He called me selfish, and needy, and ungrateful, and cold (is that possible? needy and cold?). He said my writing was stilted, my characters wooden. After having lavished me with attention, and gifts, and adoration, and support, of my person and my habits and my writing, and just…me, he stopped. Stopped answering my emails, stopped taking my phone calls.

Obviously, the adoration stopped too, and I’m willing to bet large amounts of cash that’s exactly what kicking crack cold turkey feels like.

Bad. Really, really, really bad.

No. Not Husband #1. No, no, no, no, no. All y’all Bad, Bad Lovers who’ve been with me for a bit on this little nightmare of a trip know it wasn’t Husband #1 because adoration was not in his playbook, at least where I was concerned. Not a post-Husband #1 rebound pick-up (of which there were many, and all of those went south), nope. No.

This was a friend. Emphasis on the ‘was.’ This was that friend that all straight women want, the slightly younger, brilliant, worldly, bilingual, bicultural, handsome, witty, hilarious, irreverent, insanely talented and very-very gay BFF. The one you drink with, the one you pick up guys with, the one you dance with and go to Halloween parties with, planning your matching costumes for weeks in advance. This was the consort with whom you ruled West Village nightlife, the one who knew half the bartenders in Manhattan-south-of-Union-Square (and you knew the rest). This was your Most Fabulous Friend, and in his company, in his aura, you were most fabulous, too.

The Loss Of A Friend I Loved 

This was also the Most Fabulous Friend who had a bit of a disappearing habit (for months rather than—as in the case of Husband #1—hours), and a penchant for really badly chosen boyfriends. You felt a little twinge when he disappeared on you, it was hurtful, but when he reappeared, which he always did, it was with hilarity, fanfare, festivity, and fabulousness, and things were back on track, even better than before.

During one of his reappearances, shortly after I had left Manhattan for the badlands of New Mexico and my first tenure-track job, he announced that he had established his own press (self-publishing is a badge of honor in the graphic novel world, always so much more cutting-edge than the publishing world proper). He wanted that press to have a literary fiction imprint, and he wanted the first novel of that imprint to be a little thing I had written during the early days of our friendship. This was a novella rather than a novel—it wasn’t even 200 pages long—entitled The Will of Venus (Otherwise Known as A Fairy Tale for Super-Women), which he had always love-love-loved.

I began to write Venus—my second novel, actually; the first one is lost, and that is probably a good thing… if you’re interested in my long and twisty history as a writer, I tell you all about it in the ‘About’ section of this here website—during the period immediately following the ouster of Husband #1. In fact, I think I may have begun it the very day I put my foot through that painting and threw his shit out of the third-floor window of our East Village apartment. It is a product of the first half of the 90’s. The only cellphones on the street were owned by fabulous dot-com-ers like my Most Fabulous Friend (back before dot-com-ers were a dime a dozen when you could still make a fortune being one), and they weighed about five pounds.

There was no Grinder, no Tinder, no Match.com or OKCupid or, god help us, Eharmony (if that is even spelled correctly–I take pride in not knowing). If you wanted to fish about for a lay or a love, you either went to a bar or put an ad in the Village Voice, and I did both. I wrote Venus during the wild, drunken, rebounding period of “Kurt-not-Kurt.” When I was young and beautiful and angry and hurt and determined to wreak vengeance upon the entire male sex, but mostly ended up getting kicked around (though there was also quite a bit of fun and a non-negligible quantity of better-than-average sex mixed in, and a whole lot of nights out being fabulous with my Most Fabulous Friend).

I had an Ivy League Ph.D. and I was slinging hash and pouring drinks, as a cater-waiter—I actually have a story published in Stone Canoe about this wild, funny, sad period in my life, which you can read, absolutely for free and in its entirety, right here on this purdy little site. I thought anywhere outside the limits of the Five Boroughs was not worth even considering as a possible habitat, and I was prepared to do anything and everything not to have to leave. Including bucking my advisor’s urgent call to apply for an academic job at Ball State, somewhere in the bleak hinterlands of Indiana (no way was I going to teach at an institution of higher learning with a name like that, even assuming they’d have me). I was prepared, even eager, to stack my academic chops on the pyre of partying and decadence and promiscuity, douse them with lighter fluid and set fire to the bitches. I was dancing atop the cars of the Train of Self-Destruction in stilettos, drunk, and too close to the edge.

I was reading Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin and Carson McCullers and eleventh-century Arabic love poetry (and even managing to crank out an academic article or two between stints of breakfast service, cocktail-slinging, and bar-hopping). I was also writing The Will of Venus.

