He Who Laughs, or The Complete Idiot's Guide to Intimacy

Um, will you follow me? Please? @mrisaacoliver 

My parents, brother, and I were driving around with my grandmother in Ohio over the holiday. Hers being a town of staggering smallness, she knew the inhabitants of every house we passed. Invariably something horrible had happened to all of them. In that house on the right lived a couple who threw a barbecue one summer – their sons got too close to the fire, and the fire “got the boys.” Just down that road a ways was a young woman from Mexico who gave up everything she knew to live on her new husband’s farm – his tractor flipped over on him in a ditch. Next cornfield over belonged to a newly-retired couple who were trying to be more active in their third act – on one of the morning walks they were really starting to love, they were mowed down by three bicyclists from out of town who didn’t slow on their turns and didn’t see them, you know, over the corn.

We began to dread every new story. It was a census of fatal mishaps. Her eyes would catch sight of a house in the lessening distance, and she’d say, “Oh, you know who lives in that house? Ralph Lerner, from church,” and after a while we’d all shout, “No! Stop! Don’t tell us anything else about Ralph Lerner; we don’t want to get attached or start to care about him!”

Later in the trip, my grandmother said to me, “I never wanted to marry your grandfather, you know.” I was standing in her doorway, and we’d been talking about New York. She continued, “I wanted to move to the city and become a journalist. But Grandpa’s love was like God’s love. It took hold of me and my life.” Another night we were dropping her off at her retirement home, and as she got out of the car she said, “Sometimes I shake my fist up at heaven and I say, ’Darn you, Hal; you left me here!’” She hugged my mother and said to her, “I’m ready to go. I’m just ready to go, you know?” and we walked her to her door. I didn’t know what to say. I cannot imagine being ready to go. But there’s time for that, I suppose. It’s a life’s work.

I hadn’t been on Grindr in a couple weeks, being so busy with show preparations, but on Sunday during some downtime I logged back on. Two minutes later I got a message from someone that said:

omg you’re so gross dude

Just an out-of-the-blue, friendly memo that my face is gross. Amazing, and altruistic. I deleted Grindr, figuring I could do without that kind of energy in my life, at least for a few days. Apparently I deleted it just in time.

Thank you to everyone who came to my show on Friday. Thank you as well to the staff at Ars Nova, my director Jason Eagan, and my co-star John Behlmann. It was an evening I will cherish for a long, long time.

Photos: Alexis Buatti-Ramos

I’m sorry it’s been so long since I posted. I’ve been working on my show, which I perform tonight at Ars Nova. Very, very excited. And nervous.

But! I do have entries coming — I’m writing them now. I appreciate those of you that nudged me. Stay tuned.

I’m off to the Middle of Nowhere, Ohio with my parents and brother to visit family, write my show, and count Bachmann bumper stickers. Maybe I’ll see a shirtless farmhand, and maybe he won’t beat me with a tire iron for taking a Hipstamatic picture of him with my phone. Safe and happy holidays to you all. Back in a week.

The MTA should have them on payroll — god knows they’ve got everyone else on. Also, swoon for the Alexander Skarsgård doppelgänger on saxophone.

I was hiding in the kitchen at a holiday party near the people I knew and the champagne punch I’d just met when I caught sight of a good-looking young man sampling cocktail wieners from of a Crock-Pot on the counter. I’d had half of a pot cookie and two cups of punch, so I felt emboldened enough to lean in and ask him, “How are those wieners?” Unfortunately I wasn’t emboldened enough to ask this in a flirtatious tone, so I sounded like I was conducting a door-to-door survey for Crock-Pot.

“Good,” he said, spearing three wieners on a toothpick. Still not quite nailing a flirtatious tone, sounding more like someone’s inquisitive niece, I asked, “You take three at a time?”

“Yup,” he replied, popping them into his mouth, adding, “I’m a triple threat.”

