It's All Relative (4 page)

“The only acting you ever see at the Oscars is when people act like they're not mad they lost. Nicole Kidman was smiling so wide, she should have won an Emmy at the Oscars for her great performance. I was like, ‘If you'd done that in the movie, you'd have won an Oscar, girl!' ”

–CHRIS ROCK

A
s a way to make up for what Gary believes is my lifelong sacrifice of New Year's Eve for him, we now celebrate Asian style, going out for dinner on Chinese New Year.

This tradition started quite by accident years ago, when we ordered Chinese food on Chinese New Year, something we didn't realize until the delivery person informed us of that fact.

“Free egg roll because it's Chinese New Year.”

“Really?” I said. “The Chinese have New Year?”

I knew this came out wrong, and was about to correct myself and say, “Today is the Chinese New Year?” but I was cut off by the delivery person.

“No, they stay in the same year forever. Are you prejudiced?”

Now, I must explain the hard-ass, Clint Eastwood–esque tone with which this was delivered. Our Chinese food was always delivered by a rather angry, rather hairy, but very proud preop transsexual who looked like Joan Jett, talked like Fred Dryer, and carried around a set of nunchucks on her studded leather belt. Gary, thoroughly intimidated, always tipped her heavily out of fear of retribution. Gary liked to believe that our tip money might be used for gender reassignment surgery instead of a much-needed makeup consult or anger-management session.

“Ten dollars for a twenty-five-dollar order!” I'd scream. “Are you crazy?”

“It's a long drive,” Gary would say kindly, like he was talking to the cops from behind the front door while a killer held a gun to his spine.

“It's six blocks!” I would say.

On this first Chinese New Year, I held half of Gary's tip back.

“Five bucks? That's it?” the tranny challenged me, fingering the nunchucks.

“That's twenty percent,” I said.

“Thanks, Mr. Math. You don't think I can add 'cause I'm trans-gendered? What do you think the
T
stands for in GLBT? ‘
Terrible in math
'? Do you hate anyone who's different than you?”

“What? No. No! What are you talking about?”

“I'll see you around,” the tranny said. “You'll regret this tip one day.”

From then on our orders were always off, seemingly on purpose.

Call me paranoid, but there were clues.

For instance, I despise water chestnuts, always insisting when I ordered that dishes be prepared without them, but I always discovered them hidden at the bottom, or spooned heavily on top.

Sometimes our food would show up cold.

Sometimes a box would be open.

Seemingly, the order after a delivery when Gary tipped heavily would be spot-on. However, if I tipped poorly, the next order would be screwed up.

“This is blackmail!” I would tell the tranny.

But she would just smile, holding out her ill-manicured hand for a tip. “Very busy tonight,” she would say. “Very busy.”

Which is why Gary and I began going out for Chinese—and then out on Chinese New Year: I feared she would come to our home with a carton of moo shu and a rifle, and Gary thought it would be a fun and unique way to re-create our lost New Year's Eve.

Now, to be honest, going out to a place flush with Asians was a huge sacrifice on Gary's part, because I always had a fascination with Gay-sians: those hot, thin, Asian men with dark hair and pouty lips. I had once—during my very brief dating phase before I met Gary—hooked up with such a man, who had introduced me to the wonders of the Far East.

Our favorite Chinese restaurant, the one from which we always got delivery, was a little hole in the wall not far from our neighborhood that looked as if it had been decorated by Margaret Cho's mother. It featured brightly colored fans spinning from the ceiling and a giant aquarium in the middle of the restaurant with fish the size of manatees. Calendars with rabid-looking dragons and rats and snakes lined the walls.

Gary and I were ready to gorge on what we considered to be the best buffet in town, a virtual smorgasbord of MSG and grease: egg-drop soup, General Tso's chicken, beef and snow peas, spring rolls, and some fish thing that still had its eyes, everything glistening in oil.

To be quite honest, I mostly went to drink, in order to make up for my lack of New Year's. I'm passive-aggressive that way. Supportive but selfish, honest but manipulative.

When we were seated, I immediately ordered a flaming volcano, a fruity rum drink that you slurp out of a burning ceramic skull with a couple of Krazy Straws.

The drink is made for, I would guess, three full-bodied men to share.

I ordered one for myself, a waif at best.

Ten minutes after my volcano arrived I was halfway finished and firmly believed I was Reese Witherspoon.

Part of me thought, “How can I drink? It's disrespectful. After everything Gary has been through. This is really hard for him. It's just like New Year's Eve.”

But the drunker part of me thought, “Except Gary's not Chinese. I mean, I've seen his egg roll. And wasn't the lifelong sacrifice of New Year's Eve, one of America's best holidays, hard on me?”

So I finished my volcano, and, out of spite, ordered another, much to the astonishment of our waiter, whom I coquettishly told resembled Bruce Lee.

“First of all, he's black, not Asian,” Gary informed me, very loudly, after he had left, “and secondly, he weighs three hundred pounds and has a fade. He looks like Ruben Studdard. Jesus Christ! You need some food in you. Oh, and you did not star in
Election
, so stop telling him that. This was supposed to be a romantic night together.”

Gary led me to the buffet.

Though it was winter, we were enjoying a mild respite, with temperatures in the fifties and sixties. Any time the weather hovered above the forties, I used it as an excuse to wear slides or flip-flops, my footwear of choice. In a perfect world, I really should have been shipwrecked with Christopher Atkins on the Blue Lagoon. I never would have gotten my period, like Brooke Shields, and I would have been wholly content to run around barefoot and tan while getting my brains boinked out.

