Jim Capozzola Is Dead

I might not be able to fully explain the surreal and emotional experience I had an hour ago when I read that a man named Jim Capozzola had died almost a year ago to the day.

It will probably go down in my life's history as the strangest moment of loss, disappointment and real grief for a man who played a central role in the most agonizing, humiliating experience I ever survived. And Jim Capozzola was a man I never met, and knew next to nothing about - not even that he was a blogger.

I've been blogging only since 2004, and as with any person who blogs merely as an outlet and doesn't make it his life, I have tended to keep within a relatively tight circle in the blogosphere. I don't subscribe to many feeds, but when one of them had a post title referring to his death a year ago, a light went on in my head. I knew this guy, but it took more than a few seconds to remember how.

Then the moment of recognition washed over me when I saw a big picture of a bulldog named Mildred. It was like a kick in the stomach when I saw that. It was Jim Capozzola. It was a name that stalked my mind morning, noon and night for months more than a decade ago. It was a name that rang in my ears for many, many sleepless nights when I became emotionally paralyzed and couldn't get out of bed for almost two solid weeks. It was hovering like a specter over my bed in those days -- the bed I'd bought and shared with a boyfriend of almost two years, where I was then sleeping alone and abandoned, feeling betrayed and humiliated by that subsequently ex-boyfriend and a man named Jim Capozzola. A man I never would meet, but whose image would come to represent everything awful and vile and unconquerable in the world and in myself until, after losing 25 pounds and sinking into the worst depression of my life, I came close to committing suicide. Had it not been for the intervention of a very small handful of friends I had left in Washington at that moment, I might have preceded Jeff in death. In fact, I never would have met Jeff at all.

Just writing those words makes me feel as if I am writing about the ancient Egyptians. To be able to even access the emotions of that time was a feat of emotional archeology. But leaping out of the tomb of those feelings are some very fresh ones. Very relevant ones to my life today, and a lesson maybe I can share.

In 1996, I was in year two of a relationship with Chris. I fell in love with him when I was 26, and when I was yearning for a monogamous, serious relationship with someone. My previous relationship had been a long one, and an emotionally committed one, but with someone who didn't believe in monogamy. And I realized that wasn't for me, and painfully made the decision to end it after four years. It took enormous courage and faith in myself to do that. And within months, in a sort of touching symbol of the times (1995), I met Chris over the internet. It was way back when America Online was still a fairly small universe, and chat was less about images and more about words. Chris was two years younger than me, and was living with his parents in rural Maryland. He was finishing his college degree in a local university there after failing out of George Washington University years earlier (we ended up having some acquaintances in common, like Jason) because he basically let his life fall apart as a college student.

Chris was a mess at the time, yes. But sort of post-mess, actually. He was getting his life together. He was inching further out of the closet, at least as much to reach out to people over the internet (which wasn't as easy then as it is now) and not fully accept the bleak life at home as the end of the road. He was also very, very intelligent underneath the turmoil, and had a fun edge to him, a wicked sense of humor. He was just fun, and he seemed to like me, too. We hit it off right away when he came to D.C. to meet me, and spent a weekend together.

After that, I found myself going north to have weekend visits where we'd stay in a motel, or head off to Philadelphia or Baltimore for a short visit. We liked the same music. He opened my eyes to Ryushi Sakamoto and David Sylvian, and I introduced him to gay culture. We rented Mildred Pierce on video and watched it in his dark, jail-cell-like room at his parents' house one weekend when they were away. He'd never heard of Joan Crawford before. We watched Mommie Dearest and laughed our heads off doing the lines over and over. And he told me about this show in the U.K. that was coming to cable TV in the U.S. that year. It was called Absolutely Fabulous, and he thought I'd like it. We watched the first Ab Fab episodes together, but he'd seen two of them first and raved about them.

We only saw each other on weekends, and stayed in touch by email and phone every day. I got very, very attached to him. And after a year, he graduated and decided to move to D.C. and we decided to live together. I remembered him saying that if living together didn't work out well, we would live apart but stay together "because a place to live is not as important as we are," he told me. He came out to his parents, and introduced me to them. He visited my family with me. I was totally in love, so much so that my heart couldn't be unfaithful to Chris. For the first time in my life, I was in love with a man, and I was 100% faithful to him -- even in the hardest moments -- and I drew strength from it in a way that made me feel almost invincible against whatever life would throw me.

Chris got a job in D.C. at a company where Jim Capozzola also worked. And about six months into that second year together, for reasons that I will probably never fully understand, they began a relationship that I was not aware of. It was around the same time that Chris and I grew more distant and had greater difficulty between us. I have no idea which started first, or exactly why any of it was going on. No matter how many different ways I tried to get my mind around what was happening, the reality of it was that too much was going on without my knowledge. Too much stuff that was directly impacting my relationship was being withheld from me.

