Author Archives: Joel Derfner

My dog is in the hospital. Her vet thinks she has pancreatitis. I was going to write a post about how I bet the other dogs are all jealous of the blue cast she has on her right foreleg (to keep her from pulling out the IV) but I simply can’t. The vet says maybe I’ll be able to take her home tomorrow but I don’t see how when she hasn’t eaten anything since Tuesday. Today, when I visited her, she licked a little bit of tuna and turned her head away.

About a month ago, I bit the inside of my lip.

This would not be a newsworthy event except that it kept swelling up and then going down, over and over and over again. When it would get almost all the way down, I would bite it again–by accident–and it would swell up again, even bigger this time.

The end result of this was that, by the end of last week, when I had delicious tea with him, I had a repulsive protuberance on my lip so distracting that, when I explained what had happened in the form of an amusing story, he blurted out, “Oh, thank God, because I’ve been staring at it not knowing what to say.”

My harelip was so grotesque, in fact, that it gave me a speech impediment. Ordinarily I have, like many gay Americans, a very slight lateral lisp. With the pustulant boil on my lower lip, though, the lisp was far more pronounced than usual; I also couldn’t say the letters F or V without a lot of extraneous hissing.

This made for a great class on Thursday, let me tell you, when we were discussing Falsettos.

In any case, I saw E.S. Friday night for the first time in a few days and he was horrified at what could only be an alien egg sac implanted in my lip. He attempted valiantly to ignore my deformity but the last straw came when I couldn’t kiss him in anything resembling an effective manner.

So he lanced it.

I will not provide details, as there are some things simply too gross to bear repeating. But I will say that he started with a paring knife (sterilized, of course, with rubbing alcohol–remember that he is a doctor); when that proved ineffective, he went on to a fondue fork. In the end it was a finishing needle that did the trick. The whole thing was especially unnerving given that we’d had a fight that morning in which I’d crankily blamed him for making me late to a meeting.

It’s entirely possible that there are more uncomfortable positions than sitting still while a man who may not have forgiven you for calling him a bastard pokes your mouth repeatedly with a sharp knife.

But I haven’t been in them.

Not that I needed it, but I now have confirmation from the Snack Food Zodiac.

I am a Twinkie.

(Thanks to him for the link.)

At the end of last summer, I emailed my editor for the haiku book with a bunch of questions. At the end of the email, I wrote, “By the way, do you guys need a photo for the book jacket or anything?” He replied to all my questions and then said “Yes, we need a photo, by September 22.” This was five weeks away.

And I was like, I wrote a book called Gay Haiku. Do you think I don’t need THREE MONTHS to get ready for a photo?

At the time I weighed 143 pounds–severely up from my usual and preferred weight of somewhere between 130 and 135. I went into overdrive, spending all my free time at the gym and sacrificing anything I could get my hands on to the gods, so that they’d let me lose ten pounds in five weeks.

The gods were, in the end, deaf to my pleas.

This may have had something to do with the fact that, during this period, every time I saw chocolate I shoveled it into my mouth as if it were antivenin and I had just been bitten by a rhino viper.

In the end I went to my photo shoot weighing something like 141 pounds. (I say “something like” not because hadn’t gotten on the scale in the morning and found out how much I weighed to within two tenths of a pound–of course I had–but because on the way there I was so miserable about being so enormous that I stopped at City Bakery and inhaled as many melted chocolated chip cookies as I could get my fat little hands on.)

Fast forward, if you will, to now. I am below 140 for the first time in a year, and fairly lean and muscly for the first time in two years, a state I attribute to having gone on The Abs Diet. I looked in the mirror yesterday morning and the person I saw staring back at me was so hot I wanted him to fuck me. Of course he was a bottom so there wouldn’t really have been any point, but still. I looked damn good.

So I’m thinking maybe I should have new photos taken. It would cause a disastrous delay in publication but at least my picture on the ruined book would look fabulous.

It’s important to have one’s priorities in the right place.

For Valentine’s Day, I baked E.S. an apple pie. He said it was the best apple pie he’d ever had, including all the apple pies I’d baked him before. He said it was perfect. I was quite pleased with this praise, as he is never so effusive unless he really means it.

Two days ago, as we were bringing the now empty pie plate back to my apartment, we had the following conversation:

FAUSTUS: I need to find some smaller pie plates. The pie crust recipe I use doesn’t generate enough dough to fill these comfortably.
E.S.: Yeah, you’re right. The crust on that pie was a little bit thin.
(Pause.)
FAUSTUS: I thought you said it was the best apple pie you’d ever had.
E.S.: It was.
FAUSTUS: So when you said it was perfect you were lying.
E.S.: No, I wasn’t! It was perfect!
FAUSTUS: Except for the tissue-thin crust, which you hated.
E.S.: Look, there’s going to be a flaw in any pie.
FAUSTUS: Oh, so I’m incapable of making an apple pie that’s even edible.
E.S.: It was perfect. But I think of perfection in human terms.
FAUSTUS: Why on earth would you do such a ridiculous thing?
E.S.: Are you going to be like this forever?
FAUSTUS: Yes.

