.” He smiled at me. Didn’t have to say a word. I could just tell that this made him happy.

He has asked me to be a part of a new project, something he has written – I read it, it made me laugh out loud, and I said Yes.

But what an odd thing. What a GREAT thing. What a great great thing.

Perhaps I haven’t conveyed here what this has all meant for me. I am not sure. All I know is – when I think of going into rehearsal – for a project written by ‘this boy” – the first boy to take an interest in me – the first male friend I ever had – my first boyfriend – and here we are now – 18 years later – in New York City – working together … come so far from the small drama club of our public high school, where we felt reined in, hampered, suffocated… we wanted OUT. And now we ARE out.

I just have moments where I feel: Thank goodness I have lived long enough to see this come to pass.

It took only 5 minutes of awkward laughter and basically staring at each other like lunatics, trying to get to know each other’s grown-up faces – it took only 5 minutes of that before we tossed the past onto a bonfire, and joined the present day. We did not sit and reminisce much. We talked about Now. We talked about the present moment.

It is a bit of a miracle.

Maybe you won’t know what I am talking about. Or maybe you will.