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As a man, being overcome with tears takes me by surprise every time.
I hadn’t had a good sobbing cry in a solid year, since my last big phat love ended. At almost 62, I’ve done my share of grieving. This time, I was sitting on my couch on the last morning before moving out of an apartment where I’d spent two intense years of rebirth.
This apartment held a lot of memories. It was the first apartment I’d ever had all to myself since I left my twenty-year marriage eight years ago. I rented it as my hide-out, so the world would leave me alone long enough to write my first book. What I didn’t expect was who I’d have to become to finish it.
It was also the first time I got to decide what couch I wanted to buy. This wasn’t the couch I inherited when my parents closed the cottage, and it wasn’t the $8,500 custom made couch my ex-wife and I obsessed over because it needed to match the grandeur of our newly restored 1917 Arts and Crafts bungalow. This was an eight-foot-long curved teal green monstrosity with gold trim, fringe all along the bottom, Victorian meets bohemian, threadbare claw-foot dream-liner of a couch. This couch, now having expended its last days, in five hours would be sitting at the Transfer Station ten miles away.
The apartment building was a 1920’s vintage four-plex that sat on a busy rock-and-roll strip in Portland, Oregon. The front living room was so loud from bus traffic and an occasional Harley roaring off from the Bare Bones Bar next door to actually sit in, so I set-up my living space in the dining room. Looking out at a row of bamboo, shielding the parking lot to the karate studio, it had a big bay window which was the perfect place for a curved couch.
Finding a curved couch that would fit this wide space seemed like an impossibility. Funny how when you get clear on what you want in life, the Universe seems to deliver. All I did was enter “curved couch” into Craigslist, and up popped an ad, $50 and free delivery if you take it today. A half-hour later, this orphaned dog of a couch was sitting in my dining room, perfectly nestled in the bay window. In the following week, I’d find its companion green middle-eastern carpet to cover the patched-up wood floor, and matching claw-foot oval top table. All I had to do was lay down a coat of white spray paint on top, to cover up the cigarette burns.
We all have beds that if they could talk, would tell stories, but there is a certain type of life that happens on a couch. It’s that in-between space that bridges sitting separate on chairs or standing with teacups in the kitchen. It’s a place where the first person sitting invites the second person to join. It’s a place where, depending on how one sits or reclines on the couch, the other person adjusts somehow to match. It’s that place where comfort levels are tested, where distances are set, and re-calibrated in some sort of ritualized dance of intimacy.
The first and only party I ever had in that apartment was “Chris’ Tits-Out 60th Birthday”. The theme was “Package up your tits and show us what you got.” I was amazed at how many of my male friends came dressed in a corset with pasties, the women totally brought their breasts like puffed pastries served up on lace doilies…no wait, pouting mounds of Jell-O heaving on the oblivion edge of a polished silver platter. I dressed in a red bustier with a laced back, black zipper front G-string, red wig and black pumps.
The biggest surprise was a few of my bro’s tying me with rope to a chair in the middle of my living room so I would sit still long enough for most of my friends to individually sit in a chair across from me, to share how much they appreciated my friendship. That small apartment party was packed. Let’s just say a lot of intimacy and consent got negotiated on that eight-foot-long couch that evening.
The most vivid couch memory was during the time when my last two-year relationship was ending. She made plans to move back to L.A. but agreed to move in for two months to help me finish my book. It was a men’s book on awakening one’s erotic innovator, following my journey as an up-in-my-head engineer to an embodied and clear-headed man. I set-up my computer and two monitors on the oval table in front of the couch where she and I sat side by side, day after day, going over my final draft.
She helped me connect with the true essence of what each story meant to me, called me out on trains of thought that sounded good but really didn’t mean anything, and at times, caught words that indicated that even with how far I had come in my appreciation for women, my unconscious patriarchy still lingered there. In her words, “If you say it that way, women will come after you with pitchforks.”
