Babyface: Part 2

 (This entry is a continuation of Babyface: Part 1.)

Autumn 1985

My friend Rand finds me outside and around the corner, a couple of minutes later. “Hey, where’d you go?” he asks, before noticing I'm planted on the pavement. My head had been between my knees when I’d heard the approach of his footsteps. His tone changes from plaintive to worried. “You okay? What’s going on?”

Encountering Jim had sent me into a fight-or-flight dilemma. I’d chosen to fly straight out of Beezie’s Records, the door’s mocking Tibetan bells jangling like laughter in my ears. The sight of him activated memories of my incarceration in his closet—my rage and hysteria, the helpless desperation of being trapped and not knowing when or even if I’d be discovered. Four years later, despite the sunshine and the bustle of a city street, I’m once more imprisoned within the crawl space’s tight boundaries. I’m exhausted and hopeless after hours of yelling and tears. The sheer weight of so much darkness seems to break every rib in its cage. Now, as then, I’m rasping for breath. Jim had birthed nightmares that plagued me for weeks and months, and that will continue to haunt me for years to come. He’d done it with a smile and a laugh. He’d gotten away with it.

A hand grasps my shoulder. I startle. Ignoring the traffic roaring by on the busy thoroughfare, Rand squats over the filthy pavement and searches my face. “Are you sick?”

“What? No.” I’m so accustomed to blending my personal life into the background that my panic attack, quiet and still as it is, feels like histrionics. I pull myself together and slip behind the bland facade from which my real self peers out at the world. “Did you get your album? You know, the Allman Brothers?”

Through his thick lenses, Rand blinks at my non sequitur, then holds up empty hands. “No. I turned around and you’d up and disappeared.”

I’m still breathing heavily. I decide to play into it. “Dusty old places like that make my asthma act up.” I don’t have asthma. “Just needed some fresh air, is all.” I’m hoping Rand will leave me alone. All I really want right now is solitude, but my fictional infirmity has made him reluctant to leave. “I’m good. For real. You don’t need to hang around.”

It takes a liberal handful of slick reassurances to urge my friend back to his feet. “Only if you’re sure…”

“I’m heading straight home.” My lies dull the metallic tang panic has left on my tongue. “I’m fine.” I’m well enough to climb to my feet. “You should get to the office. Elisabeth’s usually around this time of day.”

Rand seems to be assessing my fitness, so I bounce on my toes with an energy I don’t feel. Elisabeth is the teaching assistant with whom he’s enamored; the prospect of alone time with her is too tempting to resist. It’s with reluctance, though, that he deems me worthy to be left on my own. “Only if you’re sure.”

I wave him off with smiles and promises. I’m fortunate at this stage in my life, adrift as I feel after college, to have been accepted by his small, academic tribe. Despite my differences, despite holding myself at arm’s-length and never quite letting anyone in, Rand and the other graduate students have embraced me. Grateful as I am for his friendship, right now I need space.

At last, his long legs carry him back in the direction of campus. I should follow. Every instinct informs me the wise thing to do now would be to head home and never return to this third-rate used record store.

Yet there’s no mental scab I’ve ever refrained from picking. My lifelong response to adversity and confrontation is to remain stone-faced before it, unraveling only in my privacy. In fleeing Beezie’s, I have ceded victory to the enemy; nothing irritates me more than the thought that Jim might now be gloating at his victory.

I’ve faced much bigger fears since that day at the tag-end of high school when a man-child left me kicking and yelling inside a locked closet. I’m not a friendless kid any longer. I’m not a kid at all. Heart pounding and face red, I brush myself off, stalk back around the corner, and push through the record shop door.

The bells clank as I enter. Jim still sits behind the counter, looking at Style Weekly. “Oh.” He gives me only the briefest of glances and pulls up the sleeves of his cardigan. “Forget something, did you?”

My mouth opens, ready with a retort. Then I hesitate. I recognize that threadbare cardigan falling from his shoulders. I recognize the plaid shirt billowing beneath it. Earlier I’d registered how oversized they appeared on Jim’s scrawny frame. Jim’s not the type for cable knits, though, nor is L. L. Bean flannel his style. That shabby attire had once belonged to Earl.

Speechless and staring at Jim, I remember Earl lounging in a leather easy chair with that sweater buttoned around his middle, scribbling upon a card a new name, address, and time of assignation. Earl in that very cardigan, padding around his kitchen in slippered feet, making me a late-night grilled cheese, and himself a cup of decaf. The sweater had been new, four or five years ago. Now it looks ratty. Dirty.

With a horrible certainty, I realize something’s happened to Earl.

It’s only been a little more than three years since the gay cancer burrowed its way into my awareness. It feels like a lifetime. Barely a year has passed since scientists announced the scourge’s cause: it wasn’t poppers gone bad, as so many men I’d known had speculated, but a rogue virus. HIV, transmitted through bodily fluids. Rock Hudson had died of it, right at the beginning of the current semester. Although I’ve been hearing on the TV news in recent weeks that scientists have finally developed a test to discover infection in the bloodstream, no such thing has yet reached the public. Not widely. Not here.

In years past, the many expertises gay men cultivated were better suited to the worlds of espionage, or anthropology, or semiotics: how covertly to spy upon a man who’s piqued our interest, to evaluate his body language, to read messages coded in colored bandanas arranged in a back pocket. We arranged rendezvouses in clandestine places without being seen, became adept at distinguishing our own kind from enforcers of the law attempting to entrap us. We all have some proficiency in recognizing each other without word, sound, or often a gesture.

To survive this plague age, we scramble to assimilate new skills. We’re required to be sexual actuaries, to gauge each new encounter with an eye to risks far beyond the familiar. Does our quarry look like a local? Is he a regular good old boy who shops at the Army Navy Store, or does his clothing insinuate trips to a big metropolitan area where the virus spreads unchecked? We all like a good looking man, but is the one we want too good looking? Too in demand, attracting too many questionable partners? Does he cruise like a local, in fits and starts, not too fast or slow? A line had been drawn in 1981 between one era and another. On a summer night in the park four years ago, my outlaw brothers and I would all have been debauched beneath a full moon. To do so now indicates depravity of a type precarious to consider.

We’ve raced, too, to become diagnosticians. Without the benefit of any education, without even really knowing what to look for, we assess every potential partner for disease. We reject a man whose skin is too flushed or too warm to the touch. Our eyes search for lesions, though I have no clear concept of what a lesion might look like. If a man of a certain pallor walks my way, I might swerve to avoid crossing paths. Anything out of the ordinary is frightening and not worth the gamble.

One evening I accompany home a handsome fellow who seems like a safe bet. As he removes his clothes in the light of a table lamp, I can spy bluish bruises covering his body. When he moves close, arousal growing, he's accompanied by a faint, sickly-sweet scent, like a newborn's diaper. I vault from the stranger’s bed and away from his apartment as if my life is threatened.

All our snap judgments are based on faulty understanding. We’re medical imposters, forced into emergency-room rotations before we've cracked our first textbook. Real physicians are scrambling to stay abreast with the newfound virus and its ferocity. How can any layman hope to keep pace?

Not that I stop trying. My nights are often sleepless. I lie awake in my bed, staring blind into the dark, obsessing over every potential omen of my inevitable decline. As I try not to rouse my parents, my fingers travel every inch of my body—not for pleasure, as once they were accustomed, but to check for lumps, for inflammations and flaws. I’ve learned where my lymph nodes lie and prod them until they ache. I trace my hairline, certain the most minute shift might spell my doom. Somewhere I’ve picked up the term ‘night sweats,’ but haven’t learned enough to distinguish them from the ordinary perspiration of a warm Virginia night. A divot on my shin I know is from repeatedly banging into my bed frame worries me daily. I pick and poke at it until it’s tender and redder, reinforcing my worst suspicions.

It’s with my clinician’s eyes that now I appraise Jim. He’d always been a scrawny little shit. The wrists protruding from the cardigan are thinner than I remember, though. Too thin. He’s a scarecrow in those oversized clothes, a bundle of sticks about to clatter into a heap. His color is sallow; around his eyes the skin seems to have sunk and blued; red veins spiderweb the whites. His hair has thinned. He’s trained long strands over a sparse patch.

Jim looks older. Jim looks old, and he should be only, what? In his mid-thirties?

Perhaps sensing my judgment, he narrows his eyes and snaps, “The fuck you looking at?”

