Krampromise

Throughout my early thirties, I loved to tell stories on first dates. I considered myself very good at first dates and I decided the stories were why. I didn’t get a lot of second dates, though, so maybe I wasn’t actually good at first dates. And maybe the stories were why. I’ll have to take a poll. If you have dated me, please send a brief email just saying “Yes” or “No.” I’ll figure it out. Whatever the truth is, something was different with Jay, my first long-term boyfriend: we went out and then we went out again and, miracle of miracles, we kept going out. Apparently that’s how these things happen. Who knew?

Jay and I were complete opposites. He worked nights, I worked days; he was white, I was a self-conscious Nilla Wafer; he loved horror movies, vampires, and camping in the woods, I was a God warrior whose idea of roughing it was staying at a hotel with no concierge. But you know what Paula Abdul says about opposites: you take two steps forward, I take two steps back, but when we get together we move in to a beautiful, high-ceilinged apartment in a Philadelphia brownstone with each other after dating for six months.

One of the more interesting differences between us was the way we expressed ourselves artistically. He was a visual artist—paints and sketches mostly, but also photography, makeup, sculpture, models. I worked with words—stories, plays, the solo show I was perpetually attempting to write.

At that point, because it was my first long-term relationship, I didn’t know what a reasonable expectation for two people trying to make a life together was. That’s the thing that romcoms never teach you and short stories about rich white couples who live lives of quiet desperation are too far gone to cover: What is the act of making it? What’s a red flag and what’s just a weird personal detail that you can spin into a charming anecdote? The line is thinner than you think.

We’d had a really stunning meet-cute. He worked in a supermarket and I was in a season where I was eating all of my feelings, so I saw him multiple times a week. I had saved up for months to buy myself a stand mixer, and I was putting it to use on the regular: cakes, brownies, biscuits. I had a lot of feelings. Plus, a stand mixer had been my dream for so long, I didn’t want to waste a second of our time together. There’s little that I love as much as a kitchen appliance. For years, I’d dreamed of a melon-colored stand mixer and a Vitamix, the superpowered blender that can make everything from yogurt to soup. After some arduous months of saving and working overtime, I had one of the two and I was living half of my best, Great British Bake Off life.

This lifestyle naturally leads one to the supermarket quite frequently, and though I’d noticed Jay behind the deli counter more than a few times, I never spoke to him, because I have no game whatsoever and I was really focused on buying a bunch of ingredients for a complicated cake that wouldn’t taste as good as one from a box. And he never spoke to me, because he thought I was, in his words, “a straight businessman.” Honey! He wore glasses but that prescription must’ve needed some work. Picture me shimmying through the aisles of a supermarket, dancing to “Isn’t She Lovely” on the store radio (which, remarkably, lasted my entire visit every time; that song is roughly three years long), carrying a tote bag and pushing a cart full of truffle oil, cake supplies, and a Vanity Fair. Move over, The Rock, there’s a new paragon of masculine heterosexuality on the scene and she’s ready to serve!

Jay and I eventually met in the middle of Philly’s Gayborhood. He was coming from a night out at a bar; I was coming from losing a standup comedy competition. I hadn’t really thought I was a good match for standup; I have trouble memorizing things and also I like to sit. Plus, I was a storyteller and not everything is funny, despite my best efforts. But a friend had convinced me that I needed to be bolder if I was going to make something of myself. “If you wanna be somebody,” my friend told me, “if you wanna go somewhere, you better wake up and pay attention!” (My friend is Sister Mary Clarence from Sister Act II.) The motivational advice of a Las Vegas lounge-singer-turned-nun mixed with the shame of defeat as I passed through the Gayborhood. Then I saw Jay stepping out of Woody’s. “Wake up and pay attention,” Mary Clarence whispered in my ear. I walked up to Jay and said, “You’re the supermarket guy!” He nodded, startled, and then we made small talk as we walked down the street. He was in a rush, so he started to make his exit and almost stepped into the street as a bike came careening past. I grabbed him by the arm and pulled him back—to save him from the bike, not to kidnap him into more conversation, but really this line, also, is thin. He thanked me and went on his way.

The next day I walked into the market, pranced up to the deli counter, and told him, “I saved your life last night.”

“You did?” he replied.

