four months & counting…

Funny Guy and I met Sunday 10 May at 6 p.m., more or less, in an Irish bar in Manhattan, so yesterday was our four-month anniversary.

That’s all I wanted to say right now; more soon.

Oh, and we still haven’t had a fight! — A few little bumps back in June & July, but nothing much.

Funny Guy’s taking a nap right now. His new job is — well, let’s put it this way, he’s going to be able to dine out on Funny stories from his new job. It’s not in a circus, but it might as well be, if you know what I mean.

All for now. Have a good weekend.

the material world of funny guy & mimi

What I mean is, the world of stuff that we both inhabit.

Okay, well, first of all, Funny Guy now has his own closet in my apartment.

Mostly “his own”: there’s only one shelf, and it’s full to overflowing with some of my younger child’s books and a suitcase, so there’s not a lot of room. But hanging in that closet are some of Funny Guy’s shirts and pants and a few ties. On the floor are a couple of pairs of his shoes, a canvas tote bag, and that ubiquitous NYC appurtenance, a Duane Reade shopping bag. It’s one of the old red, white, and blue ones, not one of the new-style lavender ones, so it may perhaps be acquiring value as it sits there on the closet floor.

Then there’s the refrigerator: in the midst of my yogurt, apples, and diet-cokes are containers of Funny Guy’s leftover pasta and leftover oatmeal as well as bits of cheese. There’s also all the stuff we both consume: jam, eggs, juice, and a huge silver bag of coffee beans.

And paper: on the coffee table are New Yorkers, TLSes, NYRBs, and books Funny Guy is reading: the only ones I can remember, without running downstairs to check them out, are by Marcuse and by Jules Pfeiffer.

Funny Guy has his own bathroom with his electric razor, toothbrush, toothpaste, mouthwash, shampoo, and towels.

* * *

So yes, Funny Guy is embedded here.

I love having him around: he’s a very pleasant distraction, and in the midst of work I can get sidetracked talking with him, because he’s always interesting to me. And here’s the thing: he’s very quiet. I often don’t know where he is, because his movements from room to room are inaudible. It’s not that I have lots of rugs, though I do have some, but that Funny Guy is not a noisy person. His voice is quiet, too, and sometimes on the phone I can barely hear him.

* * *

And yes, Funny Guy is quite house-trained (hey, we’re talking about a 65.5-year-old man here, not a college kid): he washes the dishes (and cleans the kitchen) unless I get to it first; he buys groceries; and he helps with the laundry, which we do in this building’s basement.

* * *

So yes, sceptics: this is working! We’ve been happy & relaxed together from the beginning. I had to date 57 men to find him (he was #55).

And oh yes, Funny Guy just got a job offer yesterday! — and accepted it. So we’re two employed New Yorkers, very very lucky to have one another and our jobs.

Well, Funny Guy is lucky to “have” a job: whether he likes it remains to be seen. It begins the day after Labor Day.

* * *

So, folks, as the temperature drops (finally) and the hours of daylight get noticeably shorter (yeah, it’s been happening since June, but only now has it begun to be noticeable), here we are together, blending into the Manhattan scene, doing our laundry together, grinding our coffee beans together, pouring clorox down the same drains to make them inhospitable to indigenous critters, breathing the same polluted air, and generally inhabiting the same material world.

* * *
UPDATE
This is my 300th post.

two little things

ONE
Friday night, Funny Guy dreamt that I was appointed Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.

And as (sleeping) he registered that news, he thought, “I don’t think Mimi’s going to like that very much…”

TWO
Funny Guy is not reading a book about Lincoln and has not read (and has no plans to read) Team of Rivals.

* * *

my wife

So in case you’ve wondered about the psychodynamics of my relationship with Funny Guy — wondered, that is, beyond what is revealed in our joint post or his comments & my responses — I can tell you the paradigm to think of:

Funny Guy is my wife.

He is
– decorative
– good-natured
– amusing
– well-educated
– sweet
– an excellent conversationalist, capable of discoursing eloquently & wittily on almost any subject
– unemployed
– entirely, dare I say aggressively, devoted to and supportive of my professional work, urging me on to accomplish more, critiquing and praising my efforts
– helpful around the house, doing dishes, tidying the kitchen, helping with the laundry, and picking up odd bits of food and household items at local stores.

And oh yes, he has great hair. I prefer it slightly longer, but he keeps getting it cut, especially in this tropical weather.

* * *

Perhaps I should correct the above:
Funny Guy is a 1950s wife.

* * *
Now, what that makes me, I’m not sure: I think perhaps I’m a 2009 wife.

* * *

Well (as they used to say in the 60s) Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

* * *

Funny Guy & Gigi

Meetings

I mentioned in a previous post that Funny Guy once slept through a meeting because he was napping on a mat with his two-year-old daughter at her day care center.

