Dating the Greek Gods by Brad Gooch

Author:Brad Gooch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2003-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Meditations and Exercises

Pain and Creativity

Over a stormy Labor Day weekend, fraught with an ominous overload of police sirens and fire engines revving in the station house across the street, I found myself identifying with Hephaestus, regressing into feeling sorry for myself over a brief dating experience from which I’d emerged burned and moping. At the nub of all Hephaestus’s created beauty, after all, is pain. But pain is not a wormhole down which many of us voluntarily descend.

Growing in any kind of wisdom or self-reliance is a two-steps-forward, one-step-back process. As a steady reader of self-help books, I’d often had the experience of being encouraged by a book, putting its advice into practice for days or weeks, and then slipping back into forgetfulness. I would need to recharge my batteries by reading a similar message in a similar book. I was startled, humbled, and a bit amused to find the same slippage can occur even for a writer. I sometimes forgot that I had all the insight and technique that I acquired from having written Finding the Boyfriend Within. Yet occasionally, I’ve found myself needing to reread my own book.

A few weeks earlier, one of those skids had begun for me when I’d met Renaldo at the Big Cup, a coffee shop on Eighth Avenue in Chelsea. Or rather, when Renaldo met me. There I was, sipping my café latte, and he drinking his tall raspberry iced tea, when he strode over boldly with a phone number scribbled on a yellow piece of tablet paper in his outstretched palm.

“If you want to go to Hairspray on Friday night, let me know,” he said in his—as I was to discover—Venezuelan accent. “My friend is having a theater party.”

I took him in, stunned. I’d definitely seen Renaldo around: tall, black hair cut short, olive-skinned, usually dressed in boots and gray painter’s pants. He was a bit hard to place. As I was later to discover, he worked as a makeup artist in the fashion industry.

I couldn’t make the musical…though he hadn’t really given me a chance that afternoon to tell him so. I did call him on the rainy Saturday afternoon after the play. “Where have you been? Come over now,” he said with unusual authority. I did, and we had a romantic afternoon intercut with watching Julia Roberts in Sleeping with the Enemy, which was fast fare on a cable channel. I was taking in his compact studio apartment, with bike hung on wall, more pots and pans and kitchenware than books, lots of glossy magazines, when he revealed to me, slipped under the glass cover of a coffee table, my own publicity shot for a book promotion, clipped from a magazine a few years back.

“I told my friend, ‘See this guy, I’m gonna sleep with him,’” Renaldo bragged to me. I have to admit to taking a brief, knowing, psychic half step backward at that moment, but decided to pretend all was well.

I thrived for a couple of weeks in the hothouse of attention that was Renaldo’s apartment.

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