I’ll never forget the handful of times I got so defeated and worn down by her kind yet relentless emotional excavations, only to have her with a coy smile, lift the hem of her short skirt to expose herself to my glare. That’s all it would take to find myself buried in her, letting her know just how much I appreciated the time and energy she was sharing, open to whatever this was. The couch, the recipient of yet another stain.
There was the woman I met at a buddy of mine’s birthday party where, as soon as we figured we liked each other, I suggested we get together again soon, she asked what I was doing that night? After a few fun visits, she wanted me to take a picture of her new full back tattoo while kneeling on my awesome couch. I said sure, she stripped naked and climbed up with her legs buried into the cracks in the cushions and pulled her arms back tight, fists angled up bodybuilder style.
After not hearing from her for a month, the same buddy of mine called and asked, that since he saw a photo on Instagram of her kneeling on what he knew was my couch, had I seen her lately, he was worried that maybe she’d slipped into being depressed again. I said no I hadn’t, where we both reached out to find she had in fact been sad again but was getting better.
There were the heartfelt talks with my now 25-year-old daughter, the times she blew between apartments in Portland with overflowing bags of her stuff and our final big move to get her to New York City. We spent her last two days in Portland together with all her belongings stuffed into three checked bags and a snake in a Tupperware tub. So many things to say when the time is accelerating that fast.
Another time, there was a woman I met online who flew out from Austin to see if the chemistry in person was as good as the phone sex. On the way back from the airport, we agreed to keep sex off the table for the first night because I wanted to see if I could find a more honest and authentic way to reveal myself to her, and my fear was that if I couldn’t, I’d insult her with my egoistic drive.
I woke up early the next morning to the night-before back-draft of how we only lasted fifteen minutes on my couch before climbing in my bed and having at it for four hours straight. It was an awesome, energetic, co-created romp that felt real and authentic, but there was no curiosity in it. There was no honest connection to some form of magic that required a common celebration of a form of life resonance.
Sitting there with my morning coffee, I came to grips with how women, too, use sex to create a bond and to manage their anxiety of losing it. I also realized how much of a sucker I was in responding to my need to be validated with that kind of candy. The tragedy was sitting on the edge of the couch that morning as she knelt on the floor in front of me, pleading for another chance. It all peaked with the stare-down she gave me as I held solid to my no. Reminding her that my no was not a conversation, I gave it right back with a riveting “you got to be fucking kidding me” stare until she looked away. When she did, I asked if she wanted some breakfast. Sixteen digits of my credit card and two hours later she was on a plane and out of there, an accomplishment I felt proud of.
Ever since I left my marriage, I knew where I was, a small rented room in a house, living at a buddy of mine’s house, with some woman. I would leave that place—I just didn’t know when yet, and under what circumstances. This apartment has been my emotional workshop, the anvil I have forged a new version of myself on. It even acted as an electronics shop as I hauled the electric hydro-foil Jet-Ski I’m now building, into the living-room to do the wiring. I’ll never forget the explosions of sparks from the battery leads touching that sent red-hot balls of copper rolling around on my wool carpet. Man did that stink like the time a friend set my hair on fire in high school with a Bic lighter.
As time passed, sitting alone in the contemplation of what I really wanted to aspire to, a subtle form of clarity came over me. It centered on focusing only on what brought me joy and giving silence to everything else. The hunger to feed my need for validation gave way to a “I have shit to do” peace where I had no bandwidth for drama, especially the kind I created. Emerging out of nine months of sadness that felt warm and comfortable, a kind of caulk that filled the gaps in my loneliness, I realized this hide-out’s time was coming to an end.
I could feel a new, more subtle, nuanced insight coming on. It was a gentler flow that gave me a new inspiration for the kind of people I wanted to start to meet and hang out with. The problem was, I was sure I couldn’t get there from this shabby chic bachelor pad. The minute I got clear on needing to get out of there, it’s like the stories about prisoners being paroled and how during the last week, the food suddenly tastes so bad, they couldn’t believe they could even eat it.