Once again, my instincts tell me to flee in the face of hostility, of danger, of probable contagion. I stand my ground, however. “That’s Earl’s sweater, isn't it.”

My soft-spoken observation deflates him. He crosses his arms and stares to the side, refusing to meet my gaze. If we’d been in a standoff, it’s over, with both sides limping away in concession. “So you don’t know. Of course not. You went away. No one thought they’d ever see you again. You never even checked in with him. Why would you, even after everything he did for you?”

I’d gone away to school, I wanted to point out. I keep my mouth shut throughout his provocations.

“She didn’t even let me have a suitcase to pack my clothes.” Jim’s speaking in low tones I must strain to hear. “I had to grab paper grocery bags and the laundry basket. Some of his stuff was in it. Fucking grocery bags. Do you know how long I’d been with him?”

He’s glaring at me, but I’m not the enemy any longer. “A long time.”

“Fifteen years. Fifteen fucking years of putting up with his—“ He presses his knuckles against his lips. His hand’s trembling suppresses whatever might follow. He doesn’t speak again until he’s under control. This time, words spray forth in a concentrated stream, like water from a hose end compressed by a thumb. “A person goes from a kid to an old man in fifteen fucking years. You know? All that…I shouldn’t have called the ambulance when it got bad, but I was…that’s when everything got…real, after the hospital. And she came. From fucking Charleston. He hated Charleston. Hated them. That’s why he was up here. What did they ever do for him? I didn’t even have a suitcase of my own! She wouldn’t let me take my TV. My plants. I had to scream bloody murder to get my checkbook out of the office, and that was my checkbook with my name on it.”

The record shop spins around me. I’m so light-headed that I stagger against one of the waist-high record bins for support. Jim’s grievances, building for years, have at last found an audience, though in a long-standing adversary. He spits his stream of consciousness in rapid fire, sometimes ranting, sometimes trying to wheedle me to his side. As a linear story, it makes no sense. But in its impressionistic way, it’s little different from what I’ve heard whispered by others: a tale of unexpected illness, of long-estranged family whisking away the afflicted, of a survivor being evicted from a home not in his own name. Real as any of our relationships might feel in 1985, in the face of an vindictive family and their lawyers, years of togetherness flicker into ash and smoke, like tissue to a flame.

Jim hasn’t mentioned what might have taken Earl down. He doesn’t have to. One doesn’t name the bogeyman when he crawls out of the cupboard. I have so many questions, though. How long was Earl ill? When did all this happen? What's become of Earl's business? Most important, perhaps most essential: is Earl alive or dead? Because Jim hasn’t said, either way.

I don’t ask these questions, though, because they paralyze me with fear. I don’t ask these questions because, on a very basic level, I’m convinced I might not be able to cope with the answers. Never does it occur to me that some finality might comfort me years down the road. I don’t yet realize how quickly a life's hanging threads accumulate and form knots that neither time nor care can untangle.

Earl wouldn’t be the first of my lovers to die from the virus. That would have been David, the red-headed junior who’d wooed me as a freshman in college, whom I had been too frightened to meet. After his graduation, he’d moved to New York City. I’d read about his death in the alumni magazine this last July. There have been rumors of others. A former customer as a teen—a retired college professor of literature, who liked reading aloud to me from Sterne while I sat naked on his lap, had been rushed to the hospital, accepted no visitors, and then never heard of again. Another man, a habitué of Bryan Park, married, the only person I knew who took vacations to San Francisco for the sex he could find there—vanished, presumed dead. No one knew his real name, to hunt for an obituary. Christ, I used to think Earl so worldly for all his trips to Manhattan, to Key West, to the West Coast.

“Fifteen years of watching little sluts like you roll across his mattress, that’s all I got out of him. And a fucking sweater. You thought you were special? You weren’t. You think going off to some fancy college makes you better than any other whore? It doesn’t.” Outside the shop, through the glass, shadows loom. We both glance at a gaggle of students checking out the posters in the front window. Jim lowers his voice. “So don’t come in here acting the little duchess to me, because…” The door opens. The kids who enter are younger than either of us. The boys are dressed in uniforms of jeans and polo shirts with the collars popped, the girls in flouncy Madonna skirts. Jim rolls his eyes at the sight and finishes his speech before addressing them. “…Because we both know where your precious Earl found you. We’re mostly classic rock and some jazz, guys,” he snipes at the kids, as if he believes they can’t appreciate either. “Good luck finding the stuff you probably like, though.”

Even as I navigate through this thicket of new fears, I recognize how tiring it surely is, being Jim: always to assume the worst of the world, to resent everyone in it for not supplying what he feels he's owed. It must take all his energy, gnawing at grudges. “I’m sorry,” I tell him, meaning it. If I were a more generous person I might try to convey my sincerity with a hand on his, or a hug. But this is the man who had locked me into a closet and left me to suffocate, inspiring years of claustrophobia and nightly torment. Even now, he's calling me a whore. This stiff acknowledgement is the best I can muster.

As I turn to go, he cranes his neck close and issues his benediction in a savage whisper. “It was in him. So it could be in you, too. Don’t think you’re immune.” His glance sweeps over the VCU kids, who are looking through the racks while chattering loudly. “They could crack you open and find it swarming inside. Think about that.”

This time I make my exit slowly, dignity battered, but intact. I never return to Beezie’s—nor do I ever again see or hear anything about Jim. Twice in my life he is the source of long-lasting misery: once four years before, then today. It’s because of him that from now on, when I perform my nightly exploration for lumps and bruises, I can't shake the vision of being rotten within. With a scalpel, doctors could slice me in one smooth motion from stem to stern and discover disease bursting from my seams. In the months to come, as I should be taking my first few tentative steps to building a career, I will not be able to shake this vision of myself as overflowing with foulness and death. Any day now, any moment, what lies dormant might surface upon my skin: I'll bear its mark, and none of my accomplishments will matter. All my studying, my teaching—I wonder when the day will arrive that proves my work was for nothing. Next month? Next week? Tomorrow morning?

This is my life, both now and for the unforeseeable future. I’m all of twenty-one years old and already I divide my life into four distinct acts. The curtain rises on my dewy innocence; Act Two covers the too-brief teen years reveling in both the discovery of sex and the independence I gain in selling it. In Act Three, my college tenure, the tone grows somber as with the eyes of a Cassandra I watch storm clouds gather, yet find no one I can warn.

This day, this encounter, commences what I can only conceive of as the last and longest expanse of the drama. Beyond the horizon it stretches, into the indefinite future, both its and my own conclusion well out of sight. Upon this stage, without benefit of a script, my outlaw brothers and I find ourselves inducted into an army of the dead and the dying. We know the enemy, though it cannot be seen. Our arms are inadequate, our shields shabby.

Over the fallen we march onward. Though to what fresh battle, no one yet knows.

Seconds of Yes

One of the ironies of COVID is that our extended isolated downtime has forced me to confront the traumas of a pandemic that came before.

In 1981, the New York Times published an article with the headline of “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.”  I was a young, sexually-active man of seventeen who, a month before, had graduated from high school. The previous autumn, I’d engaged in one of the grander deceptions of my adolescence: dead set on escaping the suffocating South and finding other men like myself, I’d defied my parents and secretly applied to a university in Manhattan. I’d sent for the application materials on the sly, paid the fee from my own sex work savings, copied numbers from another financial aid application, and (in the biggest betrayal of all) forged my parents’ signatures. I was determined to be a resident of New York City in the nineteen-eighties.

The university accepted me and extended a scholarship, but I ended up declining. My mother had burned out, physically and emotionally, trying to get Carter re-elected in 1980; she seemed so fragile in the following months that though I yearned for life in the big city, I chose a college close to home. My betrayals might break her completely, I feared. I mourned the loss of the metropolitan existence torn away from me, though. All that summer and during my undergrad years, I pored over the pages of the Times and the Voice, trying to imagine what my alternate-universe self attending school in the Village might be up to—what clubs he’d be exploring, what seedy little shows he’d be seeing, what personal ads he’d be answering.

I read that first article in the Times with unease. In a cubicle in my college library, I searched through the New York newspapers to find any follow-up. I obsessed over any articles about what was for months called GRID, and then AIDS. Early on, I recognized that if I’d stubbornly followed my whims, I would have landed in an epicenter of this mysterious disease.

