Bill Dawes - January 9, 2008

I am not much of a reality TV guy, but recently, at the behest of many of my friends, I Tivo'd an episode of "Project Runway" on Bravo to watch Elisa Jimenez; the bizarre, beautiful, worn, alien, "spit-marking" designer who, I was told, seems to spend the end of every episode wincing and waiting for the inevitable axe. She and her crazy antics have been the subject of numerous late night talk shows, blog posts, and even Margaret Cho's Off-Broadway show. Sometimes she's admired, but the general consensus seems to be that, at some point in her life, the cheese slid off her cracker.

Begrudgingly, I watched an episode where Elisa had to make a casual outfit for a male model. Since Ms. Jimenez ONLY designs "couture" - on the body - she found herself in a self-imposed conundrum. Out of respect for the love she shares with her partner in New Mexico, Elisa never touches other male bodies. In an interview sidebar, she aired her apprehension, stating, "My current lover is the only man I've ever made clothes on."

Hmm....that's interesting.

Because for more than two years, she made clothes on, and for... ME.

But she wasn't necessarily lying...

Confused? I hope so.

If you're patient enough to read the rest of this entry, though, your confusion will clear and you will have read a strange and heartbreaking story. There is not an ounce of exaggeration or fabrication in it. I took no creative license; this isn't a poignant Denzel Washington movie. The conversation that happened on a fairly recent Saturday afternoon is recounted almost verbatim, transcribed cleanly from an audio clip running incessant loops through my cerebellum for the past two years. The preternatural conclusion of my relationship with Elisa is probably the weirdest thing I've ever experienced.

It may also be the saddest.

Six years ago this past October, I approached a girl on the corner of 47th Street and 9th Avenue in Manhattan. It was the first Saturday of October. For anyone who doesn't know The City, early October is smack in the middle of the perennial Indian Summer; a period that, along with Spring, serves as a kind of magical bookend for the warm weather months in New York. It is the time, mostly, that Manhattanites fall in love.

I knew her by sight. A mutual friend, Phalana, had taken me to one of her Soho fashion shows earlier in the year and I remember thinking she was one of the oddest and sexiest women I had ever laid eyes on. I don't remember how I approached her since I didn't know her name, but according to Elisa, I stopped in front of her on the corner of 47th Street and 9th Avenue and said, simply:

"Hey, Elisa."

Whereupon she stopped and looked at me quizzically, without any recollection of having met.

"Do I know you?" she offered.

"Hi, I'm Bill, nice to meet you," was my flat-footed response.

"Hi, I'm Elisa."

Months later, despite my subsequent playful protestations to the contrary, she insisted that hearing her name was the ONLY reason she would have stopped to speak to a stranger on the street. Whatever the case may be, the result was us standing there for an awkward, red-faced three minutes, shuffling imaginary dust off the concrete sidewalk with shy shoes, stammering and stuttering our way through the beautifully painful first conversation.

We discussed our mutual friend Phalana, blushed a little more, awkwardly parted, and then retreated to our apartments, conveniently positioned catty-corner to each other. I bounded up the stairs two at a time and called Phalana to inquire about Elisa. I could feel her Cheshire grin through fiber-optic cable all the way from Los Angeles -- Elisa had just called as well, with a similar breathless inquiry.

That was it. Elisa and I fell in love. Quickly. For two, maybe three days, we played coolly cynical, dipping our toes into the crocodile-infested waters of new love. After less than two months, we'd already made that delicate and unspoken pact that lovers often make: one of us isn't getting out alive.

In a turnabout on the clichéd path down which many of my relationships have run, with Elisa I was cast in the role of the staid, nerdish adult. She was the tattooed and reckless wild child who fecklessly made out with girlfriends at parties -- dying her hair and/or inking her body bimonthly with the brash abandon of a teenage runaway. I watched nonplussed as Elisa flitted through her life unconcerned with humdrum things like health insurance or filing taxes; completely unfettered by financial obligation or even the internet. She "bartered" clothes for food, rent, supplies, and, often, presents for me. And when she wasn't bartering, meditating, hand-sewing, or caring for her 7 year old daughter, she was consuming me with a sex drive that was ... in a word ... epic.

For two years we lived like that. But, as is often the case with fast love, the things about her that most intrigued and titillated me slowly became the things that drove me batguano. I started lying, first to myself... and then to her. Unable to continue wearing a mask, though, I finally steeled myself to tell her it was over.

The two of us flew west for the AFI Film Festival where a film I'd recently shot was being screened. I decided to do it there....not in the audience during the movie, but while we were out in Los Angeles. After the screening, we returned to our suite at the Chateau Marmot where, in a sardonic twist, Elisa told me she was in love with me and, for the first time in her life, wanted to marry someone.

Clearly the gods enjoy the misery of human courtship.

I took a breath and told her that I was, once again in my life, not ready. I'll never forget the look in her eyes when she absorbed what I had said. The visceral u-turn from hope to despair she underwent seemed to literally change the color of her irises, like a living thing died inside them. Elisa crumpled to the floor in a melodramatic heap of femininity, hyperventilating and crying with a ferocity that was, in my mind, previously and exclusively relegated to the mythical pathos of Medea. As much as I wanted to backtrack, to accept the indirect proposal while she writhed on the beige carpet, my mouth could only move up and down silently; any words held in submission by an emotional Jiu Jitsu choke.

