Dear John

I would love to write a long, thoughtful narrative about John Fournier and how he became one of my closest friends, but I can't. Because John Fournier reads this shit. And he will make relentless fun of me for romanticizing our story. Because he's exactly like me – an asshole.

So instead, I'll write about the early milestones in our friendship and chalk it up as a deposition for why I needed to instill all of my bad habits and great ambitions into another human. So here I go.

In the beginning, I was just a graduate student who was starting his first and only semester of work on a Master of Science degree. But on my first day of student-teaching, I walked into my Communication 330 class and saw him sitting in the front row. And when he looked up at me, I knew that I was in trouble.

John was my student for that entire semester before our relationship drifted into bedroom territory. To be fair, though, we were never fully naked together because he refused to take off his socks when it went down – an act that secretly earned him points for originality. I can speak for him now and confidently say that neither one of us ever enjoyed it. It felt forced and hasty, and eventually just became an after effect of buddy binge drinking. But the sex was minimal and seemed like a simple vehicle for us to hang out more. And eventually, it went away, and became something for us to hold against one another when we were hard-up for ammo.

Over time, we discovered that we had almost everything in common, and I declared to my coven of gays that I would "take John Fournier under my wing." I saw a lot of potential in him to be a remarkable copywriter and I wanted him to do great things and follow my lead. Instead, John picked up all of my bad habits and became my soundboard for perpetuating dumb choices. He learned to drink vodka on the rocks and I learned to always keep an extra trick on standby.

John introduced me to a stocky, blonde SAE pledge on the back porch of The Keg one night in early September. He'd recently hooked up with this gorgeous, steamy pile of fratboy, and this was his way of showing off. But at that point in our relationship, John still had a lot to learn about me. Because I slipped the guy my number when John went to piss. And I banged him seven days later.

When John confronted me about it, I fessed up and he left me on my bar stool, shithoused and frustrated. So I did the rational thing: scribbled a note on a bar napkin, forced it into John's hand, and walked away. The note said,

"I'm sorry if I made you think that I was anything but interested in you. The last thing I want you to think is that I don't seriously like talking to you. Have a good night. Be safe. Xoxo. –Ryan"

To this day, he still teases me about the napkin – and rightly so. When I look back on it, it was my desperate attempt to cover my breech of The Bro Code with a Freddie Prinze, Jr. move. But thankfully, he Rachael Leigh Cooked, and stuck around.

He is no longer my project, but my best friend. And if I could choose anyone to mine the dark side with, it would be John Fournier. Because he was able to do something for me that I could never do for him.

He knocked my socks off.

Fate Has Brought You Here

The guy that I spent last Valentine's Day with isn't alive any more.

We'd stopped seeing one another nearly five months before his passing, but the week before I got the phone call about his death, he texted me. He said that he'd recently moved back to Lafayette from Lake Charles and that he wanted to see me. I told him "sure," but never made plans. And then, eight days later, my former roommate rang my office to deliver the news.

We were causally dating when Valentine's Day rolled around last year, so we decided to spend the late evening together. He was working nights at a Mexican restaurant by the mall, so I waited around for him to get off while chain smoking and shotgunning 40s of High Life with my roommates. By the time I pulled up to the front door of Tampico's, he was already waiting outside and I was considerably hammered. Because he was used to most restaurants being closed when his shifts ended, he knew the ones that were still open at this hour. We settled on a nearby diner and we were eating biscuits and gravy within minutes. He and I didn't particularly have a whole lot in common outside of sex and a collection of David Sedaris books, but we both had an insatiable need to make the other one laugh. So we spent our meal doing what we did best: cracking up at the dumb things we said.

After dinner, we walked into the worst gay bar in Lafayette where I rekindled my buzz. I'm a little hazy about what happened for the hour or so that we were there, but I'll never forget what happened shortly after.

I pulled into his driveway and side-hugged him across the console. Then I shut off the engine, opened my door, and walked around meet him at the hood of the car. And there, in front of his condo, in a pool of Jeep Cherokee light, he kissed me. And as God as my witness, it was the single greatest kiss of my life.

I'd kissed him 100 times before then, and had kissed 100 people before him. But in that moment, I knew that I would remember this for as long as I lived. I'll give you a visual: Drew Barrymore and her teacher at the end of Never Been Kissed. It was like that. Only it was happening to me and it was better. The kiss was so perfect that I pulled away, caught my breath, and said, "Do that again."

Then I watched him disappear behind a screen door and I drove away. I only saw him a handful of times before dissecting what I referred to as his "Ambition Dysfunction" and moving onto other ventures. I later learned that he'd moved to Lake Charles for "personal reasons," and I didn't hear from him again until the week before he died. And then life continued and anniversaries of his death could begin next year.

