Don

Donald Dean Kelly died on June 5th. I found out today. He was my big one. We were twenty six when we met. We walked past each other in the Village late one night and both turned around. He was wearing a giant parka with a pulled up fur trimmed hood. Gushing beard, big ugly 70s glasses. I only saw the tip of his nose. It was love at first nose. We went to a bar and had beers and I played with the rings at the top his brown corduroy pants that zipped down the front. He told me he was a conceptual artist/ live-in nanny. He once wrote on an egg and sent it through the mail to someone. He slept over and in the morning, I walked him to the subway. He stopped - "wait a minute." He came out of an antiques store and placed a kaleidoscope in my palm. And thus began our many decades of Promised Lands and Civil Wars. Most days, he mumbled and stammered but, once in a blue moon, he delivered a joke to rival Carson. River stone smooth. He once found an 8 by 10 foot mirror on the street and we almost died when it shattered carrying it up the marble staircase in my apartment building. We both bled. Death by mirror. An almost Daily News headline - X lover executes his X. It's true what they say about seeing your life flash in front of you. Instead of asking me to change the TV to Channel 7, he'd say "switch it to twenty past." He drew a picture of my plant with chalk on wallet lining. He thought Fred Astaires first name was Freda. He drew a funny picture of the store he dreamed about running  ... I Love Juicy. I thought my fab lifelong friend Lynda was his pretty girlfriend when we first met. I didn't think I stood a chance at being a contender. I was wearing red long johns and green gym shorts one night - he said "you look like a mood." We once (once ???) had a fight and he slept with an old boyfriend of mine to piss me off. He once said re: his houndog proclivities - "I can't help it. I like to have sex everyday and I don't like to jerk off." A friend called us the Taylor/Burtons of the West Village. He drank from my sister Jessies dollhouse tea cup. He phoned me to say my picture was in the Post at a Times Square rally. Thousands of people in the pic. Took me an hour to find me. My head was the size of a no-see-um. We danced in a friends loft, he grabbed me by my shoulders - "wouldn't a glass of water be great right now." It was one of the most thrilling instants of my life. Funny when all of a sudden you feel crazy love for someone for a nutty reason. We were dancing at a club, I looked at him and he was me. He sobbed at the end of Looking for Mr Goodbar. We had makeup sex at a baby shower. He never ate anything red. When I asked him what his therapist for twenty years thought about that - "It's never come up." He got drunk at my best friends remembrance gathering and bawled his eyes out in the room and all the way home. He made leaf hats and bad Talking Heads tee shirts and sold them at their concert. He made paintings out of paint samples. He covered a balloon with insulation foam, popped it and created his orgy bowls. His dog Banboo loved to dive into the Hudson. His cat disappeared in his apartment never to be found. You couldn't tell if his fish tank had fish in it. He drew like Picasso, looked like Barishnkov and had three jobs most of the time. Before his art gallery sunk, he ran a hit UWS flower store - Stone Kelly. He put a ribbon on a stick and sold it for 25 bucks. An hour after I heard the news this morning from a kind cop in Halifax, I turned on Spotify and let it scramble songs. The first one ... Astral Weeks -  the first song on my favorite album of all time. Then - Bonnie Raitt covering Joni's Song About the Midway - I met you on a midway at a fair last year. And you stood out like a ruby in a black mans ear. Then, our girl Joni again herself - Cyote. We used to sing those songs in the bathtub at the top of our lungs. He was my fun, funny, handsome, sexy, weird, so so sweet, exasperating, sterling playmate, lover, teacher and rogue man for a half century. My therapist way back then asked why I loved him - because he's the best person to walk down the street with. There was an outstanding sky tonight. I will paint it for him.