Well, maybe it would have been better if he had missed all of his meetings: for the amusement of a friend who attended the same meetings, a friend who sat across the conference table from him, Funny Guy used to make faces that indicated his opinion of what was being said in the meeting.

This friend, a woman, couldn’t bear it: she used to laugh so hard at the faces he made that, in Funny Guy’s own words, “She was under the table.” Most times she had to leave the room altogether.

Needless to say, she no longer works for that institution: she moved from New York to western Massachusetts where she freelances.

Ashes

For reasons too complicated to go into here, Funny Guy’s second ex-wife left her late ex-husband’s ashes in a box on their dining room table for quite a long time.

By Funny Guy’s own account, he used to come home from work and talk to the ashes: So Stanley, he’d say, how did your day go?

Gigi

In bed last night and this morning, I discovered that Funny Guy doesn’t like the songs from Gigi. He didn’t need to say anything (though he did): I could tell by looking at his face that he did not want me to continue singing “She is not thinking of me” or “The night they invented champagne.”

Well Funny Guy, I said to him on the uptown #1 this afternoon, I’ve never gotten angry at you, but if I ever do, now I know how to get even….So if you hear me burst into “Thank heaven for little girls,” you have to ask yourself, “What did I do to deserve this?”

three months & still in love….

On 10 May Funny Guy and I had our first date…and we’re still together.

It’s looking good.

We just had four good nights together: Thursday and Sunday nights I worked (at home, writing in my office) and Funny Guy read; Friday we had people for dinner (cousins, their little boy, and my mother); and Saturday we saw a brilliant, amazing, visionary film, You, the Living. It’s playing through Tuesday at Film Forum on Houston Street, so go see it if you can.

* * *

In short, we’re leading an ordinary life together.

* * *

Well, I don’t know if two eccentrics like us can be called “ordinary.” Funny Guy was a student radical in the 60s, a political organizer who was jailed and beaten by the police. He’s still provocative, but not threatening enough to interest the authorities. His FBI file is probably gathering dust.

Okay, for someone in that generation (he’s 65), having an FBI file may not qualify as eccentric. But he’s eccentric in other ways, some of them visible (the little blue feather in his Czech baseball-type hat, the Groucho-Marxist way he moves his eyebrows) and some of them not. Let’s put it this way: if his many friends knew he was called Funny Guy, they’d agree at once that it was the perfect name for him.

(This morning he told me something really quirky, and I said, I’m going to put that in the blog! and he thought it, whatever it was, belonged here. But now I can’t remember what it was. So I’ll just add something else about him: when Funny Guy’s daughter was about 2, she went to a day care center at the business where he worked. He used to visit at nap time, lie down on the mat with her, and go to sleep. Once he slept through a meeting….peacefully snoozing on the mat in a room of two-year-olds. That is so Funny Guy.)

* * *

And as for me — well, read the whole blog and decide for yourself how to characterize me.

Alas I don’t (to my knowledge) have an FBI file. I ought to be ashamed.

But then, maybe I do!?

I have no idea, but I doubt it.

* * *

At any rate, we’re devoted; we never argue; we seem to think the same way on most things, trivial and significant; we’re social beings and love meeting one another’s friends; and — in short — we’re ceasing to be of literary interest.

* * *

Actually I’m sort of superstitious about saying that, but I said it anyway.

* * *

Okay, of literary interest:

– Funny Guy does the dishes and cleans up very nicely.

– My mother is getting used to him and vice versa.

– Plan C (who appears to be at the beginning of what with luck may prove to be his final romance) is curious about Funny Guy, and Funny Guy seems to be developing an interest in Plan C. Funny Guy hasn’t forgotten anything I’ve told him about Plan C and sometimes says things like “Plan C would love that” or “I can see Plan doing that!”

Hmmmmm!

– Funny Guy has by now met so many of my cousins that he asked me to make a family tree so he can keep them straight.

– I now have a pretty clear sense of the chronology of Funny Guy’s love life (2 wives, 2 girlfriends, over the past 40+ years), so I can say things like, “Oh yes, that was in the Cynthia period, wasn’t it? 1995 through 2002?” and so forth.

– Every Monday when Funny Guy goes back to his apartment, he leaves something here (by accident), usually his cell phone, sometimes a few items of clothing. You know what Freud says about that (if you leave something somewhere, it means you want to return there).

* * *

Each us remembers with enormous love and emotion a doting grandmother who was the most important figure in our childhoods.

Thinking about those grandmothers last night, as I walked upstairs to get back to work after a chat-break with Funny Guy, I imagined our two grandmothers in heaven, talking to one another, both pleased that the grandchild had at last met someone to love and be loved by.

I moved myself to a few tears, at the same time reminding myself that I’m an atheist, a sceptic, and an ironist, and the notion of anyone with any kind of consciousness whatever after death is as preposterous to me as, say, the idea of a talking lemon merinque pie or a flying ink cartridge or an invisible garbage truck.