But I didn’t live in a big city like New York or San Francisco, so I convinced myself that whatever the new syndrome was, it would pass me by.

During college, I majored in magical thinking. I conjured reasons I’d weather what was shaping up to be a serious storm. I was safe because I’d never sniffed poppers, which for a very long time was suspected to be a cause. I was in a very small college town; the disease would never reach as far as its dirt roads and sidewalks of brick. The men fucking me were either professorial sorts, whom I could of course count on to recognize the signs of disease before they allowed it into their beds, or rednecks who never ventured into the big cities where a virus was on the rampage.

I imagined myself immune because I was good at heart, or too young to catch anything, or too important for the world to lose, or simply because I willed it so. When people I knew in college began dying immediately after graduation, those fictitious protections dissolved like tissue in a thunderstorm. Men died I’d known in my home town parks, from the days and nights I’d cruise there. I saw my old mentors emaciated and covered in sores. A colleague of my father's, known to be a confirmed bachelor, suddenly developed cancers that my parents discussed in hushed whispers. Mornings, I’d read the obituaries for names I might know, like an elderly person might. My college classmates attended each other’s weddings; I only entered churches for memorials.

Death surrounded me. Even when I left my native state for an unknown new home, I couldn’t escape its reach. I witnessed my best friend, a wide-eyed boy my own age, wither over the course of mere weeks; as dementia ossified his brain, I would hold him in my arms to calm his distress when he couldn’t remember where or who he was. I felt his skin, hot and fevered, against my own, while he wept at the unfairness of it all. Close to the end, his family took him away to die. I never saw him again.

And how did I react to this decade and a half of horrors? Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Then I’d circle back to denial again, never managing to achieve acceptance. Day after day, loss after loss, I’d reassure myself that I was still alive, that I was okay. Never once did I acknowledge that survival alone was insufficient. I put out of my mind the cost of longevity. I concentrated on anything else instead.

I’ve kept journals since my teens, but I suspect any future historian looking through them would be puzzled how the word AIDS never appears in their pages. They’d find plenty of memories of good times with friends, but nothing of the hospital visits, nor of the funerals, nor of the consolation I might try to take in another survivor's arms. I aspired to be a writer, but never could I put pen to pad and confront the disease ravaging everything and everyone I knew. Writing about it, accepting it, would make it too real.

I was sinking fast, those years. Yet I refused to admit how deep were the waters I tried to tread, or how overpowering their current.

The current pandemic has really done a number on the creative writing classes I teach. For a while, they were only on Zoom, which I disliked. Admittedly, I didn’t have to get dressed up for Zoom classes, nor did I have to commute. The students were amused whenever one of my cats would climb up onto the desk and stare into my laptop’s camera for minutes at a time, so that it appeared she was talking instead of me. But I hated the electronic lag; the virtual classroom felt impersonal in the most personal of seminars. 

Last autumn, I was at last allowed to teach in person again. Because of the school’s precautions, however, we were masked up and spaced around the perimeter of the room, and a custodian hovered outside to evict us the moment the class was supposed to be officially over, so he could spray down the place with disinfectants.

This semester, Omicron hit at an inopportune time in the enrollment window, causing most prospective students to look at the spring catalog, shake their heads, and stay at home. I’ve never had such a low enrollment. But the class is relaxed; we’re at a point in the pandemic in which we aren’t as freaked out, hearing someone cough down the hall. Each week, I ask my students to bring in whatever they’ve been working on. They read aloud, I listen, and we we all provide our feedback. When there are a quorum of writers present, the system works. With low enrollment, even one absence can put me in a tough position in which I need to fill time in a constructive way.

So I’ve stockpiled some essays of my own. For the last year I’ve been working on my own book-length project, and I’ve been mining it for short sections to share. This last week, however, it occurred to me I’ve been sitting on god knows how much old material of mine from my twenties, when I was about the same age as many of these kids. Why not pass some of those, and let the students have at them?

I’ve always archived and backed up all my writing projects through the years. I’ve a folder on my hard drive dedicated to any fiction I might have worked on before 1995 or so—at least, from the years when I stored all my labors on floppy discs. It’s a jumble of miscellaneous files and subfolders all (thanks to the vagaries of various operating systems and having copied them from floppies) without any dates to identify when I might have worked on them. Some I can remember. The murder mystery that was supposed to be my first big breakthrough: I remember working on it in the summer of 1988, when I was teaching an undergraduate course in Shakespeare and needed a frivolous project to fill out the long hot Detroit afternoons. The post-apocalyptic science fiction novel I abandoned after a hundred pages, I remember writing in 1989 while I considered giving up academe altogether.

Still searching for something I might take in for my students, this last week, I browsed through the files. Some I remembered vividly; others I didn’t recognize at all. The more I read, though, the more I realized that all of them, in some way or another, were about the terrible times I was living through. They all were about death, and disease, and loss.

My murder mystery, which an amateur detective who worked in a funeral home, and who lived my experiences of feeling beaten down from having to attend countless memorial services—all identical in their basics, each populated with families hostile to outsiders. My SF novel, in which the protagonist wanders alone among familiar, now-empty streets, missing the people who once lived there. A play I wrote, in which a longterm same-sex couple, both deceased, are helpless to prevent young, straight newlyweds from moving into their former home. Another play in which a wealthy family watches without emotion as an apocalypse descends upon the town beyond their closed gates. A short story in which the protagonist fashions charms to ward off a deadly plague threatening his village. Another science fiction draft in which two sleight-of-hand artists are stranded on a planet suffering from a disfiguring ailment. A strange thriller in which a woman refuses to allow her lover to touch her, for fear he harbors a terrible secret.

They all were about AIDS. Everything I wrote for fifteen years, every novel draft, every short story, was about the pandemic roaring its way unchecked through my population. I don’t think I ever was fully conscious of what I was doing. It’s so obvious, though, reading everything from the vantage of decades later.

As I sat there last week, reading through these old files created with software that hasn’t existed since before Clinton was President, I really wanted to reach back through the decades and give my poor young self a hug. Years later, that kid is still trying to unpack the trauma and guilt of surviving. Even at this remove, it’s still tough for him to admit how much and how many he lost.

One of my folders, labeled simply, From Davy’s Chair, is a collection of short stories. I don’t remember composing them, but I’m guessing by the fact they were saved in MacWrite format that they were from the late 1980s. The titular Davy is a barber; each story is a monologue from a client who speaks while Davy works in silence. 

There’s a rowdy story from one customer about meeting his current husband at a gay bar; another is the stream of consciousness of a drag queen about finding someone to look beyond the wigs and makeup at the man beneath. There’s a story I actually kind of love about a man who, in trying to escape the romantic interest of female coworker, makes up elaborate stories about an imaginary boyfriend to keep her off his back. When she loses interest, he continues fabricating the stories because he’s lonely, and can’t stop.

Then there was a final story told in Davy’s Chair, probably the closest I ever came to directly addressing the disease stealing the people in my life: Seconds of Yes. Is it good? Well. I was young when I wrote it. Reading such an old draft triggers the editor and critic in me. I see hundreds of ways it could be improved. The teacher in me want to fix it, just as I want to help my own writers make their own work better. But I’m going to reproduce it below with all its flaws intact.

Imperfect as it is, the story reminds me of a boy so intent upon surviving that, as the tide pulled him down, he didn’t realize his frantic prose gestures weren’t waving, but drowning.

Seconds of Yes

I don't lay out. The idea's always turned me off. When I see people slathered in grease, half naked in the sun, it reminds me of bacon. I don't like thinking of myself as sizzling pork product, you know? But yes, I've been getting more sun lately. I need to get out of the condo, sometimes. Thanks for noticing, Davy. Just the usual, this time—I’m getting a little shaggy.

Did I tell you about my new hobby? You'll never guess. No, it's not basket weaving. Think bigger. I'm talking danger, adrenaline. I'm talking excitement. I'm talking about raw energy coursing through your body, your heart in your mouth. I'm talking bungee jumping.

Emerald City's been having it on weekends, the sports bar? Fridays and Saturdays—usually I go both nights. They've got that large parking lot, you know. The manager's hired a crane for the summer, set up bleachers around the edges, added more tables to the patio. The crowds are amazing—boys from all over the city come just to see people jump. You'd be surprised. It's like a roller coaster, but without the track, without the train, without the safety restraints. Not very much like a roller coaster at all, maybe.

