brunch in Palos Verdes - Sunday March 4 2001    

I still can't get over the fact that I'm actually waking up in bed beside Grechen P_____ again. No one ever prepared me for life being so weirdly wonderful.

In the morning Gretchen and I drove down to Rancho Palos Verde to attend a brunch hosted by her Aunt Jane. Palos Verdes is a low, rugged mountain to the south of Los Angeles standing hard on the southern Pacific coast. If sea levels were to rise a hundred feet, then Palos Verdes would be just another Channel Island like Catalina. But it's connected to the rest of Los Angeles by a wide spread of lowlands comprising such regions as Compton. Real estate on the Palos Verdes ridge is ridiculously expensive and generally features fabulous views of the port of Los Angeles in Long Beach or the distant Channel Islands.
It was, I suppose, your typical family-style Jewish Sunday brunch: lox & bagels, coffee and mimosas, and all sorts of quirky little dishes made with secret recipes. Gretchen hadn't seen her aunt in seven years so of course there was all kinds of catching up to be done. Then of course there was me and the subtext that surrounded me. Sure, I might not be Jewish but at least I'm a man and I have a respectable white collar job. Hell, for all they knew I actually graduated from Oberlin College. We talked for a time about my job and what my company does and how it's different from what Napster does. I giggled loudly inside when the Aunt Jane said she would never steal music with Napster because it was wrong. She's the first person I've ever heard say that, but, you know, they don't even have DSL in Palos Verde yet. Just yesterday Gretchen had made me download a bunch of Stevie Wonder and Joan Armatrading songs because she wants to expose me to the music she listens to these days.
Gretchen's friend Annie as well as a few others from the Hollywood Kabala Center showed up, schmoozed, thumbed through coffee table books and photographs. Eventually Annie was persuaded to perform an a'capella sing along song and Gretchen was coerced into reading one of her poems. Whenever asked what she does, she always says "I'm a professional poet." (She actually sells poems to schools and they use them in their curricula.)
Later on we watched a comic video short produced by Annie's cousin about a support group for people who waste too much time on the web. Parts of it were absolutely hilarious, such as when a newly-hired web-illiterate, when asked about a URL, asks, "Is that the WWW part?" But other parts, particularly the scene which is supposed to mock an AA meeting, dragged on forever.

Gretchen had originally been planning on going girl hunting in a lesbian bar tonight, but the overwhelming inferno of our newly rediscovered passion had utterly destroyed her interest in such things. I was busy exposing Gretchen to my Guided By Voices and experimenting with various methods for melting zinc-cored pennies (the only kind which have been made for the past 15 years or so).
Later on Gretchen and I went out on the porch and, though neither of us are smokers, we smoked cigarettes. We also finally applied our minds to the task of figuring out what had gone wrong between us 12 years before.
Our discussion started out with me giving a detailed and completely accurate account of my early sex life, such as it was, and the role that Gretchen had played in it. As I'd long suspected, part of the reason for Gretchen's eventual desertion of me had to do with her perception that I was weakened and become psychologically unstable in the aftermath of my breakup with Joy Powley. For some reason she allowed these perceptions to transform me into something unrecognizable in her eyes, and she wanted nothing more to do with me. She also felt betrayed because she felt I had misled her about the extent of my sexual experience (something I found ludicrous and unjust at the time and over the ensuing years). Her abandonment of me seemed so harsh and thorough that it left little chance for any sort of future reconciliation. For example when, in March of 1989, I realized that this was not just a normal falling out, I returned a copy of Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday she'd given me, she promptly whited-out the inscription she'd made in it. She also went through all the trouble of cutting me out of a picture featuring herself and her friend Terri.
But something about whatever remained of Gretchen in my mind refused to die, and I maintained a place for her in it across the years. This place was largely subconscious in that it mostly revealed itself to me in my dreams. But I also allowed myself to think about her sexually in ways that would have been unappealingly unrealistic in the cases of people like Joy, who broke up with me more conclusively if not as brutally.
Now, though, Gretchen realizes that I had valid reasons for the things I'd done back then, even if they were slightly misleading. Indeed, if I'd been completely honest with the truth of the situation we might never have started spending so much time together. I'm still not entirely sure how Gretchen allowed herself to finally warm up to me after such a thorough erasing of all connections to me, but perhaps it has something to do with her therapist, her turning 30, or even the "real new millennium." (She's one of those people who annoyingly insists the new millennium came with the year 2001 instead of 2000, which seems all the more preposterous considering she's a Jew).
Neither of us are religious or especially spiritual people, but the coincidences, symbolism and tidiness of the numbers have both of us intrigued. Isn't it odd that Gretchen returned into my life exactly 12 years to the day that she disappeared from it? Isn't it peculiar that our darkness descended during the early part of the first Bush administration, the very year the seemingly immortal Berlin Wall came down, and didn't lift until another Bush administration took control of the White House? The World Wide Web had begun forming the moment we parted ways, ultimately allowing us to find one another via communication techniques that were unimaginable in 1989. Web pages containing her full name were like messages placed in bottles and tossed into the ocean, and the database technologies of modern search engines allowed her, for reasons of idle vanity, to scan the entire surface of the seas and find the few bottles addressed to her.
We talked for a long time about faith. Whereas Gretchen has none whatsoever, many of my actions seem to be based on faith-based calculations. How, for example, could I know for sure that the 20 year old Gus of 1988 made a wise decision when he allowed himself to fall in love with Gretchen? And even if he had, how could I now be sure that the Gretchen that I fell in love with then still existed today? Twelve years is a very long time. I must have had faith: firstly, faith in my younger, more naïve self, and secondly, faith in the fundamental unchangeable features that I liked about Gretchen. This gets down to the very question of who we are as human beings. Are we really the same now as we were before twelve years of experiences?
I remember reading Gretchen's first emails in which she told me she'd just been dumped after a five year relationship with another woman. It was such an arbitrarily weird thing it kind of reminded me, for lack of a better movie analogy, of the arbitrary weirdnesses in the movie Being John Malkovitch, weirdnesses which were used as highly-effective devices to frame the gnawing question of what it means to be a particular person (and be able to relate on various levels to another person), from the differences of personality in single human beings to the samenesses of personality across humans generally.

We stayed up talking until the wee hours graduated from infancy.

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