BILMS playlist entry #6

My Bloody Valentine: “Only Shallow”



I still have no idea what My Bloody Valentine are singing about, but the music sounds terribly boozy. So, in that spirit, I’ve chosen this song from the playlist to mark the release of my partner’s book, Falling Off the Catwalk. The official release date is August 8, 2008—we’re pretending China is throwing the big party for us! The book covers roughly a year and a half during which Robert left a job at Hewlett-Packard to move to Europe to become a fashion model. During this time, he is an alcoholic, a fundamentalist Christian (a sect of his own making, based on close-reading of the bible), and totally in denial about being gay.

Reading the drafts of this memoir, more than anything, I am blown away by Robert’s willingness to be as frank as possible. He recounts, for example, a time when he was picked up by a German guy on a train, went back to the guy’s apartment in Hamburg, had the guy smear his body with chocolate pudding and lick it off during sex. Robert than catches a train to Cologne without bothering to shower because he “likes being chocolaty.” If this happened to me, I’m not sure I would have the guts to talk about it in a book—even if I put it in a novel and hid behind the claim that the whole story was fictitious. Furthermore, Robert does not play the scene for laughs, but fills it with pathos—even after such incidents of guy-on-guy pudding sex he still can not bring himself to recognize he is gay.

Before I met Robert and heard his story, I had no idea that most alcoholics have only fragmented memory of what occurred during their years of heaviest drinking. Due to Robert’s near compulsive need to document his life--through entries in a daily planner and extensive journaling (and video recordings, some of which have been placed on YouTube)--he was able to reconstruct much of the time lost during his modeling days. Robert, for example, explains that he has no memory of certain roommates, or meetings with certain friends, and only knows they occurred from his documentation. It gives Falling Off the Catwalk the interesting quality of being simultaneously both a memoir and a piece of journalism.

Obviously, I am the least objective person on the planet when it comes to this book. Still, I am very proud that my boyfriend has put this story in print with such honesty and without glamorizing this difficult period in his life.