pretend Lara Croft is hooping in this image

Around the turn of the year between 2006 and 2007, I started seeing a hooper. A male hooper. A straight male hooper. This, not so rare a species as you might think, and generally a hot specimen of maledom, at that. With, um, strong core muscles. I called him Tiger, but let’s call him K.

So K and I had been hooping and hanging out together for a couple weeks when I invited him up to my flat. At the time I lived in the middle of the Castro with a crotchety gay couple in an apartment filled with their 1940s-60s era collectibles—a tacky crew of oilslicklike vaselineglass, gilded porcelain lambs, Mickey Mouse miniatures, vases shaped like corn-on-the-cob, etcetera. Every room but the one I paid $1100/month to keep as my zen respite was filled with the kitsch, to which my roomies were uncommonly attached. One of them noticed if a doily was so much as nudged off center.

So that day K and I did some smooching, turned on some music, and were promptly overcome by the desire to hoop. A common scenario. My roommates were gone for the weekend, so I welcomed K and his hoop into the living room, cautioning him to be extremely cautious about all the shit.

K assured me it would be no problem.

He was really getting into the Zone when he brought the hoop up over his head…and brought down the light fixture. The glass of three lightbulbs and their tuliplike glass shades sprayed across the room. K was mortified. I assured him it was far less tragic than if he’d taken down a tchotchke. I spent the rest of the weekend hunting for replacement shades and ended up having to buy 5 new ones (on K’s tab, at his gentlemanly insistence) so that they all matched.

K and I saw each other for another few weeks and then stopped. (It had nothing do with the accident, really, it didn’t.) We became friends. In fact, he came over to my place to hang out and hoop just this past Friday. I live in a one-room studio now (which is where I do most of my hooping these days as a break from sitting at the computer, so busy with writing work that I usually skip the hoopingatherings and parties) and so we headed into the lobby of my building, a great open space coated in hoop-friendly tile and marble, with 12-foot ceilings. I’ve hooped there before. There are, however, a couple of those overhead light fixtures with the thick glass bowl underneath, suspended from a metal frame, that you have to watch out for. I pointed them out to him and he assured me it would be no problem.

After a while K left the lobby for a quick break and I was really getting into the Groove, doing repeating barrel rolls, lifting my arms in and out of the hoop and dancing. Then, leaning back in Limbo, I lifted the hoop off my waist and over my head. It smacked into the lamp and I watched, in slow-motion, as the fixture swung up and the glass bowl slipped out of its frame and I was powerless to stop it, only able to step back and cover my face with my arms as I realized it was falling, falling towards the tiny hexagonal mosaic floor tiles…. A thousand jaggedy splinters of glass all over the lobby, and folks from my building starting to arrive on Friday afternoon, home early from work. Perfect.

K helped me sweep it up, and we started giggling. Soon we were guffawing. As he would later say in an eloquent email about the Incident: “I find the karmic symmetry in yet another pulverized hanging lamp just delightful.”

And so it is. You hoop, you enter the Zone, you break Shit. Amen.