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It was a rainy day in Seattle. It rains a lot here, but even this was one heck of a heavy rain. Normally the rain just sort of hangs around, sipping mochas and wearing flannel shirts and listening to old Pearl Jam records. But this was a fierce mid-western rain, a big lummoxy rain, like the kind of rain that rain would be if rain was that guy from the Goonies who they kept chained up and later swung out on a rope over the pirate ship yellng "Hey you guys!" It was the day I heard the Doogie Howser was gay. So I called him (of course). Doogie, I just heard on the radio that you're gay. He asked me if I have a problem with that. If I have a problem with gays. I told him he was being very defensive. He told me I was, like, the 50th person to call him. I apologized. But then I asked him again, what's the deal? How long had he been gay? He told me about how you're born gay, and so he'd been gay all of his life, and then I asked him politely to stop playing games, how long had he known he was gay? And he said he had gone on a few dates with a few girls, and slept with a few girls, and wondered why it wasn't the driving perverted obsession that he saw in his friends, when they bought pornos and wore mirror on their shoes and stole ladies underwear. But then one day he was in the showers after some squash and some hot guys came in and that's when he realized he did have a perverted driving obsession, and finally he felt normal. I asked him if it was because he took too many proctology classes in med school, and he said shut up. Then I asked him if it was because he took too many gynecology courses, because some of those specimens can be pretty awful, and he said shut up. Then I asked him what Neal thought about it, and he said who? I said Neal Patrick Harris, the guy who plays you on TV? And he said who? And he meant it. And then he said TV? What's TV? And I started to cry. Then the doorbell rang, so I had to go. It was the mailman with my package from Amazon, delivering Kevin Federline's CD "Playing with Fire." The rain had stopped, but I cried even harder.
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