The first time I did it I was trashed, I admit. I don't even remember the trip up. One minute I was drinking at a table with some of the guys—I don't even remember who, that's how bad off I was—and then I came to with a terrible crack in my neck. There I was, swinging upside down, feeling stretched like Silly Putty, with my wallet twenty-five bucks lighter. And everyone was cheering and clapping like crazy.

I didn't mind the attention, of course, but after I pushed through the crowd, I stumbled away from the parking lot thinking, never again. Too risky, too dangerous. Not worth killing yourself over. I've seen those videos on TV—some poor kid concussing herself on the bottom of the jump platform, or worse, the broken bungee.  I don't need this crap, I thought. But at home that night, I conked out right away. Then I woke up the next morning feeling, well, happy for the first time in a while. I have trouble sleeping these days, you see. Most nights I lie awake, listening to Bernard's breathing. I have to be ready to rouse him if he slips into a nightmare, ready to towel him down if he needs it.

How is he? Oh, Bernard's fine. He's fine. Yeah, really. I’ll tell him you asked.

Let me tell you about bungee jumping.

The first part's all anticipation. Getting on the rig and helmet, waiting for your turn, the ride up. All the while, you're taking deep breaths and steeling your nerves. Yeah, even when it’s not your first time. You’re preparing yourself for one moment, that swift passage between safety and uncertainty, between sane and loony tunes. The transition from the no screaming in your skull to everlasting seconds of yes.

At the top, the wind whips by. Sometimes it's hard to hear. At the top, the people you know vanish. If you looked for them—which you don't because you're concentrating and focusing on the moment—they'd be only featureless faces, lost among the other bodies on the bleachers. Everybody disappears, Davy. You don't think they would, but they do. At the top, you forget everything except the ground below, and your distance from it.

No, Bernard doesn't come to watch me jump. He won't leave the condo often, these days. He knows where I go and he knows what I do, but he doesn't say anything. Sometimes it surprises me how different we are. Most of our friends can't believe we've lasted for nine years. At first it was the superficial differences I noticed—the tomayto-tomahto kind of thing. I'd say vomit, he'd say puke. I'd say ejaculate, he'd say jizz. I'd say masturbate, he'd laugh and say jack off. It took me the longest time to say the word…well, the f-word…when we would…you know.

It used to be Bernard who took risks. Sky diving. Hang gliding. He would always urge me to go hiking with him in the desert or camping in the mountains. Once he took made vacation reservations for the both of us at a dude ranch. You heard me. A dude ranch. Can you believe it? It's just like you probably picture—a bunch of men in worn jeans and chaps walking around wearing ten-gallon hats. And Bernard? He was out learning to rope steer, trying to buck broncos. Don't give me that look, Davy. Real broncos. It was dangerous. He could’ve been thrown or trampled. His rear end was red for a solid two weeks after, but everywhere else he glowed with tan. Me, I was still lily-white all over.

Now Bernard stays at home and twice a week I'm throwing myself off a high platform into nothingness, with a stretchy cord the only thing keeping me from cracking my head against the asphalt. Funny, isn't it? And Bernard doesn't worry, like I used to worry about his adventures. Like I worry about him now, nights, when I lie awake to make sure he’s breathing. Sometimes I rest my ear against his ribcage, to listen for fluid in his lungs.

Bernard has a lot going on. He doesn't need to waste worry on me.

At the bottom, after the earth rushes to kiss you and time stops, after you've forgotten everything in that time it takes to fall, you swing in a gentle arc. Back and forth, over the crowd, over the yellow lines of the parking lot, over the patio where nervous diners watch. The world comes back, bit by bit—it starts with your muscles aching, where the harness pinches. You pick out your friends, waving in the bleachers. Then your memories return, along with your problems and fears. For a few moments you're trapped there, swinging, dangling like a side of beef in a butcher's shop. That’s when you realize nothing has changed. Not really. But there's always the next Friday night, so you let the anticipation build again.

Oh, that looks great. Thank you. And thanks for asking about Bernard. I'll tell him you said hello. Wait...I’ve got your tip right here. See you in three weeks? Some night, come over to the Emerald City and watch me jump, okay? Maybe you'll try for yourself—it's an experience you don't regret.

The Cream Puff

When I was very, very young, my father’s sister was the coolest of cool aunts. Straight out of art school, Aunt Jane affected a bohemian lifestyle, choosing to live in a run-down studio apartment in one of Baltimore’s dicier neighborhoods. She’d always wanted to be a painter; she’d lavish layer upon layer of oils upon her outsized canvases to achieve abstract results, usually in different shades of a single hue. One of her gloomier works, a study in browns that resembled a lake in a cavern, or perhaps the cross-cutting of a tree trunk, has covered one full wall of my father’s bedroom for decades now. She exhibited at no-name downtown shows where hungry artists made a dinner from the cheese plate served on opening night; she wore cat’s-eye glasses before they were popular.

I loved going to her apartment, when we would visit Baltimore. She would bring out a bottle of red chianti in a straw-covered bottle to share with my parents, though she’d drink most of it herself. We’d sit around a coffee table on her super-modern and super-uncomfortable butterfly canvas sling chairs, and dip bread cubes into her fondue dish. My parents were very young themselves, and preferred Jane’s unconventional flat to the antiques and rigid deportment required at my Maryland grandmother’s house. Visiting Jane was a breath of fresh air.

Then she met and married a man named Bert, and that was the end of that.

Bert was already divorced when she met him, and a decade older. Jane’s ambition was to paint; Bert thought all art was crapola. Both my father and my sister might have rejected the country club society in which they grew up, but their manners were pure Baltimore Blue Book. Bert installed shelving for a living and was proud of his calluses and perpetually dirty nails. He swore like a sailor, scratched himself at the dinner table, and made it very clear he wasn’t interested in any conversations that weren’t about sports.

I don’t know what Jane saw in him. Perhaps he was an act of rebellion. Perhaps opposites really do attract. Either way, they married quickly. My grandmother moved out of my father’s childhood home into a smaller apartment, and sold the property and its contents to my aunt. She and Bert moved into my grandmother’s house, surrounded by my grandmother’s furniture, her photos, her books. She slept in my grandmother’s bed, cooked in her kitchen. A metamorphosis took place. Very quickly, my aunt Jane transformed into a younger version of my grandmother: easily irritated, narrow-minded, constantly disapproving. She tucked away her paints and canvases behind a wall in the basement, never to touch them again. She became the kind of person who cared about what the neighbors thought. Jane was no longer cool.

A lot of her change of outlook had to do with Bert. He mocked anyone with a degree higher than high school—especially my parents, with their multiple graduate diplomas and professor titles. Effete intellectuals weren’t real men. Real men worked with their hands. A real woman didn’t teach, either; she stayed home, like Jane. My mother’s activism enraged him. The two butted heads with vicious abandon at every family gathering, especially when she would talk about her pet projects—voter registration, equal housing opportunities, birth control. Bert was a lazy conservative who couldn’t muster any better arguments than Archie Bunker with his vague talk about welfare queens and the minorities trying to get handouts instead of working hard, and my mother delighted in shooting down each and every of his protests with actual facts and figures. It didn’t matter; she was a woman, and he could holler louder, so he stomped away from every argument fuming, but convinced he’d shown the Southern broad what’s what.

My father didn’t like his brother-in-law much, either. Not only would Bert insult my mom, but he’d would take every opportunity to remind my dad that his house was bigger, his neighborhood was better, and that he relied on his hands instead of his namby-pamby education to make his way in life. (That the house and neighborhood was my grandmother’s, and not anything he’d achieved himself, didn’t seem to matter.) When we’d arrive as a family for a visit, Bert would mince toward my dad with loose wrists and imitate comedian Alan Sues’ tag line—Laugh-In had been popular just a couple of years before—“It’s Uncle Al, the kiddies’ pal.” Though my dad ignored the barbs, but I could tell they’d make him bristle. I didn’t exactly understand the inference…but I could tell from my father’s reaction it must be unwholesome.

I got the worst of it. Bert constantly needled me, from the second grade up, weighing my every word and action against some imaginary standard of stalwart boyhood that I could never attain. I was a quiet kid. Not a sissy—I wasn’t especially effeminate, nor did I play with dolls. Even in the late nineteen-sixties or early seventies my parents were progressive enough that they wouldn’t have cared if I’d been girly. Other kids, though policed the genders with such fascistic zest that I’d learned never to cross those lines.