I decided not to entertain his befuddlement. “So I think it’s only appropriate that you give me your number,” I said. The boldness! In the middle of a Sunday afternoon. Who did I think I was? She’s America’s Masc Straight Businessmince Icon, that’s who!

Jay looked stricken, probably because a random man was shaking him down for his telephone number. He gave it to me anyway, though, and told me he was off work in an hour if I wanted to get coffee. I said sure, and spent the next sixty minutes wandering the aisles listening to the second half of “Isn’t She Lovely.”

It was great for a while. We started seeing each other two or three times a week, and within a couple of months it became clear to me that I was in love with him. Surprisingly, he was in love with me, too, despite the fact that we were opposites and I am a little annoying and I was baking constantly (it sounds good but it gets old!). I was shocked by how easy it was to fall in love, after years of bad dates and lonely nights. I was shocked by how much I enjoyed being with him all the time. I was shocked by how perfect everything seemed. But when we moved in together, I had to reckon with some of the more striking differences in our personalities. Jay’s art was primarily focused on darker themes—zombies, sea monsters, dead mermaids, ghosts; you know, the usual. He was particularly into H. R. Giger, the guy who designed the alien from Alien. Jay appreciated him as an artist and as a horror fan, which I could respect but did not like one bit. When we were casually dating, I’d just turn a blind eye to the canvas with the bloody undead skull chilling on his bedroom floor or the plastic replica of Sigourney Weaver’s space nemesis on a shelf directly over his pillow. But when we moved in together, the apartment was flooded with horror, like the hallway in The Shining.

It should be said, I am very averse to horror movies. Horror movies are at the top of a very long list of things that I grew up believing were the devil. At various points in my life, that list also included fortune-telling, psychics, the lottery, episodes of DuckTales with the witch duck Magica De Spell, rock music, Santa Claus, particularly creepy laughs…I could go on. The point is, I had a scattershot but serious fear of dark forces. Besides, I don’t like being scared, so what did I need to be watching a horror movie for anyway? Jay found that perplexing, but you can’t really argue with your boyfriend standing in the middle of the living room screaming “The demons come through the cable wires, even if the film has been edited for network television! That’s how they get you! It’s in the Bible.”

Nevertheless, Jay would try to find common ground, excitedly telling me about movie news concerning the upcoming Alien sequel (get thee behind me, space monster) and inviting me to watch something called House on Haunted Hill (if the house is not on HGTV, you can keep it). “You’ve seen The Exorcist, right?” he’d say to me, making a reference mid-story. I’d reply, “No, crazy. I obviously have not. What you should be asking is ‘Have you seen My Best Friend’s Wedding thirty-seven times, because the answer is yes and this conversation will go a lot better.” Ah, relationships.

Keep scary movies away from me. Particularly if there is some sort of occult theme. I am so serious about it; I will leave the room, which I did many times during the time I dated Jay. “You can sit here and watch that possessed grandma perform a ritual sacrifice if you want; I’ll be in the kitchen boiling some holy water for tea and going directly to heaven.”

Jay and I didn’t talk about spirituality a lot, but he knew I was a Christian and I knew that he was probably agnostic. Occasionally the Bible verse about not being “unequally yoked” would float into my head. Basically, as I’d learned in church, it meant Christians shouldn’t make a household with non-Christians. However, as with much of the Bible, I wondered how much of it applied to gay life. And so I decided to just cross my fingers and hope for the best. Jay assured me that there was nothing related to spirituality in his love of scary movies. I believed this, but every once in a while I would google “How to know if my boyfriend is a devil worshipper.”*1

Sometimes Jay would try to make a placating compromise on a movie night by picking a film that didn’t have horror elements, perhaps as a show that this was not an elaborate campaign to steal my raggedy soul. He’d pick something scary but not occult-y, like an intruder movie or something, but those were even worse. As you know, home invasion as a concept terrifies me, and then you put it on-screen with a nice family of white people and I’m in full hysterics. Bad things happening to white people is a whole genre of horror movies, and I find it deeply disturbing. Put me down as wanting only good things to happen to white people.

Jay, a white, did not see it in the same way. We agreed to disagree about movies. And the soul.