I laughed congenially, trying to imagine the shadow his strong jaw would cast in the glow from my Christmas tree. Pleased, he reached across four people to tap his friend on the shoulder and tell him, “This guy asked me if I was taking three at a time, and I said, ‘Yeah, I’m a triple threat.’” They laughed, loudly.

This is why I don’t go to parties — they’re open mic nights for attractive people. And we laugh, because their arms are priceless heat conductors. We laugh, and we dance for them, and when they say jump we say how high. And if, when they’re done laughing at their own nonsensical joke, they turn back to us and dare us to put four cocktail wieners in our mouth, we do it.

Yes, I put four cocktail wieners in my mouth because he told me to. When I looked up his friend had joined him. They were angled towards each other a little — a bitchy migratory V — and they were watching me make not-quick-enough work of a mouthful of spiced meat. His friend leaned in and whispered something in his ear, and they both laughed. It was like middle school, it was like they were bullies in the fucking gay schoolyard, where the sandbox is full of cheap coke and the slide is shaped like a raised eyebrow.

I couldn’t have gotten home to Frasier faster.

ISAAC: Hey, I want to talk to you. I want to give you a piece of my mind.
SHAME: Shame.
ISAAC:  Yes.
SHAME: Shame. Say it with me: shaaaaame.
ISAAC: Oh my god, yes, shame, you’re a movie called Shame.
SHAME: It’s also what I’m about.
ISAAC: (palm to forehead) That is clear.
SHAME: I seem to have hit a nerve. It’s OK — I did at Cannes, too.
ISAAC: No, no. What hit a nerve is that you didn’t hit a nerve. Look, I know shame. I traffic in shame. I once rode the subway 95 blocks before realizing I had cum in my hair. And last night I ate an entire bowl of cereal in the dark.
SHAME: Jesus.
ISAAC: You could’ve been great. You could’ve been incisive and fair, painful and seductive. You could’ve been a complicated experience, impossible now given your grey color palette and ludicrous soundtrack –
VIOLINS: (screeching) Sex with strangers!
CELLOS: (moaning) Can’t connect!
PIANO: (furious arpeggios) Horrible life!
ISAAC: Instead you’re judgmental and heavy-handed and kind of miserable.
SHAME: I bet you enjoyed my sex scenes, though, you dirty fuck.
ISAAC: Not really.
SHAME: Not even Michael Fassbender’s big dick?

MICHAEL FASSBENDER’S DICK: Not even me?

ISAAC: I mean, my god, does the thing wear a sock and a shoe?

I saw a screening of this tonight and really enjoyed it. There were scenes I could barely watch, I was so uncomfortable. Charlize Theron hits it out of the park — a perfect performance. And she and Patrick Wilson are just so beautiful I half-expected the screen to burst into diamonds, which would then rain down on us, scarring our faces and gouging our eyes, making them onscreen together our last sight, which would be OK.

Last week I went to a Q+A with Joan Didion at Symphony Space, during which a young woman approached the microphone and said she had a question about redemption. “A lot of times,” she said, “when people have experienced despair and loss like you have they still have a moment of redemption at the end.
Even in something like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which you mention in your book, there’s that image of the blue ocean and the beautiful world, there’s that redemption, and I didn’t find any in your book, so I’m wondering: did you have that moment?”

“No,” Joan Didion answered, “I didn’t.” The young woman paused, and said, “Okaaaay,” and then asked, “So, what, there isn’t any?” to which Joan Didion said, “That was not my experience, I’m sorry,” and for the tiniest of seconds the room buzzed with this crazy energy, a couple hundred people jointly terrified and considering mortality, until the young woman’s final “okaaaay” as she slunk back to her seat allowed for laughter.

I just thought that was the wildest thing.

And powerful:

Stay with us, Jonah. We hear you and are sending you LOVE.