My interests didn’t lie with the boisterous pursuits of many boys, though. I preferred to read, to get my schoolwork done. I wrote stories and poetry. “You gotta get his nose out of the books,” Bert would bark at my parents, when I’d visit Maryland and spend the trip in the attic bedroom reading. “Christ, he’s gonna end up a pansy.” There was no piano at my grandmother’s old house, but when at my mom’s command I’d play during their visits to us, Bert would spend the entire performance tapping his foot with impatience, or sighing. When my piece was finally over, he’d skip the applause and bolt, disgusted that my parents would pay good money for lessons. For a boy.

In fourth grade, I started independently making cookies and breads and meals for the family, finding recipes and trying them out (with my mother’s glad approval, since it was less work she had to do). I was once pressed into service to make dessert during one of Jane and Bert’s visits. I spent a couple of hours baking one of my dad’s favorite desserts—puff pastry from scratch, filled with an eggy homemade vanilla custard, drizzled with chocolate sauce (Hershey’s…I was only 10). When I approached the table, thinking everyone would love the delicious pastries I’d labored over, Bert rolled his eyes and tossed down his napkin. “Cream puffs?” he said. “C’mon. Cream puffs from the cream puff? This shit writes itself.”

My aunt, who rarely attempted to leaven any of Bert’s insults, this time put a hand on his arm. “Just eat your dessert.”

“All I know is my kids are never gonna grow up to make cream puffs like some kind of faggot.”

My father froze. My mother pushed back her chair, folded her napkin, and all the while staring at Bert, remove the plate of pasty from my hands and suggested I take my serving to my room. I gladly obeyed, closing my door as tightly as possible and turning on the radio, so that I wouldn’t have to hear the fireworks below.

I knew by then what faggot meant.

All through my childhood and adolescence Bert needled me. Not all his aggressions were so overt: most were subtle. He took my father and I fishing on his boat, but ‘accidentally’ left the bag of books I’d brought on the dock. He’d plan outings to football games, knowing I found them excruciating. He’d parse every word I spoke in the hope of finding something to mock. It got to a point after puberty that it seemed easier to remain silent for days on end, whenever our families visited. Even if I was quiet, though, Bert would interrogate my parents. How could they raise such a sulky boy? Or was I, with that long hair of mine, a sulky girl?

Every time we’d drive up to Baltimore, or Jane’s family would drive down to Richmond, I would have to dig deep and endure, knowing I was in for day after day of non-stop taunts. We all know how adaptable humans are: we learn to diminish unpleasant stimuli we can’t avoid. Bert was the most unpleasant stimulus on that side of the family. Though we couldn’t ignore his bullying, we marked it privately, rolled our eyes at it in public, and pretended as best we could that it wasn’t happening.

Because Bert was wrong about nearly everything. He was wrong about race. He was wrong about social services—or at least hopelessly Neanderthal. He was wrong about music, wrong about art. He was wrong to convince Jane never to paint again, when it had been something she’d wanted to do for a lifetime before him. He was wrong about treating service workers like shit. He was wrong to be a complete and relentless asshole to a little kid. When someone is incontrovertibly, absolutely, astonishingly wrong about everything, he’s easier to dismiss, right?

Of course, no one save myself realized Bert was right about one thing. I was a faggot. A pansy, a cream puff. I had to come to terms with my sexuality during the rough tenure of his withering disdain. My loving parents could dismiss his name-calling, his scorn, the scrutiny he gave to my every word and action, because they assumed like everything else, he was misinformed and incorrect. I, however, knew if that brand of harassment could come from someone related to me (by marriage…but still), what would follow from strangers would be even worse. Perhaps even violent. No little kid should have to grow up with that kind of constant fear around a family member.

So, when I could, I stopped making myself available for his sarcasm and insults. I stopped seeing my aunt and uncle when I started college. I politely declined to take any more trips to Maryland; I’d stay away when they visited my parents. After I moved away, I’d listen to the news from that side of the family from my parents, and then later from just my dad. But after Bert had made my life miserable for such a long period, once I was of age and gave myself permission not to tolerate it any more, it ended.

I’ve only seen Jane and Bert twice in the years since. The first was at my mom’s funeral, which happened at a point long after my sexuality was known to everyone. Neither of them could even bring themselves to address me afterward, either at the church or the interment, much less the gathering at my dad’s house. The second time was several years later at a family wedding—a teetotal affair micromanaged by a bridezilla who threw a public tantrum that people had the nerve to bring gifts not on the registry. I’d been warned by my dad in advance that the clusterfuck would be alcohol-free, but Jane unbent enough to join me and her brother for shots from the trunk of my car. (My dad never drinks. That’s how bad it was.)

I was the oldest of the grandchildren on that side of the family. Jane and Bert ended up having two sons, both more than a decade younger than myself. Neither of them grew up as Bert’s ideal boy: they weren’t athletic, unruly, or manly in all the traditional ways. The older played sports unwillingly until he hit his adolescence, when he refused to participate any longer. He preferred video games, and eventually bourbon from the family’s liquor cabinet: after drunkenly trashing the house and many of my grandmother’s old things, he had to be sent to rehab in his very early teens. He straightened out as an adult; he married, had two kids, got a job as an architect. But even though he’d hit all the tick marks on his dad’s American Dream checklist, none of it lasted. His wife divorced him, and took the house and the kids. For years he was in so over his head with child support and payments on a home in which he didn’t live that he had to board in an elderly couple’s home.

Jane and Bert’s younger son is more of a mystery. ‘Sensitive’ was always the word I heard used to describe him, or ‘artistic’—and I know from experience how well sensitivity thrives in the emotional desert where Bert walked. As soon as my younger cousin was able, he managed to find a scholarship to study in Australia. He stayed there for a decade, working in IT. “It’s like he decided to move to the other side of the globe to get away with us,” Jane would joke with my father, probably hoping that if she spoke the words aloud, it might make them untrue. He moved back to Maryland, but only after Jane and Bert finally gave up the family home at the turn of the millennium and relocated to Tennessee. He never married. He lived with two women, but only as roommates—they both were involved in romantic relationships with other men.

I remember my dad calling me with his suspicions, about fifteen years ago. “I think he’s gay,” he said about my younger cousin.

“Because your gaydar’s so good?” I asked.

“He’s never once had a relationship. Not that he’s told his mother about,” my dad reasoned. “He had to move to Australia to get away from them for a decade. I genuinely think he’s gay and terrified to come out to Bert. Bert would explode.”

“I know.”

“He probably figures it’s easier to wait until after his dad is dead to live openly. Poor kid.”

“I know.” If that’s what was going on with my younger cousin, I’d lived it myself. I’d had more than enough of Bert, growing up.

* * *

I’m writing this essay as a form of self-soothing. When I tell stories on a page, when I collect my memories and arrange them into a pattern I find satisfying, and true, and real, it helps pacify the turmoil in my head. Cobwebs gather on much of what I remember, particularly in passages of my mind on which I’ve long shut and locked the door, intending never to return. Giving them an airing does me good.

I’ve been resurrecting my experiences with Bert because he’s dying. My dad called me last month to say Bert had experienced a few strange symptoms that sent him to his doctor, and then a specialist, who diagnosed him with an advanced form of leukemia. Within a day he was rushed to a special treatment center in Texas; after only a few days there, they sent him home with the news that he only had four or five days to live. It was all very abrupt and unexpected.

My dad said Bert called him to say goodbye, and that the man seemed fairly reconciled to the approaching darkness. At least he was dying at home, with hospice workers helping, and his wife and older son by his bedside the entire time. (My younger cousin has declined to be there.) Since then he’s been on painkilling drugs, so not entirely present any longer. The prognosis of four or five days came three weeks ago. He’s been holding on, improbably, ever since.

My aunt’s reacting as anyone might, coping with the death of someone to whom she’s been married for over four decades. She calls my dad and cries. She’s made plans to sell the house in Tennessee and to return to Maryland. She watches her TV shows, helps with the painkillers, and waits for the inevitable. My father is elderly himself, and has always probably expected to go before his little sister and the man she married, and certainly before any of his own children. He provides what support he can, and keeps me informed. It’s sobering to him, though.

And I react by arranging my memories onto a page. The pain Bert caused is long in the past, though the scars ache when I summon the many psychic souvenirs he left. I turned out okay, despite his warnings: my love of music and of language and poetry, my queerness, my stubbornness in refusing to change to please him—those things he despised made me the man I am.