So, the door opened, and I walked through to an offer to rent a small house on a hill—a much quieter house, one with a clean bathroom that didn’t have a leaky sink screwed to the wall. Just like that, for less rent money and in a way better location, with a big yard and my own parking space where my car alarm wasn’t going off all the time, the move was set in motion. Like any move, there comes the day you rent the truck. In a sea of boxes, sitting at my spot on the couch, cup of coffee steaming, feet on the table now burnt from a soldering iron, the waves of grief hit me.
Grief comes up sometimes as a throbbing pain in the heart, sometimes a puffy, snotty swelling in the front of the face. Sometimes it’s on all-fours after a best friend has committed suicide. This was one of those “time stands still” sobbings where time itself elects to wait long enough to allow it all to come out. The sobbing came over me as my breath stopped, my head tilting up to look at some far off imaginary horizon. A feeling of standing before a portal appeared, a reckoning, a moment clearly that will never be the same. Like a small version of dying, the memories started rolling by in jittery fast forward. The time I rolled my carry-on back into this very same room after my girlfriend and I left together a few days before on a road trip through Big-Sur to return her to LA.
The same exact grief came over me after returning to my couch from flying my daughter to NYC, getting her installed in her new apartment.
On that couch, I eventually met my deepest loneliness face to face—the sadness, the attempts at medicating it in whatever form seemed worth trying, and the courage to finally sit in the uncomfortable ambiguity of it all to realize I was still okay.
So, I wept for it all—a sobbing, stomach clenching, head-in-the-hands kind of drooling grief, for myself, for the clutter I had cleared away to allow more of myself to expand into, and for my bright future. I even found the courage to tempt happiness, something my dad could never do. In the last dry heaves, the price we pay to be alive, wondering if I was done, the door buzzer startled me back to my awareness. Shit—it was already 11:00, time for my buddy to help me move.
In one load, all the boxes and my IKEA bed were in the new house. The last act was to load the couch into the truck for me to drive it over to the Transfer Station myself since my buddy had to get going. We had to tip it on one end and shove it way up in the corner of the foyer to be able to swing the door and twist it out on the front landing. Funny—there is always that last exchange between dudes after one helps the other move, something like, “Hey man, no worries, I’m not sure if I’m your best friend or the only one stupid enough to answer your text.”
Driving out to dump the couch—one so thread-bare, sun-bleached, and tattered, no one on Craigslist even took it for free—was another time for reflection. This time, it was more wondering how all the people I’d encountered on the couch were doing now, where were they, what was their life like? With my old girlfriend, I’d made a pact to not communicate with her out of respect for really needing to be done. It took us three attempts after splitting up to make it final. Silence is sometimes such a kind way of loving.
I have a deep appreciation for the lovers and friends I’ve called into my life, each giving me a chance to meet a certain part of myself, to take it out for a run around the park and a swim with it in the ocean a bit. No matter how short or how long, I’ve opened myself to what I felt comfortable sharing. I also wondered what the other person was opening themselves up to in me.
All of life is sort of like sitting on a couch—we take our position and then invite someone to join us. We sit in a particular way, our feet either pointed at the door or our feet reaching out to meet theirs, such a subtle dance it is, a lingering gaze of attention, an outstretched hand, a purposeful getting up to get something, only to return to sit a bit closer.
Rounding the corner into bay number five I could see I was the only truck there. A massive diesel front loader was off at the end groaning and shoving scattered inanimate objects, each I’m sure, with their own story, into huge organized piles. I backed my truck up to an open area and shifted into park. I heaved the rear door up to see one sad couch sitting diagonally with the table and rolled up teal rug scattered from the drive.
Unlike the caution needed when moving fine furniture, I got behind the massive couch and gave it a running shove. It went end over end to the pavement. I jumped down and dragged it off the tailgate with a thud, then slid it over to position against the backdrop of what humans no longer find valuable. I grabbed the table and instinctively placed it where it belonged and took this picture.
As I drove off, I took one last look in the mirror, then like so many of life’s closing portals, I turned away from the fire and walked into my new future.
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This post was originally published on medium.com, and is republished here with the author’s permission.
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Photo credits: Christopher Hoffmann