My coworker Brigham, his boyfriend Zac, and their friend made this video which is all over the Internet today. Ten bucks says they’re on Ellen by the end of the month:

Way better than this trash — the “SuperFestive!” reboot, complete with Santa handing out Macy’s coupons to innocent children, Justin Bieber fucking shopping, and Mariah slutting it up with a silver bell:

You may recall that not long ago I spilled wine on a date. Since then, I also spilled wine on my laptop and, like my date, there’s been a radio silence from it since — because it’s dead. I killed it. 

An autopsy was performed at the genius bar at Lincoln Center. The last thing I wanted was to have a smug genius tell me the bad news. It turns out there are only smug geniuses — apparently vast knowledge humbles no one – so a smug genius told me the bad news. I tried to make a joke about the wine, and my laptop was more responsive than him. “Whoo-boy, liquid damage?” he said, tossing his lanyard 360 degrees around his neck, “I don’t have to tell you, man, that that is devastating to a laptop.” I carried mine out in its pink case (coffin, now), and consoled myself with a new stomach-sleeper pillow from Bed Bath and Beyond.

I mean, at the end of the day it was only a laptop, and my laptop at that; I wasn’t coordinating diplomatic efforts on it, I was putting pictures of Darren Criss in a folder. 

That being said, since I’ve now laid waste to romance and technology, I will henceforth drink all of my wine out of this:

Late to the party on this one — it’s all over Gay Facebook — but I’m posting it anyway. The friends and family rushing forward at the end really got me:

I went to Las Vegas for the very first time last weekend for my friend (and boss) Robin’s wedding.

My co-worker and co-wedding guest Heather and I could only afford flights at ungodly hours, so our plan was to meet at JFK at 5:15 AM. I can never sleep the night before a flight — I’m too worried that I’ll miss my flight, that the plane will crash, that the person next to me will have brought food from home — so at around 2:15, after a particularly touching episode of Roseanne, I decided to just shower and head to the airport. How strange to start your day as everyone else is ending theirs; the drunks looked at me with pity right before they fell and hit their heads.

You’d think airport security would be a breeze at 3:15, but the line was shockingly long. After a few moments a TSA lady came up to me and asked, “Are you alone?” My god, is it that obvious? I thought, checking my face for fresh tears, and she clarified, “Are you traveling alone?” “Yes and yes,” I replied, and she whisked me off to what I hoped would be a fabulous singles-only line but was instead the employee security line. I took off my belt and shoes with the Hudson News ladies and the guy who buffs the floors. Take that, paired-offs.

Breakfast at 3:30 in the Jet Blue terminal (that is turkey sausage, not a pickle):

On the plane Heather and I took a Valium and two valerian root, respectively, and tried with minimal success to sleep. After a while we gave up and flipped back and forth on our TVs between Paula Deen stuffing butter into potatoes and the Detroit Humane Society rescuing abused dogs. The girl in the window seat brought — you guessed it, say it with me — FOOD. FROM. HOME. A Ziploc baggie full of pretzel bites and a Bosc pear, a fucking Bosc pear that she chomped and slurped and nibbled at until it was seeds and a stem, and I’m convinced she only stopped there because they turned the lights back on. Shortly after that we landed and, with about eighty minutes of sleep between us, hit Vegas.

We stayed at the Luxor, an Egyptian-themed hotel at the south end of the Strip that was shaped like a pyramid and as ludicrous as we’d hoped. The world’s brightest light beam shoots up from the pyramid’s point, presumably so all of the people stumbling around the lobby drinking margaritas out of helmets on their heads could find the hotel.

Other hotels had headliners like Elton John and Rod Stewart; ours had Criss Angel and Carrot Top, enough to turn your sex organs into Sylvia Plath. In line at the Egyptian Starbucks we overheard people complaining about their pyramid rooms, so when we were offered an upgrade to a room in the newer tower annex we took it, and it was actually very nice.