Writing all these words has made me realize how Bert must have made a straw man of me to scare his own children. The aspersions he cast in my direction, the ways in which he sniggered and mocked the girly boy who liked reading instead of camping, who preferred Beethoven to baseball—how that picture he painted of my softness must have terrified his own kids. He must have made such a bugaboo of me. I was the thing they must never emulate, the unholy creature he feared one of his kids might become.

This straw man, however, feels nothing but pity for Bert. So much time wasted, frightening little kids. And to what end? The pansy has prospered, while Bert’s older son wallows in mediocrity and bankruptcy, and the younger is a wounded little boy in his late forties, refusing to see the man who might hate him because of what he is.

It might not be the outcome anyone would have predicted. I’m certain it’s not the outcome anyone, save maybe the cream puff, deserves.

Jan

Over the course of the years (jeez) that I’ve been keeping this blog online, I’ve written a few entries that I should’ve classified under a single tag—a tag called And Then He Died.

They all have basically the same kind of structure. I set up a memory of a time in my life when I was much younger—my childhood in Virginia, for example, or the long and laughing years I spent in college. I describe another man, or another boy, and how we connected and became lovers. Or perhaps I describe how we didn’t become intimate, or understand each other much at all. I mourn the lost innocence, or the bungled connection. And then (if you were reading the first paragraph, this won’t come as much of a shock) the person dies.

Not like, right in front of me or anything. Off-stage, discreetly, for me to discover much later, so I can feel badly about what I’d lost. Whether it was a friendship, or something never quite achieved, I’m always keenly aware of what can’t and never will be replaced.

I’ve been laying low this week because I haven’t felt like writing a And Then He Died entry. I just can’t do it, this time. So I’ll jump right to the ending of the entry I could’ve written in place of this one and let you know right off: an old lover of mine died recently.

I first knew Jan twenty-five years ago, when I was in graduate school. He wasn’t a friend of mine exactly, though we did know each other by sight. Though he was tall and lightly muscular, and although his voice was deep and grave, he always seemed fragile. He wore his hair long, down past his shoulder blades. He spoke softly, barely above a whisper, so that one had to lean in and keep quiet to hear him. His eyes were gentle. When he listened, he cocked his head like a bird, and rested upon the speaker a gaze that I can only recall as pure, as if all his concentration was focused upon that moment. He was a musician, primarily. He used his long and lean fingers to play the guitar. Not loud metal. Soft and sweet music of his own composition, which he would strum into life from the strings of his acoustic guitar.

It was rumored for a very long time that he was having an affair with one of our professors. It wasn’t until a few years later, when I joked with the professor about it, that her shock and panic that I’d heard such a thing convinced me the rumor had been true. Yes, a she. I remember being as surprised about that as any of us. As I said, though Jan wasn’t effeminate in any direct sense, his gentleness and shyness gave him what I can only call an air of the feminine. I’d always assumed he was gay. I remember hearing the multiple rumors about his affair with the faculty member, thinking to myself, Good on you, Jan, for defying my preconceived notions about you, and not making any further effort to get to know him.

Which was a mistake. A few years later we found ourselves in the same musical ensemble, where we sat side by side. Every week over the course of a couple of years I got to know him better both as a person and as a musician. I grew to look forward to his gentle asides, and the way he’d hug me goodbye at the end of the night. When he confided in a mutual friend that he found me attractive and had a crush on me, she immediately came to me with the news. I was tickled at the news, and flattered, and genuinely touched. Because we were all acting like fourth-graders, she immediately went back to him with the information. Eventually the two of us slowly, shyly, and tentatively agreed to go out on a date together.

Which meant we made vague noises after rehearsal about going out to dinner, and then he came over to my place one evening that week, took off his coat, and spent the rest of the evening in my bed.

I remember that night well. We stood in my kitchen, leaning against the counters with our arms folded over our own chests. We flirted like mad, and endured awkward silences in which all we could do was grin big-toothed grins at each other. Finally I leaned into him, and took the back of his head in my hand, and pulled him down to me, for a long and lingering first kiss. Yes, he was that tall.

We made love in the dark upstairs. Everything we did was gentle, and sweet, and slow. We smiled at each other between kisses, and laughed at the way he would tingle and tickle at my light touch. We relished each other’s little gasps and sighs as we explored each other’s bodies. My dick hardened like cement when he pulled my ear to his lips and whispered that he wanted me inside him. It was probably one of the longest attempts at penetration I’ve ever taken with an adult—I think it took me nearly an hour to get all the way in him, because I was taking it so slowly. I’d grind and push myself in a millimeter at a time, so that he barely knew he was taking a little more with every push. He hadn’t been fucked in years and years, he told me in whispers, and he’d never before enjoyed it.

He did with me. I fulfilled that fantasy for him. I made it sweet, and slow, and painless. When I made him reach behind to see how I was buried all the way inside him, he was so overcome with emotion and happiness that he shook. Shortly after he came in my hand, as I held him tightly and told him how truly remarkable he was. He finally went home early the next morning, happy and grateful.

And that was it. We never fucked again. He came to rehearsal later that week and handed me a hand-penned note in which he explained that he’d fallen in love with me that night. He knew that I wasn’t in any place to have the relationship he wanted. It would be wiser for him, he explained, not to carry on a physical relationship with me when it would only make him yearn for something he couldn’t have. He watched me read it, and then—characteristic Jan—worriedly asked if he’d hurt my feelings.

He hadn’t. And I understood. On some level I knew it was wrong to make him love me, when it was happening. Jan always seemed fragile, as I said; though I coddled him like an egg through that fuck, I should have been more aware that doing so would awaken in him feelings that I wouldn’t return. I did love him. I loved him dearly for his sweet nature and for the tenderness he shared with me that night. But I couldn’t give him the strings he wanted, he knew without having to ask.

The pain lasted for only a few weeks. We learned how to negotiate around that elephant in the room between us, and didn’t speak of it again. We became friends. Good friends, even. Not the kind of friends who swap fucks, but the kind of friends who always had a lot to share, whenever we saw each other. He was there for my birthday parties, right up until I moved. He was there the night before I moved, at my going-away party.

Still. I knew every time we looked at each other just a little longer than usual, and when our gazes rested upon each other and we’d simply blink our eyes and smile. I knew what he was thinking, and he knew how I felt, too.

He didn’t take care of himself, though. Jan suffered greatly from a couple of genetic diseases that ran in his family. He didn’t have health insurance. He lived alone in a decrepit old house he was trying to renovate. He wouldn’t see a doctor unless it was urgent. Apparently by the time he sought care the last time, it was too late.

So I’ve been wandering around this last week, a little dazed and confused and reminded of my own mortality. At the holiday time of year, no less.

But if there’s anything that any of us need to take away from this sort of thing, it’s this: make your moments sweet. Take the time to lie with someone, to connect with them, to make them the center of your universe for a few minutes, or hours, or days, or years. Create memories of which the both of you will be proud, and of which you’ll be fond for a lifetime.

And make those sweet moments last. Not just as they’re happening, but afterward. Write them down so you won’t forget them, as I obsessively do. Share them so that others can benefit. And revisit them yourself, not with regret or with lingering fear or sorrow, but with the freshness of the day on which they were conceived. Honor those memories, and the men and women who helped create them.

That’s the best memorial anyone could ask.

Planet of the Joannes

There were a couple of years in the late nineteen-eighties, as my desire to finish a doctorate in grad school fizzled, in which I took a clerical job to pay the bills. It wasn't a spectacularly high-paying position, nor was it all that dignified—it primarily involved sitting in a dank windowless room off a lost corridor, and transcribing dictaphone tapes made by various faculty at the university.

The cramped office stunk of tobacco, thanks to my alcoholic, bat-shit-crazy boss, a man of little education and even less couth. When he wasn't sitting in his desk chair blatantly reading Playboy and Hustler, he was making passes at secretaries in the building and then, when they'd scatter in fear at his approach, would proclaim them "goddamn lesbians." It was a tedious existence. I needed the money, though. And in the weeks after my sexual assault, my instinct was to shut out the world as much as possible, to wall myself away. That dark, smelly room was my cloister, and the mind-numbing droning of the faculty whenever I clamped on those headphones felt like sanctuary.

