I am in love with Alexis from Barbet Schroeder's film Our Lady of the Assassins, based on the excellent novel by Fernando Vallejo. Alexis is doomed but painfully sexy in a teenage hoodlum sort of way and carries a big Beretta pistol in his pants, a pistol he whips out to fire with alarming frequency and at the merest provocation. I don't think I'd want him quite so intensely if he didn't have the gun. In the novel and the movie his lover is a 60-year-old writer who returns to his birthplace of Medellin, Colombia with the intention of dying. They stroll the city streets and the writer entertains him with a nonstop stream of misanthropic commentary worthy of Celine.

Of course Alexis is a fictional character and therefore the possibility that he might become my lover is a little remote. Plus he's 17 and was killed by gunfire halfway through the movie. These facts are clear obstacles to any romantic aspirations I might have. One can still dream.

I have a history of implausible affections, this goes way back. Other unlikely objects of my desire have included a boy who rode by on a bicycle never to be seen again, a cartoon dog, the actor who played the son in the execrable movie On Golden Pond, my cousin who came to stay with us one summer, my older step-brother, my ex-boyfriend's brother's German colleague whose thighs I frequently imagined being crushed between like some kind of erotic Teutonic death vise, various characters in novels, the short sandy-haired guy who takes it up the can with gurgling pleasure in the steam room in an old William Higgins porno movie called Delivery Boys, the actor Giovanni Ribisi as throbbingly imagined into this exact same cheesy scenario, a really cute little guy I danced with for three songs before I realized he was a woman. The list goes on, even more tiresomely.

The trajectories of my lust are unpredictable and at times a little indiscriminate, to say the least. I have this in common with most human males, and males of many other species in fact. It's a little mortifying but I'm comfortable with it.