Film criticism aside, I decided it was probably best for our relationship if I shared some sort of common interest with him, so I chose his art. It seemed a good middle ground. More than once, I opened a closet to discover a screaming ghost or a desiccated skeleton, and that wasn’t my preferred way to start the day, but I figured, This is what he makes and I care about him, so I care about what he makes. And also I am locking that closet from now on.

I began looking at the things that he painted, sculpted, or sketched with an artistic eye, saying things like “I love the brushwork on the blood dripping down that zombie’s cheek.” And these were expert opinions, mind you: I took two semesters of art history at Columbia. I’m basically Thomas Crown.

The pivot from frightened God warrior to art critic wasn’t so hard. Jay, as I’ve noted, was very gifted. And I began to see the craft behind the image of a werewolf engulfed in flames. I even started to see how I might be involved in the work as a gift of love. Or so I thought. Jay would sell pieces at a street fair once a month, but, after some observation, I decided that “sell” was too generous a verb. He would lay out some canvases on a blanket and then lean against a wall and smoke cigarettes. “No one is going to buy this undead harpy from you if you’re just standing there looking like a surly British cab driver with a corpse in his trunk, Jay! You have to advertise!” I decided that what his macabre art show needed was a little R. Eric Thomas sparkle! I dubbed myself his marketing manager, created business cards, a mailing list, and a contest. I bought a new blanket, printed out some signs at work, and took to standing in front of Jay as he smoked, making amiable conversation with the passersby like Mrs. Lovett from Sweeney Todd. “Wait! What’s ya rush, what’s ya hurry?! Don’t you want to see a demon mermaid?!”

Alas, my tenure as the Mama Rose of Fleet Street did not last very long. My efforts netted Jay a small mailing list and a blooming resentment. We quickly learned that we weren’t destined to be a family that ran a multimedia empire together, and when the street fair closed down for the winter, so did the marketing arm of the Art Ghoul, LLC. I wanted the passersby to see him the way I saw him, but in so doing I tried to change him. I didn’t want him to change; I loved the person that he was.

By December, however, that aborted attempt to mix business with pleasure was largely forgotten as I focused all my mental energy on an even more monumental and important project: figuring out a color scheme for our Christmas tree.^*2 Having a tree at all in a city is a real hassle, and this was particularly true in our case since we were on the third floor and we’d have to lug it all the way up the stairs, so I needed to make it count. Jay really wanted a tree. And when he talked about it, it seemed homey and romantic and sweet. I made him swear that before we carried it home we’d wrap ourselves in plastic like Kathy Bates in Fried Green Tomatoes to keep from getting covered in tree sap. He consented even though he had no idea what that meant. We picked a date for the tree.

But first! A theme! What’s a Christmas tree without a theme? A busy bush, is what it is. I wasn’t about to have people come into our apartment and think we just put ornaments and lights up wherever we wanted like a couple of normal people. We were a gay couple, after all. And I have a lifelong quest to make everything as complicated as possible. “Cranberry and Pewter,” I declared one night, sailing into the living room and studiously avoiding looking at the person being sawed in half on Jay’s computer screen. “Those are our colors. Not red and gray. Cranberry and Pewter. I’ve already bought the ornaments from Target. Unfortunately, we don’t have any room for any old ornaments or sentimental keepsakes this year. We’re just doing two colors, plus white lights, possibly a museum plaque on the side where I can give some background on my thought process.”

Jay stared at me blankly. It’s wonderful to collaborate.

The tree was, objectively, breathtaking. (Please remember my two semesters of art history at Columbia; this is classically trained objectivity.) We set up one of Jay’s cameras across the room and took a warm, Cranberry-and-Pewter family photo, which got so many likes on Facebook. It was all I ever wanted.

I can’t say, however, if it’s what Jay wanted. I assumed it was because I assumed that’s what a relationship was: getting everything you want exactly the way you want it, a melding of minds but not really a melding so much as my mind staying the same and the other person just sort of being subsumed. That may sound bad to you but I encourage you to think of it as romantic instead.

Close to Christmas, we went to a holiday party with a bunch of Jay’s friends near his hometown. Many of his friends were also horror movie aficionados, and their conversation naturally veered over to old favorites, movie news, sinister fan art they’d found online, and the like. I busied myself with a plate of hummus across the room. As we were leaving, one of his friends stopped Jay and presented him with a gift the friend had been working on. It was an Elf on the Shelf doll, but the red and white clothes had been replaced by black clothes, its skin had been painted green, and its grin had been accentuated with red lips and two tiny white fangs. This was no longer an Elf. “It’s a Krampus!” Jay cried with delight. He hugged it close to himself; I crossed myself even though I grew up Baptist and I wasn’t really sure how to do it.

