Author Archives: Joel Derfner

Last Saturday morning, E.S. cleaned my room while I made us egg nog pancakes for breakfast.

Yesterday, he cleaned my living room while I made blueberry bread.

There are three or four more rooms in my apartment (depending on what you count as a room), so clearly I have to keep him around for at least another month.

At which point I’ll be so fat from all the baked goods that I’ll be unable to find another boyfriend and I’ll have to keep him anyway.

Oh, shit. I just called him my boyfriend.

And it’s too late to take it back.

Let’s hope that when I call him that to his face, he doesn’t react the way I did when he did the same thing.

All the early signs of incipient homosexuality people offered in the comments to the last post–and, incidentally, all the early signs of incipient homosexuality I might offer–are as nothing compared to those exhibited by my friend K.N.

I offer two stories.

1. In kindergarten one day, K.N. stood up all of a sudden and burst into screaming, bawling tears because he realized that his underwear didn’t match his socks. Ordinarily, if he was wearing green underwear, he made sure to put on green socks; red with red; and so on. But he’d gotten distracted that morning and accidentally put on socks of a different color from his underwear.

All efforts to assure him this was not actually a problem were vain; he didn’t stop crying until his teacher called his mother to come and get him. She took him home, waited while he changed, and drove him back to school.

2. In junior high, K.N. was in class with a boy he thought was a bad dresser. K.N. would buy boxes of No. 2 pencils, sharpen them to razor-sharp points, lie in wait for this kid on his way home, jump out from behind the bushes, and stab the kid in the back with a pencil as hard as he could.

Then he would hiss things like, “Next time, tuck your shirt in.”

I am a very good homosexual.

But I bow in the presence of true genius.

Like a fool, I waited until the last minute to get my tickets to Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, and so I ended up having to see it at a theater on the east side. (For those of you who don’t know Manhattan, crossing from the west side to the east side or vice versa, while not physically too difficult, is the psychological equivalent of swimming the English Channel naked and bleeding when it’s full of sharks.)

In any event, as I sat knitting on the crosstown bus, a boy of six or seven across the aisle spoke to me. He asked, “What are you knitting?”

Now, I do not ordinarily like to be spoken to when I’m knitting on public transportation (though being spoken about is a different matter entirely–there’s no joy quite like that of hearing people whisper, “What’s he knitting, it’s so complicated, I used to be able to crochet but I would never have the patience to do something like that”) and I also hate children. One would think these two facts in combination should have inspired me to a stony silence, but somehow I didn’t mind.

“A glove,” I answered condescendingly, glad to be able to broaden the child’s horizons.

“I just finished a scarf,” he said, “in fisherman’s rib. Now I’m working on a hat in a cable stitch.”

As soon as I recovered my equilibrium, I responded. What I said was, “That sounds terrific. Good luck.”

What I wanted to say was, “Does your mother know how gay you are?”

N.B.: This post was made simultaneously here and at Upside-down Hippopotamus. We are everywhere.

For Thanksgiving, my dog A. and I went to the middle of nowhere in western Maryland with this man, his dog Goblin, his boyfriend Rob, and his boyfriend's sister Rindy. Rob and Rindy did virtually all the cooking, with two exceptions, and were also obsessive-compulsive enough to do all the cleaning up before David and I could get to it. On Thanksgiving Day, however, they exacted a price. "We'll cook Thanksgiving dinner," they said, "but you two and the dogs have to put on a Thanksgiving play."

We presented the play in the form of a puppet show, in which the dogs were the puppets and we manipulated them as we crouched behind the couch that was our stage (after covering it with green blankets to represent the fertile bounty of an unsullied new land); we spoke the dogs' lines in eerie, Talky-Tina-from-the-Twilight-Zone-like falsettos. A. and Goblin made their stage débuts to great acclaim, and David's and my performance as puppeteers was such as to make me think we have bright futures ahead of us as high-ranking members of the Republican cabinet.

Here are two photographs of the stars, in different attitudes.

The girls look off artistically into the middle distance.

The girls express their true feelings for each other.

And so here, without further ado, is a reconstruction of the script we developed. (Unfortunately, we didn't write it down, but we agree that this is fairly close, with one notable exception.)

A Thanksgiving Play in Three Scenes
starring A. and Goblin

Scene 1

A.: Hello. Iím an indigenous person.

GOBLIN: And Iím a pilgrim.

A.: Letís have Thanksgiving.

GOBLIN: Okay.

A.: Great. Hereís some maize.

GOBLIN: Thanks. Hereís some firewater and some smallpox-infested blankets*.

A.: Thanks.

(SHE begins to die, loudly.)

Argh! Iím dying from the smallpox-infested blankets! Argh!

(SHE dies.)

Scene 2

A.: Hello. Iím an indigenous person.

GOBLIN: And Iím a fat, greedy, rich American capitalist.

A.: You killed my people with your smallpox-infested blankets and then took all our land and then forced us all to run casinos. We want our land back!

GOBLIN: No. And now Iím going to win lots of money in your casino.

A.: Argh!

Scene 3

A.: Hello. Iím an indigenous person.

GOBLIN: And Iím still a fat, greedy, rich American capitalist.

