Don

Donald Dean Kelly died on June 5th. 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 of us 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. For me, it was love at first nose. We went to a bar and had beers and I played with the ring pulls on his pants that zipped down the front. He told me he was a conceptual artist/ live-in babysitter. He once wrote on an egg and mailed it. He slept over and in the morning, I walked him to the subway. He grabbed my arm - wait a minute. He went in antiques store and came out and put a small kaleidoscope in my palm. And thus began our many years of promised land and civil war. Most days, he mumbled and stammered but, once in a blue moon, he landed a joke river stone smooth. He once found an 8 by 10 foot mirror on the street. We bled when it shattered carrying it up the marble staircase in my apartment building. Almost death by. An almost Daily News headline - X Slays X with Mirror. 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 silk 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 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 at home - he said -  you look like a mood. We once (once ???) had a fight and he slept with an old boyfriend of mine to get me good. A friend called us the Taylor Burtons of the West Village. One Christmas 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 a half 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, excited, grinning - wouldn't a glass of water be great right now. My brain flamed. It was one of the most thrilling heartbeats ever. Funny when all of a sudden you feel a crazy connection with someone for some nutty reason. Once we were dancing at a clib - I looked at him and saw me. He howled at the end of Looking for Mr Goodbar. Everyone in the theater thought someone was being strangled, just like Diane Keaton a moment ago. We had makeup sex at a baby shower. He never ate anything red. When I asked him what his therapist thought about that - It's never come up. His dog Bamboo loved to dive into the Hudson. His cat disappeared in his place - never to be seen meowing again. You couldn't tell if there were fish in his fish bowl. He drew like Picasso and looked like Barishnkov. He made leaf hats and bad Talking Heads t-shirts and sold them at their concert. He made art out of paint color samples. He covered balloons with insulation foam, popped them and there - his orgy bowls. Mine is the thing in my place people most ask me about. He worked weddings in Rome, cleaned fashion designers' beach houses, did art for a porn theater, flipped burgers in the Pines, bus boyed and washed dishes all around town. Before his funky art gallery went bust, he ran a big hit flower store - Stone Kelly. He put ribbons on sticks and sold them 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 that comes up ... Astral Weeks - my favorite song on my favorite album. 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 again - Cyote. We used to sing those songs in the bathtub at the top of our lungs. He had the miles per hour of a hummingbird. This is only the tip of his iceberg. He was fun, funny, handsome, sexy, a great skier, surprising, weird, wildly impossible and wildly sweet. My therapist way back asked why I loved him - because he's the best person to walk down the street with. There was a beautiful sky tonight. I will paint it for him.