I knew what a Krampus was, because I’d read David Sedaris’s essay “Six to Eight Black Men.” In some Northern European countries Santa Claus has a sidekick or helper who doles out punishment for bad children. Sometimes that sidekick is a squad of black men, like backup dancers. Other times, that sidekick is a Krampus, a werewolf-looking demon figure. And the punishment? The Krampus drags the children to hell.

“I can’t wait to put this on the tree!” Jay exclaimed.

The ride home was tense: Jay amiably chatting, me having a quiet but steadily escalating panic attack, and our new addition, Santa’s demon friend, radiating heat from the backseat.

One of my spiritual gifts is the ability to spiral out of control at the smallest provocation, and a creature who knows the access code to hell is no small provocation. I started rethinking our entire relationship as we drove back from Jersey into Philadelphia. If Jay loves these dark things so much, I thought, who must he be? Either he is just a different kind of person, someone who likes scary things, or he is conspiring with the elf, the devil, and Pontius Pilate to try to steal my soul. I couldn’t stomach the idea of the latter, so for most of our time together I chose to believe the former. But it never really went away.

I couldn’t shake the idea that my soul was in mortal danger. I felt like if I was a better Christian I would have known what to do in this situation, but gone were my youthful days of zealotry, like the summer I went to a revival and came home convinced I had to break all my Janet Jackson CDs in half. I realized that my interpretation of God warriordom had become laxer, more modern in the years since growing up and coming out. I strove to understand the Bible in context and to apply what I had just started learning about intersectional feminism to my religious beliefs. My deepest desire was to find a way to reconcile my truth as a gay person with my assurance that God not only loved me but had saved me. I didn’t know if it was possible, but I was holding out hope. Still, I wasn’t going to church and I hadn’t in years, but I believed in God and I really didn’t want to go to hell. So, it turned out, hell came to me.

We got home and Jay trotted up the stairs, burst into the living room, and turned to me expectantly. “Can we put it in the tree?” The creature was neither Cranberry, Pewter, nor of the Lord, but he popped it onto a branch midway up, framed it in twinkling lights, and cast me an affectionate grin. He was so happy.

When we first moved into the apartment, we’d had to sign a lease earlier than we needed to secure the apartment. So its halls, which would in my mind soon fill up with horror, sat empty for two weeks as we intermittently brought over a box or two. One afternoon, I popped in and wandered through the rooms, imagining what life would be like for us there. I had never lived with a boyfriend before, and the possibilities of our love nestled in every corner like dust bunnies, hung in the air as sunbeams, echoed off the bare walls.

I rounded the corner into the kitchen, a cramped space that had been converted from a child’s bedroom. The refrigerator had been shoved into what used to be a closet; the linoleum buckled as if in protest. Our home. In the middle of the floor, I saw something new: two pieces of carpet scraps we’d found left over from the previous tenant, arranged into a heart. And on top of that heart, a Vitamix. I let loose an audible gasp. Jay had secretly saved and worked overtime for months to buy it for me. He may have misread me as straight prior to our relationship, but over the course of our years together, he consistently saw me for who I was and showed his love for that person through small kindnesses and large gestures alike. I knelt on the kitchen floor of the apartment we’d soon share and marveled at the person I’d stumbled upon.

A few months later, staring at our new roommate, the Krampus, on our otherwise Cranberry and Pewter tree, I tried to call that feeling back to mind. It wasn’t working. Jay worked overnights, so we were both alone at home a lot. Well, he was alone. I was having a face-off with a doll. Jay would leave the apartment at 10 P.M. and he’d get back around 7 A.M. five days a week. We’d moved in together in October, so by December I was used to puttering around by myself after work at a law firm, watching Scandal on our couch, planning color schemes for future holidays, and slowly driving myself crazy with loneliness. Sometimes we’d argue about his job; I’d press him to find something that would allow us to spend any time together. He’d grow frustrated with me, rightfully pointing out that it wasn’t exactly ideal for him either but that he was trapped. I was trapped in my job, too, but because it was in the daytime, suddenly it seemed less urgent. As much as we made adjustments for each other’s happiness, there were some things beyond either of our controls. I wanted to spend more time with my boyfriend, to enjoy those stereotypically cozy winter nights in front of our perfectly curated tree, watching movies where everyone goes to heaven in the end, if not actually, at least by implication. Instead, I found myself fighting a squatter from the underworld.