A.: With all the money I made from the casinos you forced me to run, Iíve become a billionaire and taken over the world and also developed superpowers!

GOBLIN: No!

A.: Now Iím going to kill you!

GOBLIN: Argh!

(SHE dies.)

A.: I win!

GOBLIN: And Iím a ghost.

THE END

With material like this, how can I fail to become a star?

*David insists that this line was actually "I bring you firewater and smallpox-infested blankets," but I believe my own version.

It’s extraordinary how hemmed in I feel.

When I started this blog, nobody read it. Then a few people started to read it. Then lots of people started to read it.

Then people I knew started to read it.

I want to write about E.S., but I keep censoring myself because, since he knows about the blog, he might read it–not that I’m hiding anything from him this time around, but still. And he’s actually informed me that he’s purposefully not reading it, but still.

I want to write about cheerleading, but I keep censoring myself because a handful of cheerleaders on the squad who’ve stumbled across the blog, including the coach, might read it—not that I’d be writing anything more extreme than what I’ve already written, which seems not to have bothered anybody, but still.

This medium used to be so safe. And it doesn’t feel that way anymore. So for the last few weeks I’ve taken refuge in very brief posts and in stories from my childhood. I’ve drafted a few posts about things closer to my heart—or whatever performs the function of that organ in my body—but haven’t yet found a way to make them work to my satisfaction. And as a result I feel both less funny and less interesting than I used to be.

I’m a long way from giving up this enterprise, I think. But still. It’s a treacherous ocean I seem to have entered.

And I’m terrified that I’ll lose you if I don’t learn to navigate it.

When I was about six, I asked my mother why tube socks were called tube socks. She said, “Because it doesn’t matter which way you put them on.”

Ignoring the fact that this wasn’t properly an answer to my question, I inferred correctly that, if it didn’t matter which way you put tube socks on, then it did matter which way you put other socks on. I further inferred that, with non-tube socks, there was a right sock and a left sock.

And I couldn’t tell the difference.

I figured that, according to the laws of statistics, I was wearing the correct sock on the correct foot about half the time—clearly an unacceptable state of affairs, but I was far too ashamed of my ignorance to ask for help.

I finally overcame the stigma, however, and asked a particularly well-dressed teacher how to tell the right sock from the left sock. She patiently explained to me the way socks actually work (she wore stockings all the time, so don’t ask me why I thought she’d know about socks, but in the event she did) and put my fears to rest. I was free from that day on.

I would find the whole thing less embarrassing if this epiphanic conversation hadn’t happened ten years later, when I was sixteen.

Yesterday, after a harrowing and largely unsuccessful shopping trip, E.S. and I decided to lift our own spirits by baking chocolate chip cookies.

Now, I have a recipe that consistently turns out perfect chocolate chip cookies. Without fail, people to whom I serve these cookies are amazed and delighted at how wonderful they are.

So of course I decided to use a different one, just for fun.

I looked through my recipes for a while and eventually found one that looked kind of elegant in its simplicity; what made it more interesting was that it was written in my own handwriting on the flyleaf of the first cookbook I ever bought, but I had no memory of writing it there.

So we went ahead and made the cookies according to the recipe. They turned out fine—nothing like my perfect cookies, of course, but certainly acceptable. In fact, they tasted vaguely familiar. I clearly hadn’t used this recipe for years, if ever, but somebody had.

In fact, a great many people had, as the recipe proved, to my horror, to be the Nestlé Toll House chocolate chip cookie recipe.

At least it’s good to know that my tastes have become somewhat more refined over the years.

Everyone must go here at once. It’s work safe, except for the fits of hysteria into which it’s likely to send you.

One of the drawbacks of being from South Carolina is that I am related to people with names like Bubba. Bubba, my mother’s half-brother, was kicked out of the Citadel, South Carolina’s military college, which should tell you all you need to know.

When I was a small child, my parents occasionally left me in the care of Bubba and my other uncle, Billy. (Billy was Bubba’s half-brother but not my mother’s brother—my grandmother was married nine times before she died, which is a tale for another day.) I loved it when Bubba and Billy babysat, because it meant that we ate no actual food, subsisting on a diet of ice cream and marshmallow fluff. This was apparently not enough of an incentive for Bubba and Billy, though; eventually they decided they’d had enough of having me foisted upon them, and hatched a plot.

The next time my parents came home from a weekend away, having left me in my uncles’ tender care—I believe I was three or four—Billy and Bubba suggested that we all go out for lunch. On the way there, Billy and Bubba said, “Hey, Faustus, why don’t you sing your mom and dad the song we taught you?”

I burst spontaneously into a beautifully executed rendition of “Dixie” and my civil rights worker parents just about had a stroke.

Then we got to the restaurant, and when it came time to give my drink order, I asked for beer (which is what Bubba and Billy had told me Mountain Dew was really called).

But the coup de grâce came in the form of the following conversation, for which I’d learned my lines as instructed:

Bubba: “Hey, Faustus, what do you like?”

Faustus: “‘Cause they don’t tell.”

Billy and Bubba never had to babysit for me again.

In fact, I believe it was several years before they were allowed within thirty feet of me.

There’s nothing like bouncing a check to your brother to make you feel like your life is spinning out of anything remotely resembling your control.