My foot has been iced and taped up like this for the past two days. I wish there were some dramatic story to it, but honestly, my big toe was sore, and then I was stupid and aggravated it by wearing an uncomfortable shoe and walking on it, and then the next thing you know I’m on my ass for a couple of days. It hurts if I put any weight on it, but since it’s my toe rather than my ankle, I’ve found myself being able to get from room to room by doing this weird half goose-step march which nobody should see in public.
My partner Kareem has been awesome through all of this, even preparing a foot bath and dealing with me bitch and whine and get needlessly dramatic about how hot the water is. Today, he’s working all day “on movie stuff” while I’m stuck on a couch which my foot propped up which means, well, I guess it means it’s writing time, I think.
K has always been interested in movies. He has intricate knowledge of films the way I have random bits of trivia stuck in my brain, and even though I ripped him apart last week because he thought an Alicia Key’s song on the radio was from Jodeci — 90s MALE R&B GROUP JODECI — I’m worse about film. Hell, I thought Meryl Streep and Glenn Close was the same person until two years ago.
Right after I moved to Miami, Kareem got into filmmaking. He set up a Kickstarter and made a ten-minute short documentary about a fancy show cat that lived in the 80s. Watching him make a film for the first time reminded me the same way of how I started to blog; everything was new and unfamiliar, but the positive feedback from other people a seductive way to continue what you were doing or at least push a little harder.
When he decided his follow-up film would about a man who had an emotional and physical relationship with a captive bottlenose dolphin, I thought he was joking. When Kareem contacted him and decided he’d drive to central Florida to meet the man for an extended interview, real talk, I told him the whole situation was a little fucking weird and told him to be careful if he invites you into his trailer.
That particular project, Dolphin Lover, lasted a couple of months. K worked on the film in our living room while I worked from home, splicing really explicit interview footage to build a cohesive story for hours. “The animation doesn’t show him humping the dolphin enough,” he would say to someone over the telephone about a particular scene. More humping, please.
I told all my friends about his new endeavor. Partially because I was proud, but also because sharing that my filmmaker partner’s latest project was about a guy who had sex with a dolphin was the cocktail party story of the fucking century.
“You know,” my friend Paris said to K and I, “the movie should have really had the tagline, 'A Man with a Porpoise.'”
“Dolphins aren’t porpoises,” Kareem replied. “He’d call us out on that.” The dolphin lover. Damn him, ruining our only chance to contribute to the movie.
When he finished working on the movie, I was happy for him, proud of the creative work made. Paris, the guy who cracked the “man with a porpoise” joke called the movie “surprisingly emotional,” and yeah, that’s how I would describe it as well. That said, I was also glad we could all move on.
Then the movie got into Slamdance, an emerging and low-budget film festival held the same time as Sundance. Kareem and his filmmaking partner Joey had printed up a 1000 stack of fliers of a plain man in a button-down blue shirt against a dark grey backdrop, emotionless and looking directly into the camera. They were going to staple the fliers on telephone poles, the same way indie bands staple fliers for their next show at music festivals at South by Southwest. But you know, instead of a band, it was a guy. And transposed over the man’s face would be the phrase: THIS MAN HAD SEX WITH A DOLPHIN.
“The big letters were my idea,” Kareem said.
The Daily Mail had a field day with this one, and once it was noticed by the Daily Mail, the story made all the gonzo media rounds. Howard Stern interviewed the guy, even said Kareem’s name on the air. I wonder if I would have blogged about Dolphin Lover if I came across this while actively blogging in the early 2000s. I probably would have linked to the piece myself, made a flippant comment, move on with my life. Hopefully, I would have been clever enough to make the “Man with a Porpoise” joke.
So all of that was around three or four years ago. Kareem, Joey, and a couple of other people have been working on a new project the past couple of months. Out of respect - and also because I don’t know how much I can share at this point - I won't give out too many specifics of the film quite yet.
The film has been taking a lot of his time, and even though the subject matter feels “very Miami,” it has required a lot of travel: Puerto Rico for some pickup shots, LA to work on editing. His co-directors and producers are delightful people slightly younger than me, funny, razor-sharp, and good looking. Also, one of those people LITERALLY WON A FUCKING OSCAR, so there’s that shit going on. I’ve seen some of the scenes in-process, and honestly, I think it will be his most successful work to date. Obviously, I am biased.
I’d also be lying off my ass if there wasn’t a tinge of jealousy going on. Old school blogging gave me a taste of micro-celebrity - I’ve had three to five moments where a stranger recognized me on the street and two moments where they were actually giddy. As someone who has never had the highest self-esteem, the attention was welcome, and just enough of it not to feel like your privacy was being violated.
But I don’t think that is what the jealousy is about.
More than anything, K is living his truth right now. I know that sounds fucking ridiculous, and I would never say phrases like living my truth or living my best life out loud to another person without dying inside, but I don’t have a better way to describe it. He’s doing things he's interested in and passionate about, bettering his community while doing so. It's something I really admire about him.
For a while, I demanded myself I match that intensity pound for pound, mile for mile. I imagined us being one of those power couples that luxury magazines would want to write about. I went hard for a couple of years until all this shit that went down this past couple of months where I burned out and gave myself an eight-week time out.
Being on an extended break right now means a lot of sitting and thinking. I’m trying to ignore the voice inside my head, the one that developed from a lifetime of anxiety. That voice telling me that resting is idling, that idling is failing. That same voice chides me while my prop my injured foot on the armrests of my living couch, and it asks me if I am living my best life, my truth, my best truth, whatever the fuck. Am I?
I’ll put it to you this way: if what you are reading now was a documentary, and I was the one being interviewed the same way the guy being interviewed for having relationships with a dolphin was, I’d probably shift a little bit on my stool, feel uncomfortable in my button-down shirt. I’d stare at the camera, look in the camera wide-eyed, give an awkward little laugh and a shrug.
“Not right now,” I’d eventually say to the camera after a long pause. “I’ll get there once I figure everything out.”