As Valentine's Day 2012 inched closer and closer, I found it increasingly difficult to take it seriously. Not the commercialism of the holiday or the bitterness of single people – just the fact that my last date was in the ground and I had to make reservations at Tsunami so that my best friends and I would have something to do. In all honesty, Valentine's Day is my favorite holiday outside of Christmas, but I still couldn't shake the feeling that it was pointless to celebrate love when it goes away. I am the last person that he would ever spend a Valentine's Day with. Forever. And that fucking pissed me off.

On the morning of February 14, 2012, I walked into my office and sauntered over to my Art Director's area for our Downton Abbey debrief. Behind his desk was a poster that he'd recently created for a local not-for-profit's Valentine's Day fundraiser. The design was simple and low-concept with the headline, "Give the Gift of Warm Fuzzies" written in gorgeous typeface above illustrations of a bear, a rose, a balloon, and a heart. At the bottom was white space for the organization to fill in with the location and time of the fundraiser. To the extreme left of the open space were the words "Fate Has Brought You Here" next to an arrow. The joke was that fate had brought the attendee to the event to purchase last-minute VDay gifts for a good cause. But to me, those words hit me somewhere in my chest.

Fate had brought me to this moment – 365 days after my date with a departed friend and a haunting kiss. Fate had forced me to face my ambivalence. And fate had given me a year to figure it all out. Meeting him was great, dating him was so-so, ending it was easy, and wondering if I could have saved him was forever.

Fate had brought me to a place where I could say that last year, I spent Valentine's Day with an amazing guy, who passed away a few short months after. Thankfully, before he died, he taught me that Valentine's Day should be less about ordering flowers and making reservations, and more about saying everything you've ever wanted to someone you love. I miss you, buddy.

Do You Believe In Fagic?

After my break-up with The Dean, I started seeing this LSU theatre major named Michael. I met Michael on the dance floor of Splash, the Mecca of gay bars to 19-year-old me. Although I frequently popped in on the staple gay bars of Downtown New Orleans, Splash in 2007 was different. It played better music and always had a better quality of patron. Nola's Oz had the volume, but Splash definitely had Louisiana gay bars corned when it came to packing the house with cute, ignorant, eager college guys. Geaux Tigers, I guess. But the best part about Splash was its fagic (fag magic). To this day, after several dozen visits, I've never had an uneventful night in the puddle. Either something horrifyingly traumatizing happens (walking in on your ex getting pressed up against a bathroom stall) or fantastic (hooking up in the same bathroom stall with a fully mohawked American Idol reject) happens to me every time I make the trip. Lose yourself in the occasional foam or shake your ass to Ida Corr on top of a block with seven strangers, none of whom are confined to ironic torso fabric. It's pure fagic.

But the most tangible fagic of Splash was its power to bring people together. I'm well aware of the nature of the teenage homo. He's not wasting a trip to an out-of-town gay bar without hooking up with something. And since Splash distracted you with sporadic blasts from ice-cold, overhead CO2 jets and alternating Britney/Madonna remixes, you had to scramble at the eleventh hour for available dong. But learning to embrace the distractions and trust in the fagic will likely result in dong finding you before the house lights ignite, which is how I met Michael.

It's a quarter 'til last call and I'm knocking on blackout's door. In my state, I'm allowing this guy wearing a pink flannel-pattern shirt and an Acutane-level pizza face to grind on me. After a few minutes of me doing my best Lil Mama impression ("Lipgloss" was the national anthem at the time), I decide to turn around and face him for a few circular hip thrusts. Choosing ignorance, I never look him directly in the face. Instead, I distract myself with lights and the guy dancing behind Medium Pepperoni (which is what I'm now calling the boy whose crotch is banging against mine). The guy behind MP catches me staring, saunters over, and begins dancing on MP from the back. Now I'm face-to-face-to-face with MP and this guy, who is a remarkable dead ringer for a live-action Jimmy Neutron. His "fuck me" eyes and smile are only amplified by his shimmying and tongue wagging when he dances. I'm a sucker for a guy who's willing to put himself out there, especially if he's not doing it right.

With MP between us, J.Neutron and I continue to graze one anothers' forearms and exchange expressions that say, "I'm the weird kind of horny right now. The kind that isn't concerned with how I'm getting home later."

The music tumbles to a dull pulse and the crowd is herded outside to the widely-known and never revered Meat Market. The Market is Splash's sprawling parking lot, and it serves as the last resort destination for hasty tricking. Guys mill around and make their final selections, then slink away to their respective Civics. Here, by the grace of Gaga, MP has augmented his focus to my best friend and choice wingman, Trey, and seems to be enjoying the returned interest. Meanwhile, J.Neutron is alternating glances between my crotch and the gravel. "I'm Ryan!" I yelp with a stiff, sideways hand extended. "Michael," he says, brandishing a goofy, confident smile and sqeezing his fingers around mine. I remind myself a week after we've been hanging out that this was the exact moment that I knew it was a sure thing.

The relationship never went anywhere that either of us would consider cumbersome, and seemed over before it started. But my takeaway was the simple affirmation that sometimes people can literally walk up to you and become instantly memorable. I didn't seek Michael out or work hard to get his attention. He just danced his way over and made a lasting impression. And that was proof enough for me that serendipity is half of what brings people together. The rest has something to do with motive, interest, and maybe a little fagic.