And look, so you don’t spill your drink:

I was grateful, having left my martini helmet at home. Getting ready for the wedding:

Robin and John were married at Aureole in the Mandalay Bay. It was beautiful, and I don’t have any pictures of it because I was too busy crying. After the ceremony we had cocktails and climbed into a 24-person limo that took us to the Las Vegas sign, where a jester was officiating a Renaissance wedding:

And an Elvis was officiating a wedding that will surely be annulled by the bride or the groom’s parents:

Just to put it out there, I got the bouquet:

For the next two days we explored. We wandered up and down the Strip, stopping in each casino, putting a dollar or five into a machine. I got fifteen dollars back at one point and, even though I’d put more than that in over the course of the weekend, it felt like winning. Evening penny slottage:

Morning penny slottage:

Context is roundly discouraged. It’s entirely possible to spend multiple days indoors, and if you miss daylight there are plenty of hotels that simulate it on their ceilings. And if you’d like, giant conveyor belts can carry and your margarita helmet out of a hotel, up and over the highway, and right into another hotel, which is playing the same Not Quite Katy Perry music as the last.

The Paris:

New York New York:

The Chandelier Bar at the Cosmopolitan:

(The Cosmopolitan was a bit much.)

Waterfall (!) at the Aria:

Gondoliers at the Venetian:

This is indoors:

I took many more pictures inside the Venetian until I remembered that I WAS TAKING PICTURES OF FAKE VENICE.

Fight Night at the MGM Grand:

Hourly volcano eruption at the Mirage:

Gorgeous Bellagio fountains:

Chihuly flowers on the Bellagio lobby ceiling:

My favorite casino by far was at the Monte Carlo, which, compared to the smoky-trashy Excalibur or the thumpy-flashy Caesars Palace, felt positively subdued:

We visited a majority of the casinos on the Strip, but to the Monte Carlo we remained true. The air was scented, the penny slots were always open, and their dancing ladies seemed the happiest — perhaps they’re getting business-management degrees debt-free, and I’m sure the Monte Carlo will help with job placement, I just got that vibe, I love you Monte Carlo:

The mayors:

We saw formal trackwear. We saw a man using his drink as a cane. We saw Elvises, Freddie Kreugers, Spongebob Squarepantses, storm troopers, Mickey and Minnie Mice, and Zach Galifianakises. There was always an oxygen bar, an aqua massage, and secondhand smoke within immediate proximity. We could get a steak and a martini before we could get a newspaper (which, by the way, was fine by me). At every street corner a minimum of twelve men and women thrust strip club flyers at us. A man with snakes in front of the Planet Hollywood scared me, and then the Planet Hollywood scared me. A showgirl posing in her skimpies on the sidewalk asked a mother and father how old their son was — “Oh, mine’s three,” she then said, “he’s always going for my camera, too.”

There was a marine ball at the Mirage, and a marine asked me if I wanted to buy him a drink. At first I was tempted, since many gay porns commence in such a manner, but so do hate crimes so I pretended not to hear him.

And the buffets — oh, the buffets. We ate orange chicken amongst Egyptian ruins and snow crab legs in a French town square. At a crazy-expensive breakfast buffet I filled my plate with pumpkin pancakes next to Not Quite Kardashians whose leopard-print dresses from the night before could no longer contain their pumpkin pancakes.

On our last day we took a bus to Fremont Street to see the old Strip and the first casinos, and on our journey we saw a slightly different Vegas:

I really loved Fremont Street:

On the red-eye back to New York we again tried to sleep — no dice. I didn’t have headphones so I watched The Smurfs without sound and, man, can that Neil Patrick Harris wear a pair of Dockers. Oh, and guess who sat in the row in front of ours? Bosc Pear Girl. Thankfully she hadn’t brought any food from her goddamned hotel, and she ate Terra chips at 4 AM just like everybody else.

As we took off into the night I looked out our window and could see the lights from the Strip, including, yes, the douchebeam from the Luxor. I kind of loved all of it, I must admit. But three days was enough for now. The simulated times of day and conditioned climates may have fooled most of me, but my eczema, ever-intuitive and opportunistic, exploded around my ankles and elbows. It knew the simple arid truth, that underneath it all Vegas is a flash of pleasure, a furious quench of thirst in the middle of a desert.