Happy Birthday Ryan Elston!
A Tribute to the Love of my Life
In Northern Lights (for my love, Ryan O'Connell-Elston) by Ryan Wildstar Cold dreams Like arrogant fireflies Flitter here, and from now on, and then are gone I vow to care for his boundless heart Until my essence is recalled To eternal dust In northern lights Once the un is unspun It whirls the why
An excerpt about how we met — from Ryan Wildstar’s memoir, The Cephalopodic Reveries of An Epicurean Vagabond:
Who Wrote Ulysses?
It was the end of a century. It was 1999 and I was gonna party like it was Y2K. For almost two years I had been sequestered in my room drinking bourbon and mediocre French wine, wallowing in my sorrow over a vintage typewriter in the back of a white trash rambler house I was renting in the outskirts of Seattle from a neurotic, manic depressive mother and daughter. I had to get out. I had to have some kind of interaction with my people . . . gay people.
On January 2nd, 2000, I went to “College Night” at The Cuff, a downtown bar that was ordinarily designated as a leather bar (hence the rather insipid name). That night they were having a special New Year’s party that advertised jock boys and college twinks. Well, this seemed right up my alley. After a year of enduring a steady-stream of sociopathic discourse with my ignorant, white-trash lodgers, I was in desperate need of some kind of culture, even if it was just some superficial gay culture. I needed some queers.
Thus it was that I arrived at The Cuff just before midnight on January 2nd, 2000, dressed in tight-fitting black slacks, my vintage wooden 70s platform shoes, a wide-collared black dress shirt with a gigantic, full Windsor-knotted vintage necktie and a red-paisley smoking jacket. It was a bit much for a local bar in Seattle that typically served people dressed like they were going to change the oil in your car, but I didn’t care. I came to let loose and be me.
They were playing 70s disco and 80s/90s pop songs and, after a string of vodka sodas, I hit the dance floor running. I was in my zone, not really paying any attention to anyone, just happy to be dancing, to be out of the house, not crying, not sad, away from the harpies with whom I was currently incarcerated.
Just as I thrust my head back to Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls” like a seasoned queen, I spotted two very hot young guys on the sidelines, eyeing the dance floor, me in particular. One was a dirty blond beatnik-looking dude, sexy-eyed and deviously handsome. His friend was a bleach-blond Dionysus possessing the face of a boy with the eyes of a God and the lips of a Goddess. I was mesmerized immediately. The two of them clearly seemed to be a couple, sizing me up. I smiled, winked, blew them a kiss and kept dancing. The next thing I knew, as Michael Jackson’s “Off the Wall” died down, the beatnik was suddenly standing before me, arms waving to draw my attention.
“Yes?”
“Hello, my friend and I saw you checking us out. He wants to know if you know who wrote Ulysses?” he hurled at me, crudely.
Who the hell was this ingrate? I was now annoyed. I’d come to escape my sorrows by letting loose on the dance floor, not for “playtime with philistines.”
“What do I get if I answer correctly?” I slithered seductively, channeling my best throaty Tallulah Bankhead. At that, he preemptively turned heel and marched back to his companion, the one I really found sexy. Well, this did not sit well with me at all. I wasn’t going to be insulted by some smug college-aged upstart who’d just discovered On the Road and now esteemed himself the Djuna-fucking-Barnes of The Cuff. I ignored the iconic disco classic that was just beginning to heat up and marched straight over to this obvious newbie and his god-like friend and assailed them. I sized them both up, just as Tallulah might have, and said quite disdainfully, drawing on my classic French literary training, “Homer, obviously.”
The brownish jock laughed, looking as if he’d won some kind of bet that had been wagered between them. However, the beautiful twink boy with his peroxide blond hair and piercing eyes seemed to alight with pleasure. As his friend started to shut me down, he waved his hand in the air to silence his friend and seized the moment to finally speak to me himself.
“Yes, yes . . . Homer, it’s true, wrote The Odyssey, which is also known as Ulysses. We were asking about the Irish writer who wrote a novel called Ulysses.”
“Ah, yes . . . James Joyce,” I retorted. Then, lifting my haughty nose into the air, I leveled a razor-sharp gaze upon them both and volleyed, “Now, can you tell me who wrote The Theatre and Its Double? Les Enfants Terrible? The Thief’s Journal? Have either of you English majors read any French literature?”
For a moment, they both stared at me dumbfounded and then it suddenly became clear, as we all simultaneously broke out into gleeful smiles, that we had perhaps found some common ground that wasn’t readily available at College Night at The Cuff and needed to continue this conversation in a new location.
We absconded from The Cuff to another 24-hour queer watering hole, The Cadillac Grill. There, we sat drinking and discussing literature until the sun arose on January 3rd. While the overly-bronzed beatnik blathered away about his dusty travels, I was titillated to learn that the beautiful blond possessed the same name as me . . . Ryan. From there on in, admittedly, the majority of the conversation was between Ryan and myself. His “straight” friend Bly interjected periodically, though he was clearly out of his depth. At the very least, I surmised that they were not a couple, which gave me some kind of hope, as I had become quite smitten with this scholarly little prince with his bleach-blond locks and boyish good looks. Indeed, I was completely and utterly charmed.
After a long night of banter and discussion, we exchanged numbers but I had mistakenly transposed two numbers of the phone number I gave to him. This could have been the end. But, as fate would have it, he accidentally transposed the same two numbers when phoning me and got through to me when he called a few days later. It was kismet. We met up for coffee and everything I had felt that first night was all there again. I was almost shaking. It was a feeling I hadn’t felt since I first saw Paul walking across campus when I was 17. This terrified me. I couldn’t endure another relationship, could I? It could kill me. He was 7 years my junior and had none of my experiences. He was so much younger than me, a fresh-faced, enthusiastic student of literature and art. He was naïve but he was also brilliant. His mind, his perspective, captivated me. I found that I wanted to talk to him endlessly, which was good because we were both capable of endless conversation . . .
And here we are, 24 years later, still in endless conversation . . . I love you, my love, my best friend, my companion in the stars for eternity. Happy Birthday!
I love that a typo couldn’t keep you two apart. Magic! Happy birthday Ryan. ❤️
Thank you, my love, for this beautiful birthday message. I'm honored. Je t'adore!