Believe it or not, I still have Hollywood connections from years of living in West Hollywood. An old client of mine sent me a screener dvd for “Call Me By Your Name” movie. I enjoyed the first half of the movie but couldn’t figure out what’s all the big hoopla about. Then, it really touched me in the end. The last scene with the father (Michael Stuhbarg) was powerful. I rewinded that scene 3 times. Armie Hammer looks like my 2nd husband who was 6’5″ and a professional volleyball player. I read Armie’s interviews on the web. He immersed himself in this film’s reality and had a hard time walking away from it. When things are this good, naturally there’s talk about a sequel. I think Armie will be disappointed because it’s magical in its own time and space, and one can never revisit it. It will not be the same.
This film took me back to when I was 16 years old in a small Illinois farm town. My beautiful cousin came home and brought her fiance from Kentucky. He was a gorgeous 26 years old. A Ryan Gosling look-alike who’s unaware of it. I was just started dating this girl with nice tits. I knew I was gay but I was a horny teenager in this bucolic town. I made out with her a lot and I played with her tits but never went any further than that, which frustrated the hell out of her.
My cousin wanted everybody to go out for a fancy dinner on a double date. We drove for an hour to St Louis MO and ate at the Old Spaghetti Factory near the Gateway Arch. I ordered the Pot Pourri platter because it sounded worldly. As the night went on, her fiance looked at me across the dinner table with his eyes that I never forget. I haven’t seen that look ever since. Time stood still. Everything around was a low murmur. I could feel my heart beating rapidly against my chest. My cousin’s loud laughter and her rattling the messy table snapped me out of it. I had no idea where I was and the girls had no idea what just happened to me. When we got home, he asked me if I knew where to get pot. I took him across town in my cream 1969 2 door Cutlass Supreme. We got a dime bag and he rolled a couple of joints in my car. We smoked a bit, listened to David Bowie, talked about Klaus Nomi. I was getting high. He took a deep puff, gestured me to pucker my lips, leaned forward and blew his smoke into my mouth. For a microsecond, our lips lightly touched. I opened my eyes and saw his. We kissed. My world was spinning as my soul was fed for the first time. We had sex in the car and every day till he and my cousin left for Kentucky. We both had never done anything like this before. He told me that he was so confused, lost. The goodbye was tough. It was the end of the world for this 16 years old. I spent the summer missing him.
They got married and had a girl, later, a boy. I visited whenever I could. It was a long 4-hour drive to KY. The minute both of us were naked in his hunting cabin in the woods, nothing else mattered. These short moments of my head on his chest as he stroked my lower back, had to last a lifetime. The happiness was matched by the pain of our situation. I went off to UNLV right after high school. This was the days of pre internet, email and cell phones. Writing was not an option, fearing it would be discovered by our family.
Years later, he said me moving so far away broke his heart, and that he was faithful to my cousin all these years. I was the exception. Until this day, he didn’t know why.
Merry Xmas – Love y’all xoxo Van
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