For a couple of months I worked alone, but then my tiny office was rearranged one day to accommodate another desk. Soon another transcriber invaded my monastic solitude. His name was Geoffrey. He was a narrow-shouldered guy who came up to my sternum, with a head full of strawberry-blond hair. On a big, bulbous nose rested a pair of very geeky horn-rimmed glasses. Elvis Costello glasses, they were. He was skittish of me at first and I of him. I had a paranoid few days in which I imagined our boss had planted him in there in order to keep an eye on me. I began to relax, though, when I realized that Geoffrey was gay; I heard him talk to what I had to assume was a significant other on the phone, a few times a day. I understood from his guarded, non-gendered references and carefully-neutral words that he was trying not to give away that he was seeing another man.

After that realization, I opened up and Geoffrey and I rapidly became friends. We were both the same age, and both had a particular disdain for our boss. "Fucking asshole," Geoffrey would mutter under his breath, whenever that Marlboro-scented storm cloud would loom on the horizon. We bonded over the strange bureaucracy of our division, too. The vice-president of our school was guarded by two administrative assistants and an academic services officer, all three of whom were named Joanne, and all three of whom were joined at the hip. They lunched together. They gossiped together during work hours. They all chattered in high-pitched, rapid voices. "Planet of the Joannes," I nicknamed the fourth floor one day, and Geoffrey started to laugh so hard that he had to slump against the wall with tears in his eyes.

After that we were constant work friends. We lunched outdoors, munching on sandwiches even in the coldest weather, to rid ourselves of the tobacco stink. "I have something to tell you," he said one day over our meal, perhaps a month into our acquaintance. "I'm into guys."

"I am too," I replied.

He seemed relieved, and commented that he'd thought so, but that he'd really had no way of telling. "And another thing," he said. And I remember the very formal way in which he said these following words, because the defensiveness and awkwardness of them struck me in a way that made me wonder how many times he'd said them before, and how badly they'd been received. "I have unfortunately been infected with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus."

“That’s okay,” I told him. “Thanks for telling me.”

Hearing him say the words was something of a shock. Yet I wasn’t surprised. Geoffrey and I sat close enough that even over the stink of cigarettes in that office I knew his smell. I’d grown up with a mother whose odor changed with every new pharmaceutical regimen. I knew how medicines change a person’s scent. Geoffrey’s pores exuded a sharp tang that I can only describe as being like the metallic overtones of a diarrhea smell, but without its organic nastiness. It wasn’t vile; it was merely sharp, and distinguishable. I knew he was taking pills for something. It didn’t surprise me that it was for HIV.

These were still the sad and early days of the AIDS crisis. Geoffrey was a novelty. Not for having HIV, but for admitting it. I’d known a couple of people by that point who’d died, but they’d gone off to New York or San Francisco and met their demises offstage, so to speak. I’d never known anyone living with it, day to day, before him.

I got to know Geoffrey’s daily routine with his pills. It seemed as if there were dozens of them that he’d take throughout the day when the timer on his watch would beep. By that point in our friendship he’d tell me what each of them was and what it was for, as he’d down them without water in our little back room. “Down you go,” he’d say, over and over again. “Do your dirty work!”

By that point we were seeing less and less of our boss. The university had instituted a no-smoking rule in its buildings, and he was spending a lot of time ‘working from home,’ which meant that Geoffrey and I were largely unsupervised. We’d do our tasks in the mornings, then sit in the back room and listen to alternative radio while we talked in the afternoons, or visit the Planet of the Joannes so that we could laugh at them later. Sometimes we’d just head out into the sunshine and wile away the hours. Our super-sneaky boss liked to throw in a phone call to the office at five minutes to five, on the days he worked at home, just to make sure we were still there; we’d creep back in the office just under the wire and pretend to have been good boys all the day long.

It was on one of our afternoon trips that Geoffrey gravely informed me that some singer we both liked—I think it might have been Annie Lennox, but I’m shaky on that point—had HIV. She’d announced it to the press and everything he told me. “Oh no,” I said. “Not her. She’s too good for that!”

He turned beet red. “So do you think that only bad people get the disease?” he snapped.

I never made that mental mistake again, ever.

Because Geoffrey was a sweet and good soul. He dearly loved his boyfriend, a man in Chicago who lacked the means to help him move there, and longed for the days they could finally be together. He had a gentle good humor and a prankster’s sense of fun that made our ventures to the Planet of the Joannes infinitely less painful than they could have been.

At the same time, he had a deep, voracious sexuality. At some point we began to compare sexual experiences and it came out that we both were fans of one of the restrooms on campus—a men’s room so notorious that researchers had installed one-way mirrors in it during the nineteen-fifties so they could study cruising behaviors (it was assumed by then that no one was watching through them, but who knew?). And gradually, on occasion, on our unsupervised afternoon tours around campus, we’d walk to the other end of the university and down into the basement together, and I’d watch him go hog wild.

The restroom was one of those places in the remote bowels of the building where very few people ventured. Anyone down there was looking for sex, plain and simple. I’d act as lookout so that Geoffrey could suck dick until he’d had his fill. Often he’d undo his shirt and kneel there on the floor with a cock in his mouth and another waiting nearby, its owner stroking and watching, while Geoffrey played with his own meat, stiffened by a cock ring. He had skin as pale as mine and the very lightest covering of blond hair on his body. When he sucked, it was with total abandon. His glasses would end up askew on his face. He’d have cum and sweat and saliva dripping down his neck and chest, and spattering his work shirt. He’d particularly go wild over black men, gargling and strangling over their tools with a gusto I haven’t seen outside of porn.

Then, when he was done, or there were no more cocks to service, he’d straighten his spectacles, wipe off his face with a damp paper towel, grin and thank me, and then catch up on whatever pills he’d missed during the session.

We never had sex. Geoffrey was more of a brother to me than anything, and though I didn’t mind being his lookout or even his pimp in the restroom, I never wanted anything more of him. I’m not sure I could have, even. I wasn’t so ignorant that I considered him off-limits or untouchable because of his medical condition, but I hadn’t yet made my peace with those risks. It was probably fortunate for us both that the attraction simply wasn’t there.

I didn’t know at the time how very badly off Geoffrey really was. Daytimes he was lucid and intelligent, creative and chatty. Nighttimes, when I didn’t see him, were apparently when things went south for him. I visited his house once and discovered that it was a maze of Post-It notes and scrawled reminders; apparently he had an advanced-enough case of dementia, combined with the effects of the drugs he was taking, that he would lose track of time, or which of his regimented tasks he was supposed to be doing. If he didn’t stick to a very strict schedule on his own, he could get stuck in a loop for hours.

“I think I’ve made dinner four times,” he would say over the phone to me, some evenings. “But I don’t remember eating at all.” Or, “I had a note to call my mother tonight, but she told me I’d already called her twice before.”

“Do you need me to come over?” I’d ask.

“No,” he’d say in a tiny voice, sometimes. Or sometimes he’d say nothing, and I’d drive up Woodward to his small home, and sit with him on the sofa watching television, until it was time for him to go to bed.

During the daytime he was funny and sweet and lucid. At night, though, with his hairy ankles sticking out of the feet of his pajamas, he looked like a little, lost boy.

We worked together for less than a year. Geoffrey’s symptoms were far enough along that they’d begun shaving away at his life. He had to give him up a beloved cat because of a toxoplasmosis scare. His good hours during the day became fewer, and out of fear of blackouts he had to leave earlier in the afternoons to drive home safely. Soon he stopped working altogether; his boyfriend in Chicago finally found the means to help him move. I got a letter from him the month after he left—a silly, bitchy breath of fresh air in which he asked me about the Planet of the Joannes and wished me sincere luck in coping with the alcoholic boss.

Then a few weeks after that, I heard he was gone. A twinkling little light in my life, extinguished, off stage.

I’m writing this memory of Geoffrey in the very small hours of the morning. I’ve been unable to sleep; the medicine the doctor prescribed for me last week doesn’t seem to be working.

All this restless night I’ve been thinking about Geoffrey, and his sweet and gentle presence, and how much I liked him as a friend. Both of us were wandering and a little alone, back there in that dim office in the building’s lost corridor. How could we have ended up there, else? And yet, for a time, I like to hope our companionship elevated us both—helping me step back into the sunshine again with tentative steps, and keeping him a few steps ahead of a darkness that at every turn threatened to swallow him whole.

I remember you, Geoffrey. It pains me to the core to think about your loss. But I remember.