So I mention my little vision not to convey a newfound religious belief, god help us, but just to show the emotion with which I think of Funny Guy.

As a survivor, just barely, of Catholic elementary school, Funny Guy is every bit as atheistic and sceptical as I am. So I think he’d feel the same way about my little vision.

* * *

Oh yes, I forgot to say: another way we’re alike is that we’re both worriers, especially worried about safety. So I worry that now that I’ve met the perfect man, something will happen to him. And he worries about my safety. — But fortunately I’m busy and don’t have time to be consumed with anxiety. But if I weren’t, I would be.

* * *

So here we are, three months into something quite amazing.

A very nice anniversary that we aren’t celebrating in any particular way; just taking note of it.

* * *

Funny Guy is feeling sick to his stomach.

Thursday night

Poor Funny Guy: when he doesn’t eat with me, as he does about 4 or 5 nights a week, he buys cheap take-out food.

What made him sick?

Here’s the chronology:

1. Last night he got Chinese take-out that was (he said) awful.

2. On his way here tonight he bought a rice pudding that looked like vomit (perhaps all rice pudding does?) at a deli near me that I would never, ever eat anything from.

3. For dinner he had excellent tuna salad from a very nice source, on white bread toast (all his choice), and some plum tomatoes. For dessert he had strawberry sorbet.

4. A couple of hours after dinner he began to feel sick. I was upstairs working, and he didn’t bother me: he just stayed downstairs feeling lousy.

5. I went downstairs about 40 minutes ago to say hello, and he was in the bathroom. He came out and told me he felt nauseated and asked if I had any Pepto Bismol. I didn’t, so I ran out to Duane Reade and got him some. He also requested Ex Lax.

I think it has to have been the rice pudding; if it had been the Chinese food, it wouldn’t have taken 24 hours for him to feel sick.

He still looks handsome, but his face is a peculiar color. Poor Funny Guy. I’m going to go downstairs again and see how he is.

* * *
I just checked: he’s asleep on the sofa with a cover over him and the lights out. I hope he wakes up feeling better.

Funny Guy just eats & eats. When (early on) I asked him what he liked to eat, he said “anything.”

Obviously he needs to be more careful.

* * *

funny guy et moi today, 3 august 2009

1. 1 a.m.
Funny Guy and I discovered another “degrees of separation” connection, albeit somewhat remote. It takes a bit of doing to explain it.

F1 (female) and M1 (male) are NYC literary figures who used to be married to one another. I was reading a piece of M1’s online, and Funny Guy mentioned his connection, which led me to mention mine.

F1 and M1 got divorced, and F1 became the girlfriend of M2. I met F1 and M2 when they asked really good questions after a talk I gave in 1994.

M2, it turns out, was cheating on F1 with F2, and also had an off-and-on relationship with F3. He ended up marrying F2.

Funny Guy’s ex-girlfriend was a friend of F3 and heard all about the various affairs from her, as did, then, Funny Guy himself.

Not a matter of ’small world’ but of ‘complicatedly networked’ world.

2. 11:30 a.m.
When I came back from my doctor’s appointment and Funny Guy was leaving my apartment, we bumped into each other. Such a pleasure! We sat on a bench under a tree (it wasn’t hot yet) and talked.

I persuaded Funny Guy not to search any more for a small table for his apartment but to use my grandmother’s card-table. He had said, quite definitively, that he didn’t want a card-table, but when I reminded him that this one was wooden, not metal, a pre-World War II piece of furniture, he saw that it might just fit the bill. It’s sturdy — at least as I remember — and four people can eat on it.

3. 6:40 – 9:40 p.m.
I met Funny Guy at one of his favorite bar/restaurants. We were meeting friends of his whom he wanted to introduce me to. The male of the couple never joined us (he was in an afternoon meeting that stretched into the evening), but the female of the couple (am I making them sound like pigeons when I use this locution?) made it.

She and I instantly hit it off. Before we knew it, we were teasing Funny Guy about the conventional male fantasy of having sex with two women. He was actually getting embarrassed! But she had seen immediately, the moment she came through the glass door of the restaurant and her eye lit on him, how much happier Funny Guy was than he’d been the last time she saw him. I asked her how she could tell, and she said (she has known Funny Guy for about 13 years) that his state of mind, his general well-being, is instantly visible on his face. She had never seen him looking this happy and relaxed.

After talking with me a bit, she turned to Funny Guy and said, “You’ve met your match!” She meant that I was as ‘funny’ as Funny Guy himself….

Well, it’s fun to hit it off with someone so quickly. Although I’ve liked all of Funny Guy’s friends, this is the first time there have been such sparks.