Realizing that Jay’s absence and my paranoia put me on the back foot, the Krampus quickly began to terrorize me. Sometimes, I’d be sitting on our IKEA couch and I’d hear it breathing behind me. Was it breathing? Probably not—demons don’t have lungs. I think it was just making noise to mess with me. I found I couldn’t even look in its direction. I’d turn it some nights, moving it to the back of the tree, or just adjusting it so it looked in a different direction. The Krampus always turned back, its beady eyes trained on the spot where I always sat, its forked tongue licking its fangs with anticipation. Sure, Jay probably readjusted it when he came home in the wee small hours of the morning, but there is no way to prove that. You’ll never catch me playing the devil’s advocate, honey. That’s how they get you.

Krampus and I were terrible roommates. It got to the point I couldn’t even set foot in the living room anymore, because you can only fight the forces of evil for so long before you go crazy. I had access to four different rooms and a whole city of experiences; Krampus didn’t have legs that worked. Yet, somehow it had all the power. The living room was canceled; Krampus owned it. When Jay would leave home, I’d shut the door so I didn’t even have to think about it. But Krampus wasn’t satisfied. Krampus wanted more. Krampus’s face would appear in the soap as I washed dishes and shout spoilers for Scandal. Krampus became a recurring guest star in my dreams; it was a surprisingly versatile actor. But I wasn’t beguiled! You can’t tempt me with award-winning subconscious performances, Krampus! I’m a God warrior.

I was, to put it mildly, completely losing my shit. And because Jay and I were, more often than not, ships passing in the night, I was doing it completely on my own. A relationship was supposed to be a refuge, I thought. I didn’t know and I had no experience to judge it by, but I was highly doubtful that it was supposed to be a battle for the soul against your partner. And if I’d thought a little harder, I might have connected my anxiety around my soul to the fact that I’d never been in a relationship this long—my homosexuality was leveling up. I was, actually, afraid of the devil doll in my living room, but I was, unknowingly, also afraid that my happiness with a man was going to damn me.

At the end of one particularly grueling week of spiritual warfare, Jay and I were watching TV on the couch on his night off. I fidgeted. I had to say something. “Don’t say anything,” Krampus growled behind me. A bead of sweat wormed its way down my temple; my breathing got heavier. I’d found myself a captive of my own apartment and now Krampus and Jay were here together and it occurred to me that perhaps this was how it would all end. I turned to Jay. “You have to tell me the truth about something,” I squeaked. “Stop!” Krampus bellowed. The room seemed to shake; I could see my breath as it escaped my lips; the lights started flashing on and off. Well, that last part was okay: they were Christmas lights. But the rest of it: not good. I grabbed Jay’s arm. “Are you a devil worshipper?”

“What?!”

“Are you in league with the darkness? Are you a soul snatcher? Are you and Krampus working together to drag me to hell?!”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Shockingly, I am!” I felt slightly sheepish but soldiered on. “I might be going crazy. But this doll, I think it’s possessed. At the very least it’s really creepy. And I feel like I can’t be in the same room as it. Sometimes it shows up in my dreams. It told me what happens on the season finale of Scandal, which is rude and—”

“Okay, I get it. If it bothers you that much, I’ll just take it down.”

“No!” Krampus shouted.

“No…” I whimpered. “You like it so much.”

“Yeah, but you hate it.”

I nodded. It was just an artfully painted Elf on the Shelf, but I hated it.

Jay plucked it from the tree’s branches and put it in a box. He disappeared to his workroom and I never saw Krampus again. It was a kindness and I told him how much I appreciated it, but I also felt like I’d failed in some way, like I hadn’t been flexible enough. I’d pinned my existential anxiety on his hobby. I had loved but I hadn’t loved hard enough.

For all of love’s complications, I think every couple’s story starts with two strangers who, if they want to survive, must move heaven and hell to reach each other.