Unnecessarily Performative Acts of Love

My first intense crush, and the first of many men who took only platonic notice of me, was Jason Hagerty. He emulated Christian Slater who emulated Jack Nicholson who I’d been infatuated with since seeing the diner scene of Five Easy Pieces as a pre-teen. Jason’s whole look was topped off by a fedora. I can’t stand the look of a fedora on a modern man’s head, but do appreciate a fedora hung jauntily from a hat rack. An implicit bias test isn’t necessary for me to recognize my ridiculous but hardened hat prejudice. 

Jason would fill up our living room chair with an excess of baby-fat and brooding, as I’d sit at his feet soaking him in to every black-head pore of my teen being. My memory isn’t long enough to remember if we did anything beyond kiss but I’m quite sure we “messed around” as I was notorious for “messing around” starting at the age of 14. 

As I crushed on him, he crushed on another, and expressed his adoration for the other girl by emblazoning her name on his chest. His method of choice was a sunburn process where he wrote her name in SPF-laden lotion, or maybe with masking tape, on his not-yet-hairy chest and laid out to burn. The time it took to scorch his skin was my first understanding of performative commitment; I was hooked. 

If Jason had scratched her name on his chest with a ragged fingernail in an act of hardcore hypergraphia, I would’ve surely pined for him longer - dreaming of the day he’d cut my name into his flesh. Looking back tho, my 7-letter name - T-r-i-l-e-t-y - would’ve been much more time consuming than K-i-m, so his love for her was obviously lazy. 

For years I conveyed my romantic feelings with a hint of performance art, and I was reminded of this while cleaning out a closet over the New Year’s weekend. I found a forgotten box in the top of the closet labeled “Juan.” Bits of us stuffed in his boot box - from cards and letters to pomegranate husks and shore stones - all evidence of our bond. It’s intriguing how many mementos could easily be mistaken as trash to an obtuse eye, yet they hold the tales and memories of relations. And in this box is where I came across a forgotten hand-stitched silk pouch full of my bunny-fluff pubic hair. 

Years ago, Doug and Juan and I were all at the same party, and up until that night I’d only met Juan a handful of times where he tended bar. And as the air cooled on that Memorial Day weekend, we all made our way back inside, picking at crusted over snacks and telling stories of past romantic embarrassments. 

I jumped in with a giddy admission, “I sent a man my pubic hair once.”

“Oh my god!” Doug yelped, both unsurprised and aghast, “you WOULD do something like that!” With the face of Ben Folds and the voice of Morty Smith, his thought was punctuated by a vocal crack, “No one admits that -  even if they’ve done it - at a party!”

I shook off Doug’s flusteredness and continued, “. . . and when he received it he texted me ‘don’t ever do that again, to me or anyone you know’.” 

“Damn!” was the overall gasp of the room. The moment was still warmed tho with laughter, not about my pubic-hair sharing act, but about my sharing-at-a-party act.

And that’s when I looked to my left and saw Juan at the end of the table - ever quiet of mouth and power of presence - his eyes widened, not in astonishment but in curiosity and kindness. I can barely remember what his voice sounds like now, but that night I know it was sincere when he said, “But that’s an amazing gift. I would be honored to receive a gift like that.” 

Hours later, as Doug and I walked to the car, he chuckled until his curls made shaky shadows under the after-midnight streetlights and he said to himself more than to me, “I still can’t believe you told that story in front of Juan, and I can’t believe he thought it was cool!” 

And so I had forgotten, until seeing that pouch, that I’d given Juan my pubic hair months after that exchange, and then he left it for me in his safe after his suicide.

I’ve consigned gestures like that to the past. Or maybe now I just know better how to love people the way they want to be loved, and finally understand that not everyone needs a bag of my body detritus to know that I care. . . tho Juan was the rare appreciative recipient.