4. 9:40 p.m.
So for the first time since, I think, our second date, Funny Guy and I said goodnight on the street. He had to go back to his apartment tonight, so each of us walked home alone in the soft and slightly-less-humid air of Monday evening.

***********
PS
A year ago yesterday, I broke up with Plan C.

If you’ve forgotten all the drama of “The Talk” with him, see
http://sexagenarian07.wordpress.com/2008/08/07/and-it-came-to-passpart-2/

“Bad Beth” & other anecdotes from my life with Funny Guy

BAD BETH
Funny Guy was trying to say the name of a chain store where he was looking for a small shelf, but he got the vowels mixed up:

FUNNY GUY: I went to Bad Beth and Beyond.
MIMI: That sounds like a dominatrix who’ll do anything you want.

THE GATES EPISODE
Funny Guy and I have different points of view on the Gates / Cambridge police episode, but we don’t fight about it. Because of his working-class background, Funny Guy often tends to be on the side of police when they clash with upper middle-class professional types. I hate bullying, so I’m rarely on the side of the police, who (I believe) often exploit their authority and bully people. Yes, Harvard professors are arrogant, but arrogance isn’t a crime. Funny Guy thinks it should be.

But together we developed a scenario for the Saturday Night Live version of this episode that should have aired last Saturday, if SNL hadn’t had stupid re-runs.

Our scenario:
Gates’s taxi-driver is a Sikh (this is our invention) who gets into the fray and accuses both Gates & Crowley of being anti-Sikh. The three men fight. Then Gates retreats inside across his threshhold and says to both men, “You can’t come any farther. This is my house.” At that point a member of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe, in full native dress, appears in the doorway and says, “You are all on my land. Leave it at once or my people will make you eat turkey.”

DEGREES OF SEPARATION
In previous posts I’m too lazy to do a link to, I talked about the fact that many of the men I dated — men I found on the internet, corresponded with, and then met — turned out to know people I knew. In the cases of the men I dated seriously for any period of time, connections always emerged. Even when they didn’t at once, I knew they would, sooner or later.

And that has been true with Funny Guy. I told him a while back that even though we didn’t yet know who the people were we knew in common, sooner or later we’d find out.

We’ve now found two, and oddly enough, they’re both men I’ve dated!

And still more oddly, both are lawyers.

One I had alluded to a few times but never said his name. When, about 10 days ago, I said his name, Funny Guy’s face changed expression and he repeated the name.

MIMI: Do you know him??

FUNNY GUY: Yes!

This is the man I’ve called “Mark,” whom I met first in April 07 (too lazy to link), and who joined me in fall 08 to watch the first Obama – McCain debate. We were always just “friends.” I sent him a message telling him this surprising news, and he wrote back a very nice message for Funny Guy.

And then last night we were looking at pictures in my old laptop, many of them the profile pix of men I dated. When I said the name of one, Funny Guy said, “I know him!” It turns out that an old girlfriend of his (from ‘88 or so) worked in this man’s office. This is the guy I called SDF for Swing-Dancer’s Father; I dated him in January 2008.

I guess it makes sense that a lot of professional males in their early 60s in the NY area would know one another…after all, it turns out that a woman Plan C dated also dated another man I dated (if you see what I mean).

It still strikes me as curious that so many of the people I met in a seemingly random way on Jdate or Match would be connected to me and to one another in such complex ways. There must be hundreds more such connections, an invisible and unknowable network, that I’ll never find out.

DOMESTIC PEACE
Funny Guy is very quiet: his voice is never raised and his footsteps are never audible, or not very. He has written in a memoir that women he has lived with often never know whether he’s home or not till they see him, because he’s such a quiet presence.

THE TOILET SCHEDULE
Remember how it used to be said that women who live together often tend to become in sync and to get their periods all at the same time?

Well, Funny Guy and I are on the same toilet schedule.

Don’t ask.

Fortunately, my apartment has two bathrooms.

OUT THE DOOR
I’ve tended to watch out the window as men I’m dating leave my apartment.

Performer went straight out under the awning, limping to the curb to hail a cab.

Plan C went to the right, in dignified, businessman-like strides, pulling his little suitcase after him, to get the subway.

Funny Guy goes to the left, a feather in his cap and his messenger bag over his shoulder, walking to a different subway in his bouncy youthful gait, a smile on his face.

* * *

excerpts from an email correspondence early in the morning Friday 24 July 2009

FUNNY GUY
You are the joy in my day and hopefully in the days to come. I want to share the Good and bad days. I want to be with you. I want be in this world with you. I don’t think I can say it any more clearly.

MIMI
You make me begin the day all red-eyed & teary. I’m very moved. I love you dear Funny Guy.

Now isn’t it irritating how much we owe to match dot com?

Don’t even think about it.

FUNNY GUY
We owe it to each other. Match got their money and someone is really rich.