By the end of 1996, Chris and I had been to couples counseling and been struggling to hold ourselves together, but I found him to be more and more absent. More obviously deceitful to me about where he was and what he'd been doing. One shocking incident came when I found he'd run out to be vaccinated for Hepatitis A and B without telling me, and when I'd come upon the laboratory papers in our house, he screamed at me for invading his privacy. It scared me. And eventually I decided I'd had enough and ended the relationship. Painfully, but as gently as I could. It was awful, lots of tears and regret with both of us. But I felt I could get through this somehow as long as I comforted myself in the knowledge that he wasn't a bad person, just wrong for me, and we'd tried everything we could to save it and there was no reason to not be friends and just move on and not prolong the pain.

But in the week or two after we broke up, and he was in the process of moving out, I learned he had been in a relationship with a man named Jim Capozzola for months. Someone he worked with who I didn't know. Months. They'd been seriously involved, and even had gone to New York for a romantic weekend -- a city I had first taken Chris to -- while my parents visited me in D.C., and he was on a "business trip". They had not only been having an affair, but most of my friends and work colleagues were aware of it for a long time, I found out. None of them bothered to tell me. And some of Jim's friends -- people who were apparently not fans of mine for other reasons -- were laughing behind my back the whole time and were making it known through various channels that they were laughing even harder now.

I also learned that Jim had chronic Hepatitis B. That explained the vaccinations, and made me even more depressed and frightened at how much I'd actually been lied to.

All at once, I learned that none of what I needed to get through the break up would be available to me. The truth was that I was being strung along like an idiot, being humiliated in public by this person I loved and trusted, and was fighting to stay with for months in therapy. And now he was gone, unable or unwilling to explain any of it, and I was left with almost no friends I could really trust anymore and a world that was suddenly cruel and dark.

But as any 40 year-old will tell you when you're 28 and heartbroken: you'll get over it. And of course I did. But it took years. In fact, in the first few months after it all blew up, I made new friends and tried to get back out into the world. And I was haunted by the name Jim Capozzola. I didn't know quite what he looked like, so I imagined he was everything I wasn't. I'd shrunk down to 147 pounds around then from depression (I am six feet tall) -- so I imagined he was muscular. I was always very fair-skinned, so I imagined he was tanned. I was broke and living in a group house, so I imagined Jim was wealthy and was out there buying Chris expensive gifts that I couldn't afford. I was faithful and trusting, and Jim was a party to (and the beneficiary of) the greatest betrayal of my life. I was in agony, so he must have been overjoyed. Jim Capozzola was everything I was not. Everything.

I learned that Chris moved right into Jim's building in Dupont Circle. I only assumed they were living together in all but apartment number. So as I walked around town I found myself seeing Jim everywhere. When you don't know what a person looks like, it's easy to imagine that you've seen them. I became more and more frightened about what he was really like. I wanted to be able to tell myself with every fit of imagination that I was also quite crazy, and this was all just nuts and would pass soon enough. But if I were to somehow see him for real, and realize all that I imagined was true, then I worried I might not have the strength to get through it. Suddenly, I was 14 again and being beaten up in Junior High School -- on the bus, in the hall, in gym class, in the school yard where the buses parked -- but the location was now all of Washington, D.C. I was once again the butt of an enormous and cruel joke and should be ready to be abused, laughed at and pummeled at any moment, from behind the next corner.

It was in those days of being haunted by Jim Capozzola in early 1997 that I met some of the dearest people of my entire life, and indeed when I began to become who I am today. I met Troy that Valentine's Day. I met Cameron that spring. I met Steve a few days before his birthday that year. I met Ran and Jeff that summer. I moved to Capitol Hill. I went to Berlin and Prague and Krakow again, and hiked in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. And at year's end, I threw a gigantic New Year's Eve party that I probably will never top. It was an incredible year after all, and it was spent outrunning the specter of Jim Capozzola - the man whose image forced me to build a new me. A stronger me. The me I am today.

Perhaps the longest challenge I had was how I would learn to trust a man again. After something like that happens to you when you feel pure and faithful romantic love for the first time in your life, it's hard to imagine you will ever feel it so purely again. I admit it -- I was scarred. And looking back on my life since then, I still have a tiny bit of the scar left. By some sheer coincidence, two weekends ago I cracked open my diary from 1997 and was reading about that time, just out of curiosity. I remember concluding that while the emotional memory of those last few days of 1996 and the first months of 1997 will always be with me, I'd long, long ago let go of any feelings toward Chris - bad or good. (Remembering and writing about how we met and fell in love now actually makes me only remember the good, pleasantly enough. He was much more loving and sincere in the beginning than I ever let myself remember afterwards.)

