James Fuller the Fortunate

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    Fuller. Yeah. Well. I met the fiend about eight years ago in a used bookstore by the Borges shelf. Even though it should have been obvious – because not every guy groks both Borges and cats, but as I am almost as direct a proportion a recluse in my private sphere as I am flamboyant in my public life, it was not heels over head at first sight.

   In retrospect, he did look the part of my future fiend. He’s a lanky 6’1” (& ½, he says); unruly straightish chocolate hair; brown eyes in which it’s hard for the uninitiated to read the feast of mischief; most annoyingly, he has thick black eyelashes. Stupid cow! How does he get those? He’s a jumble of Celtic bloods with one unexpected Guatemalan grandmother tossed in there. He’ll be 36 in mid-September. The relationship is impossible. Along the slow, increasingly obsidianly hilarious way, I became irrevocably smitten. Does it matter that he’s tall, dark, and handsome? Maybe. It matters that he’s the funniest man to ever touch down on the planet.

    Fuller seeped into my bloodstream stealthily. It took years of odd friendship for me to get that he was the hemoglobin, the essential alchemic stuff, in my blood. Luck likes him too because he is so diabolically amusing, and she always falls for wry.

     For drolls, he plays keyboard in a commercially-failed (tho, vrai, you couldn’t actually say it prevailed enough to fail …) but earnest band called The Tikals. His gargoyle humor ain’t for the squeamish. Most of my friends specialize in harsh & horrible humor, hallelujah, but Fuller is the royal flush, sans toot doot.