Which I am going to serve up to you, dear and faithful reader of this fine, fine blog of Bad, Bad Love, in blog-post sized increments over the coming two months or so. Yes, the ex-friend theoretically owns the copyright (I think), and it may or may not have been him who removed it from the site of his press (sometime after the blow-up described in the opening paragraph of this post) and linked it up to some gay porn site (I mean, who else…?)–if you Google it, let me know what comes up.

Someone who is definitely not me claims it as hers on Goodreads. Along with a bunch of other stuff I’d never want within a mile of me (to which she is welcome, and it may very well be hers). Rest assured, Venus is mine. Proof of that is A) the fact that the one rating it has is from someone I know, and B) the fact that the manuscript is in my possession… And as proof of that, you shall read it here.

Why Write About This? 

Why am I doing this? Well, because that last post really took it out of me. Writing about Husband #1 in general really takes it out of me and that last one was a heavy load. Don’t get me wrong, I am all for writing about Husband #1, and #2, and all of the random men that came between ‘em. And I plan to continue doing just that. This brief hiatus of actual creative production, however, will allow me to finish the draft of the new novel that I am trying oh-so-hard to have in some sort of decent shape to hand over to my agent toward the middle of this fall (I’ve said 15 October, and am still very hopeful that that self-imposed deadline will be met). Venus graciously offered to step in (as it were–not to worry, the shoes aren’t going anywhere), so I said okay. In fact, Venus takes place almost entirely in Manhattan, where it just so happens that I am headed for a wee city-break/DIY writer’s retreat this very Sunday. The shoe will come along and will pose in various locations, together with various props, for pictures for Venus posts.

Yes, this will be a bit of a guilty-pleasures read for summa y’all—there’s drinking and sex and even some magical realism, some santería, and a ghost—but I do believe you will enjoy. I can’t give this to my agent because it’s dated as hell (though I suppose it could be packaged as historical fiction, the 90’s being now twenty years ago, how the eff did that happen!?). Perhaps the bigger impediment is that it has, technically, already been published.

But it belongs to me, in spirit if not in the letter of the law, and so I’m-a-gonna do with it what I please.

I will, from time to time, give some contextualization, for younger readers who might not have ever seen a pay phone or know what the Personals were or how they worked, or perhaps to indicate to you when a particular character is based on a real person (several are). But mostly I will just let my words from twenty years ago speak for themselves. I won’t edit, I don’t think that would be honest, and the point of this is to let me take some brain space back for the finishing of the new novel. So I will serve it up raw.

Stay Tuned For The Will Of Venus

The first installment will be next Friday–do stay tuned…

Before I leave you, I know you’re wondering, though you are perhaps too polite to ask. Whatever happened to the formerly Most Fabulous Friend?

Well, I couldn’t really say, because he no longer speaks to me. I wrote to him once a year or two after our final blow-up, just after a friend of mine had died, far too young, of cancer. I said I would hate for that to happen to one of us without us ever resolving whatever had torn us apart (okay, that was melodramatic, but the sentiments were sincere). I happened to be down in Brooklyn at the writers’ conference hosted by the wonderful editoras of SLICE magazine (which really was instrumental at setting me on the path toward becoming, once again, a writer). A story of mine, “La Crisis,” had won the little in-house contest for fiction and I had $100 of prize money burning a hole in my pocket. I was staying in a hotel, literally, blocks from his apartment. I proposed a drink, dinner, anywhere he wanted, I was buying (he had always bought, he’d always insisted, and I had always let him: I am not guiltless here).

And then I went down to the hotel bar, with my device, which I refreshed every three seconds or so, certain I’d hear from him. He has every electronic device known to mankind, and he lives permanently plugged into all of them, even when sleeping, so I was sure he’d see my message. And I am still sure that he did.

I ate by myself at the bar, I got very drunk on my $100, I stayed there all night, and he never answered. That hurt just as bad as any shitty thing any straight man ever did to me. Maybe worse. And you know what? If he called right now and said let’s go out for a drink, I know for a fact that I would forgive and forget in a heartbeat. That I would drop everyone and everything right this second and go running out the door, just to be in his fabulous company once more (something I absolutely would not do for any straight man alive, with the possible and partial exception of one, and no you haven’t heard about him on here).

Maybe that will happen someday. I can hope, right?

And, in the meantime, I can also hope, perhaps more realistically, that you will read, and enjoy, The Will Of Venus (Otherwise Known As A Fairy Tale for Superwomen).

Please do.

Connect with Cynthia on Twitter and Instagram, find her book Birds Of Wonder here, and learn more about Cynthia here.