But I can see now that the ghost of Jim Capozzola -- the image of the man I never met or knew that I had in my head -- has never 100% left my life. There are times when it comes back and I feel threatened in my relationships by factors I can't control, by petty limitations I might have that no person should ever hold against someone they love, if they really love him. Jim Capozzola was still the repository of all my deepest fears and anxieties, and the sense of exasperating injustice that can be visited on a person who just didn't deserve it.

And when I read that he died a year ago, I have to confess that I wanted to feel relieved, perhaps even happy. I wanted to feel good about his misfortune. I wanted some kind of just ending to this sordid tale to make it all easier to close up and put away. But, as I've found in the past (see here and here), even with people I knew to be bad men, I just can't feel that sense of happiness over someone's death.

What's more, I know that the real Jim Capozzola did have misfortunes and pain in his life since 1996. He and Chris did move in together and they moved to New York, a place I had first taken Chris on perhaps the most intimate and romantic trips of my life to that point. I know that Jim and Chris had their problems, and that they too had an awful breakup. When I'd heard they'd gotten a bulldog and named it Mildred, my heart was at once warmed and a little broken over the memory of watching Mildred Pierce with Chris in 1995. In the short and sporadic interval when we tried to be friends after he moved in with Jim (but before they moved to New York), Chris invited me to their apartment at 17th and P Streets to meet Mildred, who Chris told me was named after the film. She was adorable. (Jim was, of course, not present when I made my one visit to their place.)

I really tried to be happy for him; I thought it would be a healing experience for me. I later heard that perhaps the worst aspect of their eventual breakup in New York was over who would get Mildred. I had, of course, quietly lost the Mildred that Chris and I had before this dog was even born. But it all sounded so painful, even though it was literally planets and solar systems away from my life at the time. I just got a few facts from mutual acquaintances (Mildred ended up with Jim, as all who know him as a blogger know her as his closest companion in the years since) and I didn't really want to know any more.

And this afternoon, in an absolutely ass-backwards way, I found out that Jim died a year ago. And then I found out he was this highly regarded blogger, and is credited for being one of the founders of the political blogosphere. I had no idea. I was astounded that someone so widely known and respected, whose mere name had literally haunted me into almost committing suicide at one time, never crossed my browser screen all that time he was alive and thriving after breaking up with Chris.

I began to read more about him, and his writing, and I found a picture as well. He suddenly was not the ghost I had conjured, but just a guy. Five years older than me. An excellent and witty writer, as it turns out, and someone who never staked an egotistical claim over the blogosphere like so many other blowhards (gay, especially) in the business. Just a little before I left politics, and maybe because he moved to Philadelphia, his blogger career somehow had escaped my knowledge all together.

There were so many obituaries for Jim last year when he died, from a wide swath of bloggers of note. It made me all the more regretful and mournful. All those years I could have just done a Google search and found him, and easily reached him. He had never met me, but he knew very well who I was. I'd long since made peace with who Chris was and let all those feelings go related to him (and it's funny, but it seems Chris has had this strange attraction to writers, as last I heard years ago when we last spoke, he was living with a fairly famous one in New York), but I had never come to terms with the real Jim Capozzola. The more I read on his blogs today, the more I realized what an approachable guy he was. I could have just sent him an email and said, hey, I'd love the chance to sit down and chat with you sometime. Not to talk about Chris or all that, but to tell him what a funny and talented writer he was, even if we didn't agree on everything, and see for myself who he really was.

For whatever reason, though, I denied myself that chance. I never reached out. I guess I never had the courage, and was more content to just try to forget him. But we never forget ghosts. We never forget the worst break-up of our life. But for the past 11 and a half years, I have been fighting against the ghost of who I'd made Jim Capozzola to be. I wish I could have let go of that ghost the right way. The best way.

But now I will have to find another way. I'm choking up now as I write this - I want to find out as much as I can about Jim Capozzola now. I feel like such an immature idiot for not doing it sooner. And here this poor man who suffered from awful health for years and who died a really awful death (shortly after Jeff killed himself and died alone), and I could have known him. This bizarre bond of fate we had was never more than what each of us imagined it to be (if he imagined anything at all).

I'm chastened by this experience, more than I would have ever expected. I'm suddenly left to wonder what I could possibly do now to do right by the real Jim Capozzola. Maybe all I can do is stop and wonder what else is hanging out there in my life, unresolved and facing a fairly easy fix like a phone call, an email. A kind word. An apology.

The ultimate forgiveness -- for Jim, for myself -- as forgiveness and understanding are the only cures for the kind of experience I went through. I want to find a way, now that Jim himself is long gone and I've missed a golden opportunity to make permanent and shining all this marvelous change in my life since Jim Capozzola and I crossed paths.