The restaurant was buzzing with Asians out celebrating their New Year, along with the usual mix of slow-moving old people and fat college kids in sweats.

“What the hell is going on?” I asked once we got in line.

The line for the buffet, which was set up in a massive U along three different walls, was backed up in a human traffic jam. I was in that fuzzy drunk place when you are just starting to feel the effects of huge quantities of alcohol on your body and mind—that lovely moment before anger, vomiting, and alcohol poisoning set in—when the lethal dosage is innocently manifesting itself as munchies.

At the moment I was feeling the need for something greasy in my stomach, so I wound my arm free from my nursemaid and staggered a few big, unsteady steps forward in line.

“Excuse me, ma'am,” I said to a dead woman propped up on a pillow in a motorized cart—the kind that has a TV tray up front to hold a dinner plate. “I need a crab rangoon, or I'm gonna pass out.”

She frowned at me and revved her cart.

“Oooh, and I need some duck sauce. Can't have a rangoon without duck sauce.”

I ripped the packet of duck sauce with my front teeth, smiling at her the whole time, and began to squirt a dollop in the middle of the rangoon. But in doing so, an orange rivulet spurted onto my bare toes and oozed into my leather slides.

“These cost two hundred bucks,” I said to her, bending down in an immediate panic to clean them off.

In my drunken haze—I had no distance perspective—I bent over and hit the dead woman's cart. In her effort to make room for me, she put her cart in reverse, and all I heard, as I wiped clean my foot and slide, was the loud “BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!” of her motorized cart heading in reverse, and then what sounded like the
Titanic:
screams and dishes breaking.

I stood up and turned to see that I had caused a Chinese chain reaction of terror, people lying on the floor amid broken glass and cashew chicken.

“Way to go, Godzilla,” Gary whispered, sidling up next to me. But then, like any great dancer, Gary said, “Follow my lead.”

“Are you okay, ma'am?” Gary asked the dead woman in the cart, who was now being assisted by one of her elderly companions. “You just seem so confused. Are you okay?”

Gary said all of this very loudly and very dramatically, with faux force and sincerity, just like President Bush used to do when he talked about poor people.

“What? What?” the old woman said. “What?”

“Is everyone okay?” Gary asked. “She's very sorry.”

I shoved my crab rangoon in my mouth and gulped it down.

“Consider this your payback,” Gary said. “Forever. Happy Chinese New Year, honey.”

I was drunk. Very drunk. And at that moment his spontaneous gesture seemed way more romantic than any midnight kiss on New Year's Eve could ever be.

Gary quickly threw some cash on the table and raced toward the exit.

But, ironically, just as we were leaving, the delivery tranny—returning to the restaurant to nab another to-go order—stopped us at the door. “I saw everything,” she said, grabbing me with her ill-manicured hand. “But you can buy my silence with a
big tip
.”

“I'll give you a big tip,” Gary said, fingering her nunchucks. “Clean up your eyebrows. They're the window to the soul of a
real
woman.”

My man, I realized, could never be bought again, be it New Year's Eve or Chinese New Year.

Which is why, this time around, Gary celebrated
our
New Year's Eve by leaving the restaurant sober, in love, and very much in control of his life.

I batted one for three.

I
knew I had met someone special the afternoon I picked Gary up to attend our first Oscar party together. I was running late and arrived to find my new boyfriend standing by the curb, his head and neck wrapped tightly in shimmering gold lamé.

He
was
Oscar.

And I was smitten.

Since this was the Gay Super Bowl, it was the equivalent of a straight man picking up Pam Anderson in a mesh Patriots half shirt.

A half hour into the party, however, I simply became irritated; the gag had gotten old fast and I was tired of leading a blind, sweaty, suffocating Gary around the party by the hand. I loved the Oscars—make that I
lived
for the Oscars—and wanted to focus not only on the red-carpet fashions but also on completing my Oscar ballot.

So I began to pawn Gary off on people, or leave him leaning against a wall or a dessert table, returning to help only when I could hear him aspirate the gold lamé that kept sneaking into his mouth and nostrils.

Fittingly, I hit Oscar gold twice that night.

The first time came when I smacked Gary, hard, on his rear, and
told him to stay put by me on the couch the rest of the night so I could focus. The second time came when I hit on roughly 90 percent of my Oscar picks, even predicting the Academy Award winners in little-hyped categories like Best Animated Short, or Sound.

I walked out of the party with a Benjamin in my pocket and a trunkload of movies, popcorn, and Milk Duds.

“Do you know what I learned tonight?” I asked Gary on the way home.

“That lamé is highly chafing?” he said.

“I'm not just a film buff, I'm a savant!”

“You got the gift!” Gary said, unwinding his golden mummy bandages.

“And you got the rash!” I said, mortified by his red, welted skin.

“I got it, too,” Gary said.

“You sure do.”

“No,” he answered. “The gift. Except mine is for pageants.”

I put Gary's ability to the test watching the Miss America pageant. (Gary, by the way, prefers only to watch Miss America, and not Miss USA, because he considers Miss USA “trashy,” since they allow contestants to enter who have had breast jobs and cosmetic surgery.)

I challenged Gary to pick the top ten finalists based on appearance as soon as they walked onstage for the first time.

“No problem,” he said confidently. “That's pretty much how I've chosen to live my life.”

The cheeseball music started and we eyed the contestants, quickly but secretly scribbling on our pads of paper. I made lists of Definites, Maybes, and Be Thankful for Your State Crown. During the commercial break, we trimmed our lists to ten and then exchanged them so we could grade each other's work.

When the top ten was announced, I hit 50 percent.