Christopher

Here's my friend Christopher, in a picture I took at the end of 2005 at EJ's Luncheonette on the Upper East Side. According to my journal at the time:

Christopher and I went to the Metropolitan Museum yesterday to see their Prague exhibit. Christopher has no attention span, so we breezed through it a little more quickly than I would have liked, but it was interesting. Then we tried to go to the Skyline Diner for lunch and it was CLOSED!!! The place was gutted. I was amazed at my prescient abilities, considering I'd photographed it just months before. So depressing...we wound up going to EJ's Luncheonette, where we sat at the bar. Lots of cute 20-somethings there for brunch. I definitely had a wandering eye! Christopher kept trying to pick out a potential boyfriend for me.

This was sort of a typical day out with Christopher. He grew up in suburban New Jersey but he was a city boy, and although when I knew him he often preferred to stay close to home, he embraced the urban lifestyle. He got everything delivered. He was a New Yorker through and through, at least until he moved to LA. And then he embraced California like the long-lost home he never knew he missed.

Here is on the beach in Santa Monica, with something called the "Santa Monica Art Tool," which looks like maybe it leaves a map of the city when rolled across damp sand.

But back to New York: I first met Christopher in December 2000, just six months after I moved there. We met at a singles event at the LGBT Community Center called "Date Bait," where he chatted me up and called me "adorable," which of course got my attention right away. We dated a couple of months, and I remember waking up one cold Saturday morning in his wreck of an apartment on East Fifth Street, with hundreds of magazines piled on the sloping wooden floors and snow coming down outside the windows, and feeling so New York-y, so Bohemian. At that time Christopher ran a perfume company with his former partner, who I met once and who seemed like a rather fierce character. They specialized in quirky fragrances like "beetroot" and "mesquite" and "gin & tonic," and although I never understood why someone would want to smell like a gin & tonic they seemed to do pretty well.

Christopher loved Sondheim and Elizabeth Bishop and Stevie Smith. He was literary -- he urged me to read Cynthia Ozick's novel "The Puttermesser Papers," one of his favorites. It embodied the New York sensibility he so appreciated. He especially liked this passage describing Puttermesser's building:

If you asked the super to send the plumber you would get the exterminator. Without warning the pipes dried up for the day. You could try to run the faucet and nothing would come out. Or the lights would fail; the refrigerator fluttered its grand lung and ceased. All the refrigerators up and down the whole row of apartments on a single corridor expired together, in one extended shudder. You could feel it under your soles right through the carpeting. The building was a nervous organism; its familiar soughings ricocheted from cranny to cranny.

Despite Christopher's sophistication, he sometimes had terrible taste. He bought a pair of appalling Gucci pants at the Barney's sidewalk sale that were a sort of dusky pink with, as I recall, glittery appliques. (I admit my memory may be making them worse than they really were.)

Christopher and I flew to Palm Springs that March 2001, where we stayed at a clothing-optional gay resort called the Citadel (I opted for clothing), and he bought me a great book about mid-century architecture in the desert. But by then we both knew we weren't a couple, and around that time he began dating Gerardo.

I met Gerry when I tagged along with Christopher to the Fifi Awards, which is sort of the Oscar ceremony for the perfume industry. It was at Radio City Music Hall. Susan Lucci was there! (She had her own fragrance and was up for a prize.) Gerardo wore a tux and chunky black glasses -- as someone said, he had a very Havana-in-the-1950s vibe.

Christopher and Gerry at the farmer's market in LA, 2006

A few months later, just before 9/11, Christopher began to experience swelling in his face and neck. It turned out to be Kaposi's sarcoma, which is how Christopher found out he had HIV. (He and I had always been careful.) His immune system, by that time, was essentially demolished. He spent several weeks and months in and out of the hospital and staying with a friend in Brooklyn, and we all thought he was dying. But with treatment and medication he bounced back, the proverbial phoenix.

From my journal, May 2002:

Went to see Christopher on Thursday -- he seemed OK, though he'd had chemo and once again eating seemed like a problem for him. I'll check on him today and see if he's improving. He's had a strange urge to play musicals for me -- it used to be we'd just sit and watch TV, but these last couple of visits he's wanted to play cast albums and explain his appreciation for the music (mainly Sondheim -- "Company" is what we heard Thursday). I don't know whether this is significant or not, whether he's at a stage where he feels he needs to impart something meaningful to others rather than absorbing -- who knows.

All this time, his relationship with Gerry was growing stronger and eventually they moved in together. I visited them often at their fancy apartment down near Ground Zero, where they got a special deal on the rent because the city was trying to encourage people to return to that part of town. We went to see Laurie Anderson perform live at Lincoln Center; we went to lots of movies. And then, in April 2005, Gerry got a job that took them to California. As I wrote at the time:

Christopher leaving NYC? It's like Armageddon!

But, surprise surprise, Christopher loved it. He eventually sold the perfume business and embraced life on the West Coast.

I visited them there three times. At my insistence we visited the Brady Bunch house (above)...

...and Watts Towers...

...and Joshua Tree National Park. And who could forget the Pinkberry Bouncer?

By this time, Christopher and Gerry had adopted Bailey, a Jack Russell terrier that had belonged to Christopher's father.

He loved that dog. And the dog obviously loved him.

In recent years Christopher and I were in touch intermittently as life took me to London. In 2013 I woke up at 2 a.m. to virtually attend (and read poetry at) his 50th birthday party. He had more health problems; he and Gerry got another dog, Miles. As I said yesterday, I fully intended to re-visit California with Dave and see both Gerry and Christopher, and I am heartbroken that that opportunity is no longer possible.

I'll miss you, my friend.