And so, almost three years after it had begun, we had that breakup; the type of breakup that only results from true love. It got ugly. Friends got involved, rumors flew, more lies were perpetrated; and all of this was exacerbated by the fact the her seven year old daughter was now caught in the middle of the pain and depression. Even after the "official" breakup, months and months of make-up sex, negotiation and recrimination spiraled down a tortuous path of searing shame and regret. There was only one thing I could do.

I met someone else.

I fast tracked the relationship so my new girlfriend could move in, knowing full well that part of the reason I was doing it was to erect artificial barriers to physically pry myself from my habitual and habituated connection to Elisa.

It worked.

Once my lover moved in, got a key and scribbled her name on the mailbox, it was over with Elisa. The dripping faucet of our broken relationship finally closed. No more fights. No more mad scrambling and impromptu stripteases in the corridors of my co-op. However, the news of the move-in crushed Elisa and she told me, in no uncertain terms, never to talk to her again, never to approach her or her daughter on the street, and, even more specifically, to walk across the street if I ever did happen to see her. Since she lived around the corner, this would not be the simplest of tasks.

Nevertheless, for the next year I did it: I walked on the side of the street opposite her apartment. I abruptly changed direction when I saw her (often to the confusion of my current lover), and did everything in my power to respect her wishes. And then, suddenly, I stopped seeing her.

About six months after my last peripheral glance of her with her daughter on 9th Avenue, Phalana called to tell me Elisa was hit by a car in London. She was crossing the street with her daughter and was blindsided; apparently a common occurrence for Americans abroad because of the inversion of the driving patterns. Phalana told me that Elisa pushed her daughter clear out of the way and took the hit head on. She had just emerged from a week long coma when Phalana called. Elisa had broken her neck, hip, back, leg, and skull. Doctors were afraid she might never walk again.

My knees buckled. I sat on the edge of my bed, slack-jawed and speechless. It affected me in a way that belied the roiling sea of emotions just below the surface that I'd been repressing for almost a year.

Immediately, I sent letters, emails, flowers, anything I could think of to get in touch with her and let her know I was thinking of her and that I cared. Her "friends" received everything I sent and either returned it or threw it away. They wrote emails back to me that ranged from pleas "to stay away" to assertions that I was "the Devil." Since they wouldn't let Elisa speak or write to me, I responded that if I were the Devil, I would banish them all to hell and have imps buttfuck them for eternity.

About five months after the call from Phalana, I started seeing Elisa around the neighborhood again (wait... I DO live in Hell's Kitchen... hmmm). The first time she walked by me, it was like seeing her ghost. She was a shell of the woman I used to know. Her sturdy and bronze Mexican legs now looked and moved like pale stilts. Her improbably wide-set and smiling green eyes that once upon a time made her look like some impossibly sexy human cat hybrid -- eyes that made people stop in their tracks when she walked in a room -- now seemed sullen and lost. She now seemed excessively wrinkled, tell-tale rivulets of pain and wear etched into her face. Yes, it had been years since I saw her up close, but it appeared like the accident had aged her exponentially.

I made a halting step forward to say something, to approach her, but she floated right past me. Clearly, Elisa still wanted nothing to do with me.

Before I knew it, I started seeing her all the time. For months, I would walk right by her at least three times a week. I would get mysterious itches on my scalp as I looked down to avoid eye contact. I would shuffle into a store whenever I saw her walking towards me on the sidewalk. Then, once again, the run-ins suddenly stopped. I assumed she finally moved from the hurly-burly of New York - a city that never seemed to suit her earthy, eccentric sensibilities. .

And then this past October, Elisa and I had our penultimate meeting...

I'm going into a store to buy some juice and Elisa walks in right behind me on her cell phone. She doesn't acknowledge me and goes immediately to the back of the store. I thought it was odd that she didn't run away when she saw me in there, but clearly she was still ignoring me.

I quickly finish my shopping and cross the street to go into another store. As I walk out of that one and turn uptown towards 47th Street, I see her walking downtown straight towards me. I decide not to duck. We are about to cross paths. We begin to sheepishly look at each other, when, for the first time in two years -- EYE CONTACT!

I stop in my tracks. I have to say something...

"Hey, Elisa!"

Elisa stops and looks at me quizzically, seeming to have no recollection of ever having met me.

Finally, she gives a nervous laugh and says, "Do I know you?"

I inhale a cloud a confusion into my thoughts.

"Very funny," I laugh as well, covering my befuddlement as best as I can. Part of me thinks she is deliberately mirroring our meeting years ago.

However, when she continues, there is no con in her voice, no tongue in her cheek. There is only a trembling and frightened sincerity, halted by a sporadic nervous laugh that only reminds me of the first meeting all the more.

She continues, "I'm sorry, I had a near death experience not too long ago, and I don't remember a LOT of people from my past."

