Crazy as a Blue Lagoon Loon
Current mood: nauseated
Category: Romance and Relationships


I remember one childhood day when my mother pulled me aside and warned me that it was extremely important that I try to get along with other children. Since I was an only & adopted child, I was made to believe that the entire universe revolved around me. Teachers described me as a flamboyant, sensitive kid. But soon, I matured into an antisocial sissy that spent the majority of the tween years isolating in a walk-in closet with my Hollywood fanzines and dolls.

Thus, my formative years were grounded in a negative perception of self image and a depressive loathing that laid the path for years to come. In 1980 my divorced father and his child-bride belted me into the back of their station wagon and took me to the drive-in showing of Herbie Goes Bananas. I had no interest in the trite telling of a VW bug's life. Bored and bitter, I peered through the rear view window to discover an angel of an image. When I saw Christopher Atkins frolicking on the beach of the Blue Lagoon, I felt a dreamy warm chill flash through my gut. Doing a 180, I read his gorgeous, full lips word for word through the back window, since I could not hear the spoken dialogue.

"Turn around and watch our movie," my father scolded.

Forbidden and banished from my evening in the twilight of the Blue Lagoon, I wept in angry tears.


"That goddamn film is not for a 7 year old," said the brutish father.

I went home that night and dreamed of a blond, Aryan god. Hollywood's image was forever in my head. The bleached, athletic prowess of a California beach boy stayed in my subconscious and served as the ultimate prototype of perfection.

As I shed the poundage of a suicidal childhood, puberty led to adulthood and a modicum of self-acceptance. No matter what I looked like in the mirror, an uncomely nerd stared back. This dreadful image followed me through high school, into college and a young adulthood spent in a microcosm of looksism aka Hollywood.

Slim and suddenly able to compete in a model's market, I maintained the destructive behavioral pattern fueled by an inaccurate self perception. Christopher Atkins moved on to yesterday's news but his masculine ideal remained the golden-haired standard.
I became bewitched by the American Model Guild beefcake icon imagery but his tantalizing unattainable bulge haunted me.

Upon a recent evening set in my current habitat of ennui, I met my childhood wet dream incarnate. A friend showed up at my door and introduced me to Bjorn. I dried the dish soap on my ragged jeans and considered it a welcome substitute for the laundry I was too broke to do. Luckily, the faded frumpy cornflower blue sweatshirt I wore was baggy enough to hide evidence of my neglected abdominals. Sticking my hand out to welcome the hazy figure I saw in the foyer, I licked my lips twice when my eyes focused. Bjorn stood before me and I blushed like Blanche Dubois. "Why didn't you tell me he was so fine?" said Bjorn to my friend.

Since I had been wearing the same drab dress for over a depressive week, I cursed myself and hurried to the loo to implement damage control. I remembered reading that Bette Davis was dubbed the "little brown wren" upon her Hollywood arrival and I flashed to that image. Piper Laurie's cacophonous curse lectured in my ears. "They're all gonna laugh at you," she ragged. "He's never going to f**k you, " rang the mantra. Over and over, the sirens taunted me. The blond Venus in my living room must have mistaken me for someone else.


When I finally rejoined my company I flashed on Shirley Maclaine doing a fast-switch with her hairpiece in the ladies room before she lunched with Jack Nicholson in Terms of Endearment. If she could dance the entire Nutcracker ballet suite with a broken ankle (Washington Ballet circa 1950s), then I could fake my through social niceties with my childhood lover fantasy.


Bjorn took his shirt off and I channeled Paris Hilton with

"Wow, you're HOT".


"Puleeze," said my amused friend, rolling his eyes.

I accepted Bjorn's complimentary stares much less gracefully than Shirley did in her dance of the lost cupcake.


My friend busied himself perusing the craigslist m4m postings and I sat beholden by Bjorn. He layered the saccharine on tri-fold and lambasted me with butterfly kisses.

"I dreamed of you last week." he said. As we had just barely met, I questioned the validity of this statement.

"Here, read my journal," he offered as he pulled out a tattered, steno pad labeled "treatment journal". The handwriting was psycho Palmer method but I was able to eke out a semblance of translation. Something to the effect of song lyrics or a dream sequence was on the page but I could not be sure. I interviewed him with the journalistic training I acquired at USC and practiced active listening.

