Page 22 - Finding Tulsa - Preview

14 Jim Provenzano

chubby teenage frame was nothing compared to his burly muscles. Dick
looked even better wet.
Mom always says Dick Thorson looked like a big Muppet, not a little
one-hander, like Kermit or Ernie, but the big standing ones from way
back. Do you remember Jim Henson’s Cinderella? Do you remember see-
ing something or someone for the first time and knowing it was love with-
out knowing the name for it? I had crushes on Muppets. Is that strange,
any stranger to love a guy only six years your senior? But let’s not jump to
societal issues. Let’s have more nostalgic backstory.
When too many layers had come and gone, Dick and I would peel the
sagging canvas off the frames, prying the staples off with flathead screw-
drivers to salvage the wood. Truly old canvases became floor mats for other
painting projects (It was one of those, complete with foot prints, that I
own). Those naked wet frames worried me. They showed what could hap-
pen if we didn’t believe long enough or hard enough.
I’m thinking about this stuff as I write my speech for my homecom-
ing. The things about me that made me an outcast are what got me this
fame, this resounding revenge. Cliché, yes, but I will revel in it, soak it up
like champagne at thirty thousand feet. Or I would if I weren’t traveling
coach and drinking a rum and Coke.
I click away at my PowerBook while the semi-cute businessclone tries
his hand once more at conversation. I like seeing his uneasiness as I con-
tinue to type through our talk, the way his eyes keep darting down to the
screen, as if I’m recording his blathering, as if I even know what we’re chat-
ting about. I finally notice he’s leaning in closer, so I shut the damn thing
and look him right in the eye, and we talk.
The movie is over. Yes, it starred Hugh Grant. While parents walk
their infants up and down aisles, other folks jockey for the toilet.
He, of course, gets around to the question, which for me will open
that vast cesspool of my opinions, successes, and failures, the question
which will bring up the topics of homosexuality, death, AIDS, sexual frail-
ties, poverty, and riches: “What do you do for a living?”
I tell him.
“How’d you get into that?”
I recite what I tell interviewers, when they ask, and they always do,
how I got my first idea to direct films. If he’d ever had a beer and movie
night in college a few years back, he might know of my The Manipulator
trilogy, a low-budget late ’80s cult classic. The rest are categorized as “gay,”
“experimental,” or both.