My Amalgam Love of Loves

So when amalgamated Mickey Rooney/Andy Hardy tries
to start a life he goes where anybody would – Manhattan –
to which amalgamated Judy Garland/Betsy Booth (who boldly
and alarmingly insists in 1941 on getting older) also goes,
as usual, as his gold-plated Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer conscience,
even though the girl was popping uppers to get through the ballyhoo
of switching yet again into another humble siren of a moralistic
fable. Rooney was no Gable, but as Andy Hardy he could fake

a nascent little man – and Judy Garland, well, was Judy Garland
aching for a musical: the grandest art exonerating her young
country’s early 1940s heart was hers – but everybody, Mickey

Rooney, Judy Garland, Andy Hardy, Betsy Booth were cutting their

and our collective tooth on the amalgam loves of youth, writ large
on silver screens – purported pork-and-beans of mental health:
the wealth I took to New York City when I came to start a life myself:
handsomer than I could dare to understand – simply due

to being just another average twenty-four year-old gay man –
I drew to my intrepid chest the first of many self-defining tests –
the best for last, which is the vast enchantment and investment
of my full if dimly recollected past, which waltzes with me like
the meteorologically misty cast of every Judy-Mickey movie:
proving, it would seem, that what it takes to love a human being
can’t be learned from anyone at all. But I’m in love with my
amalgam love of loves, and I will love them till we fall.






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