Bjorn seemed a bit off balance; a quality I could relate to as evidenced by the number 5150 tattooed on my arm. The cuckoo's scarlet letter scored me some points with an impressed Bjorn. He lapsed into a deep, throaty rendition of a Kurt Cobain tune. I brought up the parallel between the wispy Nirvana singer's suicide and Bjorn's most recent attempt to overdose.

I probed him for sketches of a biographical narrative. He made references to a broken home, a neglectful mother and tyrant father. I pictured the young, blond, curly-haired innocent Dickensian character. The tragedy of the marble faun.

He told me I looked like a rock star.

Then he leaned really close to my ear and confessed he only watched straight porn. He said it as if gay porn was totally inappropriate to watch during gay sex.

By the end of the interview, I was to learn Bjorn was born 14 days after my September birth date in 1973 and was the absent father of two children. A daughter named Destiny and



... 'wait,- stop, go back...

I could not believe the parallels. I was 2 weeks older than him. Amazing! And his daughter's name is the same as my niece just as his name is the same as my sister's ex-husband, himself a parolee, just like Bjorn. Of course, my sister's ex served time for attempted man-slaughter while Bjorn's only crime was stealing my heart.


I stared into his eyes and imagined being swallowed by...



the California sea-scape.



By this time, I was living an out-of-body experience or did I only want to because he said he did? No stranger to attempted suicide, he parroted other accounts I have heard about near-death. Tales of ominous light coupled with a feeling of peace that led to the spirit levitating above the body ad infinitum.


Suicide, pills, teen-age delinquency, sex, psych-meds, porno and blond! I was beside myself; - in complete disbelief. I pictured a paperback novel with Fabio on the dog-eared cover. The hallowed story of this lusty squire.

Suddenly he was overcome with passion. We were two babes in the woods with a determined dynamism. My sexual half-life up to the present had been primarily dominated by the hurried hushes and carnal urgings uttered by straight-as-identified men. I was totally disconnected from the 'wow' factor for years. Having humored the homophobic hostility of MSM for so long, I could barely remember the sparkle kiss of contentedness shared with another man.


Bjorn's tranquil caress brought me to Xanadu. I flashed on Olivia Newton-John and a memory of Let's Get Physical reverberated through my physique. The nirvana-like euphoria I experienced made me question the association Bjorn made between himself and the wispy shadow of an icon, aka Kurt Cobain.



(aside)--- I enjoyed myself sexually but how could I not? He's completely unreal and I'm still not so sure that he is not one hundred percent cuckoo-loo. That explains why he claimed attraction for me. He has to be nuts. Or ulterior motives are in play. I'm out of the running. I can barely stomach myself. How can he?

I wanted to bask in the promising pillow talk and dream of my future ex-husband. I tried to picture myself as the second half of two dads to his children. But then he lapsed into baby-talk and for a while looked and sounded like an eight year-old. He sat on the floor and surrounded himself with a Mr. Wizard-like set of drug paraphernalia. He seemed to be playing paddy-cake with a witch doctor's unction. I knew Bjorn had a drug-induced past, another trait he shared with me. The unguent combination he prepared in the spoon looked unlike any injectable substance I had ever seen. "It's synthetic cocaine," he offered. "Want a hit?"


Good Lord. Being an advocate for junkie's rights had never exposed me to this sideshow. I soon learned that Bjorn's synthetic coke was actually a crushed-up and watered down smattering of Welbutrin mixed with another undetermined psych med, "dipped in Ecstasy" that was actually heated by flame and drawn up in clumps through a used syringe.


Another parallel screamed in my brain as I "suddenly, last summer" flashed on the imagined vision of my overly medicated birth mother morphing into drug addict vis-a-vis Liz Taylor's lobotomized fate akin to the Three Faces of Eve.

Did Bjorn's dissociation match the disorder my biological birth mother effected in Agnew Insane Asylum? I knew better than to look this "hung like a (gift)-horse" in the mouth and my optimistic dreams of coupledom gave way to self chastisement.

The familiar lashings of self-doubt and hatred caustically attacked me from the eaves of my id.


Bjorn was gone. Totally gone. As he left upon Aurora's awakening, (dawn) he blew me (and then a kiss) ? vowing to return for the dawn of our relationship. I have not seen him since.


I bid farewell to him and adieu to the hateful imps wreaking havoc on my self image. I realized I could never imagine that I would somehow be worthy of the attention he lavished on me. And by the rate things are going, I'm not sure I ever will. God save me from myself.