My Single Is Dropping

Like most people, I have a list of things I want to do before I die. But for me, these things are mostly dudes. It's my fuck-it list. Stand-outs from the list include:

• From New Zealand
• Has a massive back tattoo 
• Has an Irish accent
• Has kids
• Works in an art museum
• Invented Facebook
• Zac Efron
• Dances ballet for a fancy company
• New York Times best-selling author
• Named Jessie (or Jesse)
• Jesse McCartney
• Blind
  
• Bullfighter

And although most of my prospects are cruel and/or unusual, at no point have I ever expressed having any ambition to screw a rapper. But I did. And I'm not thrilled about it. And if you think the fact that he's white, nineteen, and has freckles helps how accomplished I don't feel about it, then you're on glue.

The short story: He added me on Facebook after seeing my "OH MY GOD I'M GINGER" cover and sending me a message saying that I seemed funny. Ok, Freckles, I'll bite. So turns out he's in a fraternity at a mostly black half-university. And he makes beats and raps under a pseudonym. Which intrigued and bewildered me.

After chatting me up for a few hours, he'd made a strong enough impression to get my number. And then for the next five days, he sent me voice memos of beats and verses that he was working on. So I decided that he was enough of a novelty to join the ranks of my fuck-it list. And soon after, I put a check mark next to the words, "white rapper."

For me to say that my only motive was sex would be a lie. He was a nice guy with many redeeming qualities — the greatest of which was his talent. He was pretty stellar at what he did. And frankly, after the way I avoided letting him down, he probably deserves to hold me down and shit on me and five things that I care about. But until then, I'm going to pretend like he didn't say that his hero is Drake and instead do what Juvenile would do. And if you don't know what Juvenile would do, then you need to go to back to school.

Which reminds me, I need to add college professor to the list. Lord knows I need the credits.

When A Man And A Woman Love One Another Very Much

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Amendment #1

In the interest of practicality, I've decided to only sleep with people more attractive than myself.

Americano

I once dated a guy who had an intense passion for Europeanism. My guess is that since he was born in a small town in Southwest Louisiana and raised on a farm in Wyoming, he’d seen parallel levels of American hell and dreamed of something more.

So he pranced around Lafayette wearing man capris and pronouncing fleur-de-lis with a strong “s” sound at the end. In fact, any word that appeared to have a French origin was delivered with the diction and inflexions of a Parisian waiter (which isn’t unusual for the area, but jarring when it comes out of a nineteen-year-old queen behind authentic D&G shades).

I admired how he could be moved and marveled by a culture whose refinement didn’t closely resemble his own — with all of its monster truck rallies and black rodeos — but his whole shtick made me want to grab him by the collar and tell him that if America is good enough for Sofia Vergara, then it’s good enough for him.

The whole thing got weirder when he started wearing neon-colored jockstraps from the very European and very homosexual Topman.com — claiming that he needed them because they “helped him avoid panty lines.” In my confusion and frustration, I would counter with statements like, “Your entire ass is now fully exposed to you jeans. I hope you wiped yourself, you whore” or “Panty lines? You’re nearly 200 pounds and carrying a dick between your legs. Stop giving me the willies, Tranny Oakley.”

We broke up shortly before he boarded a plane for his summer abroad, and soon after, I began dating someone else. When word got back to the states that he’d become the American slampiece for half of Barcelona’s gay scene, I didn’t even flinch. Prospects of expatriatism could give him a raging hard-on, so I could imagine how some muscle top named Salvatore could reduce him to leg-humping.

In the mean time, I was sleeping with a hick from West Texas who couldn’t identify Heidi Klum in a crowd of black men, let alone describe wine pairings or the difference between Louis Vuitton and Louboutin.

Instead of forcing me to miss sophisticated companionship, my new boyfriend only helped me to become more disillusioned. I went from being with someone who never fully embraced his nationalism to someone who would take a bullet for (and a dick from) Trace Adkins.

After him, I dated one guy after another until I was faced with something that I would consider a departure.

In Chuck Palaniuk’s Invisible Monsters, the narrators commands us to “find what [we’re] afraid of most and go live there.” So I did. I met a British guy named Sam. And after deciding that my exboyfriend’s affection for his type was something that I abhorred, I asked him if he wanted to date me exclusively.

Three months of concentrated fieldwork and this is what I learned about having a European boyfriend: he will refuse to surrender his man purse in public (even if you beg), the rumors about his irregular bathing are not only true, but horrifying, and most importantly — he can’t drink the things that you can. So challenge him. And beat him. And rub it in his face.

Because European guys are overrated. And American gays who are obsessed with them are in for a rude awakening when they find themselves tied to a sex swing on the 4th floor of some Italian bathhouse while twelve Silvio Berlusconi lookalikes wait their turn.

Consider this my love letter to America. La dolce vita.