"Wait...you really don't know me?"

"I didn't even remember someone from my childhood when I went back home to Dallas."

"Hi, I'm Bill. Nice to meet you."

"Hi, I'm Elisa."

My head starts to pound.

"I don't know if you knew about what happened to me, Bill."

"Yeah, I heard."

"I was walking with my daughter and a car came. I pushed her out of the way and got hit. I broke my neck and skull. I'm a miracle, actually!"

"Yeah, it sounds like it."

".....did we know each other well?"

"Very."

"I'm sorry."

"For some reason, deep down, I think you know who I am."

"All I know is for some reason my heart is beating really fast right now."

Something about that sentence cut me to the quick, affecting me in a way that even today, almost two years later, I feel fraudulent trying to describe. It took my breath. It made my tear ducts shudder and wretch. It made me want to puke up my soul and ask God for a new one please.

Finally, I recover, and say, "Well, Elisa, you look fantastic and happy. I'm glad you were able to recover so well."

"Thank you."

"I'll see you around the neighborhood."

On the foggy walk home, I remembered that it was six years earlier, ON THE VERY SAME CORNER, AND ON THE FIRST SATURDAY OF OCTOBER, that we'd met on that very first occasion. Both meetings started with me summoning up the courage to say;

"Hey, Elisa."

When I got home and told my girlfriend, she instinctively shrunk away from the romantic tragedy of it all and tried to dismiss it as something commonplace. Between deluded rationalizations, she inhaled her cigarette like it held salvation for a relationship that, not unironically, would very soon see its last day.

When I had time to process the conversation, I was confronted with the unsettling fact that after all the time we spent together, Elisa had absolutely NO recollection of me. No recollection of the pain and heartbreak and tears and screaming. No recollection of the lies and betrayal, of the loss and remorse.

I told the story to other women I dated in the past or women with whom I was friendly and, to a person, they reacted like it was the most horribly depressing story they could imagine; like they had been stabbed in the heart. Tearing up, a few expressed the faintest hope that this was a serendipitous chance for Elisa and I to start anew.

When I told my one of my best guy friends, Garret Dillahunt, that Elisa had no memory of me or the relationship, he said, plainly, "Damn, I gotta send all of my exes to England."

POSTSCRIPT

I kept seeing Elisa around the neighborhood. (I realize now that she was back from her home in New Mexico to film "Project Runway".) I approached her one more time, trying to keep a casual air of affection towards her and her daughter. The daughter looked at me askance, with the keen intuition of a loving child, while Elisa managed one terse, forthright and confident paragraph.

"I found out who you were. I asked my mom about you. She said that you were a karmic debt that I had to pay. And I paid for it dearly. But that I should wish you well and give you blessings and move on."

Once again, like three years before on the hotel room floor, my mouth moved slowly like a carp. This time she was calm, almost ebullient, as she spun on her heels and walked hand-in-hand with her daughter up 8th Avenue.

For the next week I slept fitfully or not at all. My skeletons barged out of their closet and my ghosts tunneled up from my subconscious. They reclined comfortably, smoked ghost cigarettes, and had a big fucking party staring at me while I squirmed in existential torment.

Unable to quiet all the voices, finally, I wrote her a card, ending our communication with the same words that started it over six years earlier:

"Hey Elisa,

I am not a karmic debt that you had to pay. We were two people who were very much in love. For reasons I can't seem to explain now, I got scared, and it ended badly. But it was real. For both of us, and maybe the most intense thing either of us had ever experienced. Someday, you might want to know more about it, and when you do, I'll be here waiting.

p.s. The last movie we saw together was "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." At the time, even though we hadn't broken up yet, we joked that was us. I guess we had no idea how right we were."

I snuck into her building and slid it under the door to her apartment.

And then I never saw her again.

Until "Project Runway."

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NOTE TO THE READER

Elisa was voted off Season 4 of "Project Runway" in the 6th episode when the designers had to make an outfit out of stuff from the Hershey's store. I guess I can understand since the dress has these sleeve things that look like swim floaties. What I can't understand is why she, or the producers of Project Runway, didn't bring up her amnesia. In the episode where Elisa was kicked off, they finally got into her accident but never even touched on the memory loss. Maybe she forgot that she ever made clothes for me and that I was her male guinea pig for years before "Project Runway." Maybe she forgot she had amnesia.

If that is the case, I will, like a fool and comic, end this story with a bittersweet joke. It is a photograph from "PAPER MAGAZINE". It was from a bizarre fairy fantasia fashion show of Elisa's. It is a picture that, if I had "pride," could be used against me as blackmail material. It is at once humiliating and hilarious.

The picture simultaneously proves two things:

1. She made clothes on, and for, me.

2. I was pussy-whipped.

But, like I said, it doesn't prove she is a liar. I just shake my head and, with a smirk that covers a thousand heartaches, remind myself that she is ... forgetful.

***A fan of mine has already submitted this to Digg with a great title. DIGG THIS PIECE SO MORE PEOPLE CAN READ THIS CRAZY STORY!

Posted by Bill Dawes at 7:53 PM