It’s time here at the Search for Love in Manhattan for another installment of Words I’ve Had Trouble Remembering This Week. (Go here for the most recent installment.)

1. apotheosis
2. compatible
3. bacchanalian

Luckily, “algorithm,” a popular entry in previous installments, has come to me quite easily. So perhaps not all hope is lost.

Just most of it.

Back when I was doing this job, I developed friendships with a number of my coworkers, including Y.T. Y.T. was a cheerful woman from some place in the midwest whose open face and sprightly demeanor allowed her to make viciously cruel jokes about our bosses to their faces without their realizing it. Almost all of our bosses deserved to have viciously cruel jokes about them to their faces, and she spared the ones who didn’t, so that was all right.

One day, as we were talking about our respective childhoods, she said that her house had been filled with flowers while she had been growing up.

“But I thought you said you grew up dirt poor,” I said, confused. “How could you afford to buy flowers all the time?”

“Oh, we didn’t,” she replied. “My mother would take me to local cemeteries where funerals were happening, and we’d hide behind nearby gravestones until they were over. When the mourners had all gone, we’d come out from behind the gravestones and steal the flowers and take them home.” She paused. “Not all of them. Just the ones we thought were pretty.”

I thought it was cool when my mother let me skip school and took me to see The Empire Strikes Back, but this woman was in another league entirely.

This man is, God help him, opening a store in which he will sell products that don’t destroy the earth.

Do me a favor and help him out by taking his very short survey, would you?

Unless of course you want the earth to be destroyed, in which case he’d probably rather you didn’t take the survey, as it would skew the results.

One of the part-time jobs I most enjoy is co-teaching a musical theater writing class at NYU. Every semester, we take another group of undergrads through the basic principles of constructing musicals and watch them blossom and grow. Every semester there are wonderful surprises as they bring in songs that delight and amaze with their freshness of voice and maturity of perspective.

We also occasionally give them listening or viewing assignments so that they can pillage techniques used by the masters of the form. This semester we told them, as we often do, to watch The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Jacques Demy’s 1964 French movie musical featuring one of the greatest love songs of all time, “Je Ne Pourrai Jamais Vivre Sans Toi” (known in English as “I Will Wait For You”), and, even more importantly, starring your favorite gay icon and mine, Catherine Deneuve, in the role that first shot her to stardom. Since then, she has appeared in over 100 movies, apparently growing more beautiful by the hour, and even inspired a lesbian magazine (which has since, alas, had to change its name).

So last night in class, as we were discussing the movie and what it had to offer us as writers, one of our homosexual students, making the point that each character seemed to have his or her own music, said, “like, there was the blonde girl’s ‘I’m sad’ song.”

I like this student a great deal, but the blonde girl’s ‘I’m sad’ song?

I’m going to kill myself.

O brave new world, that has such people in’t!

When my ex N.T. and I moved in together, we bought several appliances with which to furnish our new home, including but not limited to a portable dishwasher. This seemed the height of luxury to us, as we lived in a huge but ramshackle apartment in the middle of nowhere in Washington Heights. For those of you who have never operated a portable dishwasher before, this is how it works: there’s a hose running out of the dishwasher that you attach to the faucet of the sink in your kitchen/bathroom; you turn on the faucet at the same time as the dishwasher, which somehow possesses the native intelligence to tell the faucet when to shut off. N.T. also bought a hideous dish-drying rack, which I kept hiding in progressively more obscure cabinets and which he kept finding and returning to a place of honor on the kitchen counter. I figured that if we had a dishwasher, however second-class, a drying rack was redundant.

When N.T. moved out, he left the dishwasher but took the drying rack with him; honestly, it was almost worth losing the one to get rid of the other. One evening I went to do the dishes unredundantly–it may have been after this dinner–and realized that I didn’t have any dishwashing powder. “Well,” I thought, “I can either go out to the grocery store and get more, which would take time and energy and money, or I can improvise.” So I filled the dishwasher with hand soap, turned it on, and went to watch TV.

When I returned to the kitchen an hour later, imagine my surprise when I found the floor covered in what seemed like three feet of foam but was actually two feet of foam and a foot of water. “Well,” I thought, “I can either clean this up or just leave it where it is and deal with it in the morning.” So I went to bed.

When I woke up the next morning and went into the kitchen, the floor was both completely dry and cleaner than it had been since the day I’d moved in two years earlier.

What I learned from this experience is that if I ignore my problems, they will go away.