David, Part II

(While I'm visiting my dad, I'm posting some older journal entries for today and tomorrow. What follows is an old journal entry from 2003 that's continued from yesterday.)

I don’t know why meeting David had mortified me. I can hazard a few guesses, but my perspective has changed so greatly over the last two decades any one of them would be difficult to explain. All the sex I’d had in the five years before, by and large, had been with men older than myself. I’d been used, photographed, banged, passed around, and never really felt any shame when it happened.

When David walked into that house, however, and appeared in the bedroom door, it was the first time my slutting around had been laid bare for someone my own age. My life had been neatly compartmentalized to that point. I had my friends and peers, and I had the collection of men I’d slept with. I might be friendly with the men fucking me, but they weren’t my friends. Likewise, my friends didn’t fuck me.

David frightened me, I think, by being my peer, wanting to be my friend, and wanting so obviously to enjoy sex with me. It was too much for me to handle. From what I recall, I went back to my dorm room that afternoon and hid. As it grew darker, I badly wanted to go down to Crim Dell and meet him, but every time I imagined him there, waiting in the campus’s most picturesque and romantic spot, my stomach churned with fear. I pictured him leaning against the fence overlooking the duck pond, its Japanese bridge framing his impatient silhouette. I pictured him looking at his watch and waiting for me.

I also pictured myself showing up and not finding him there, and returning to my dormitory disappointed and shaking.

I stayed in that night. I didn’t go down to meet him. Ten o’clock came and went and I remained curled up in the corner of my room where my bed met the wall. Midnight passed, and one, then two. I didn’t fall asleep until nearly dawn.

When I look at David’s photograph in my old college yearbooks, he appears slightly cross-eyed. That puzzles me; the expression was nothing like the David I knew. I could see his approach on campus after that from far away—the red of his hair allowed me to spot him long before I could make out his features.. When I could, I’d duck down some byway or gravel path and avoid him. When I couldn’t, our eyes would lock as we passed. If he was in the middle of a conversation with a friend, he would stop talking so that he could stare at me as I walked by. When I looked over my shoulder, I would see him craning his neck to gaze after me.

I yearned for David all that year, but never said a word to him. His attention mortified me, but not as much as the knowledge that I had stood him up that autumn evening.

By my sophomore year, I was involved in the theatre department and co-starring in a two-person drama written by one of the more talented student playwrights. It was part of an evening of one-act plays. David turned out to be in one of the other productions. Our paths, however, didn’t cross until the night we ran technical rehearsals on all three plays. While we waited for our turns, we sat ten feet apart. Though we pretended not to be noticing each other, he was all I could think about. I feared him getting up and speaking to me. I worried he still wanted an apology for never meeting him. He watched me from the corners of his eyes the entire time. When I was onstage for my play during the performances, standing at attention in a soldier’s role, eyes straight ahead, I could see him standing above the bleachers of spectators in the walkway that ran around the room’s edge. He stood there, watching no one but me, for every performance. And then he would disappear.

During David’s last semester on campus we shared a class in seventeenth-century poetry together. He sat in the row ahead of me, one seat over, next to his friend Shana from the theatre department. Every Tuesday and Thursday we would both go through an elaborate charade in which we’d pretend not to know the other existed. He would swivel in his chair and pretend to look out the window, even while his eyes would sidle in my direction. I would flush a deep, deep crimson and pretend I was listening to our short, frizzle-haired female professor. He would talk loudly about going up to New York on his spring break and visiting a gay bar. His friend Shana would hush him, worried that someone might overhear. He’d meant for me to overhear, however. Maybe he’d thought I’d forgotten how I knew him.

How could I forget, though? Whenever David was around, he was I could think about. My skin seemed to blush, warm, and grow tight in his presence, like a grape swollen to bursting in the afternoon sun. If he turned suddenly in his seat, I would flinch as if I’d been struck.

Toward the end of the semester he appeared in our class carrying a single white rose. It lay next to his notebook throughout the lecture, but from time to time he would pick it up with his soft, small hands and hold the bud to his nose. Twice he turned around in my direction and let his eyes flick to mine as he held the rose on his lips, casually, offhandedly, as if bored with the lecture and having a private muse on some other topic. I nearly had a stroke.

At the end of the class he turned to Shana. “This is for you, sweetie,” he told her. She beamed and took it. They left the seminar room together. David very deliberately scanned my direction to see if I watched, yet refused to meet my eyes. I just wanted to slink back to my room and hide.

The day of the final exam, David was in a giddy, playful mood. He toyed with Shana’s hair and cracked jokes I couldn’t hear. Shortly before the professor walked in, he grabbed a mug of water she’d brought with her, walked over the window, and fished something out of his pocket. While Shana protested, he poured the water over the something and brought it back to where they sat. “I found this in the river,” he said. “See how beautiful it is when it’s wet?” Shana didn’t seem overly impressed, but she agreed with him and hushed him so the professor could begin her lecture.

The course had been tremendously difficult for me, and of course I’d never been able to concentrate during the lectures. I was pulling nothing but Cs on my papers and tests, and the only way I’d been able to tackle the final exam had been to memorize vast quantities of the professor’s favorite poems and to regurgitate them back into the blue book. I was the only sophomore in what was a senior-level class. I was also one of the last people to hand in his test booklet and leave the classroom. I walked down the arched hallway and down the stairs and through the front door of the Tucker building and out into the sweet Virginia sunshine, relishing mingling sensations of apprehension at my performance and relief at the class’ completion.

I felt a touch on my arm. David had been leaning against the old brick wall of the entrance, waiting for me. He barely looked at me as he pressed something into my hand. “Had we but world enough, and time,” he said. I was still so surprised that I could barely comprehend him, but I did note how stiff he sounded. It was as if he had practiced his line thoroughly, but barely had the courage to speak it. Before I could reply, he sprinted down the steps without a word more. When I opened my hand, I saw that he had given me the stone he’d earlier shown Shana. It was dry and still warm from his hand, and it was plain and ugly.

I never saw him again.

I was angry with him for that moment for months. The line was from Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” a poem we had studied in class. Every negative interpretation I could attach to the quotation and his dubious gift, I attached. Mentally I railed at him for suggesting I’d been my Jamestown road friend’s whore. I resented David for thinking me coy and calculating, rather than merely frightened to death of him. I thought he had given me a stone as a booby prize—it was the rock in Charlie Brown’s trick-or-treat bag, or a representation of how hard he thought my heart.

I kept the stone, though. I buried it in a Godiva chocolate tin from the 1950s that had belonged to my father and where I kept other small treasures. I didn’t look at it again until a year later, however, when I found out that David was dead.

He had moved to his beloved New York right after his graduation in 1983; the obituary I ran across in my father’s alumni newspaper said he’d died of complications related to pneumonia—probably a euphemism, I realized even then. David was most likely the first man I knew to die from AIDS-related infections.

David's stone was still there in the Godiva tin, smooth and round and a speckled, anonymous grey. It wasn’t until after I learned of his death that I thought to put it under water. It came alive then with layers of rosy pink and deep, chocolate browns. Flecks on its surface reflected light back at me. It really was a beautiful thing to behold.

When David comes to mind these days, it’s always with a sense of loss—both the loss of his life and the loss of my missed opportunities. Certain things remind me of him. A certain shade of red hair. Light blue eyes the color of the sky. A particular tilt of the head, or an aroused hiss of breath. A white rose.

Every couple of years I take my Godiva tin and dig to its bottom where sits a plain, round, undistinguished stone—the kind of pebble I might kick out of my way if it rested on the sidewalk. I let the water run over it, and I admire its colors. Its rose-colored strata endure and never change, unlike youth or shame or even fear. And I wonder not so much why I feared David, or why we never really spoke or touched again, but how I should ever have thought that he could give me a gift that wasn’t truly beautiful.

David, Part I

(While I'm visiting my dad, I'm posting some older journal entries so that you won't miss me. What follows is an old journal entry from 2003.)

“Don’t get up,” he told me.

I was already pulling on a shirt, panicked at the sound of the back door opening at the other side of the condo. It was the first time I’d been in a man’s bed and heard someone unexpected enter his home. “Someone’s coming,” I said, panicked. Was it a lover? A wife? A policeman?

“Seriously. Don’t get dressed,” said my friend. After twenty-two years, I’ve forgotten his name. He was one of those alumni of the college who never seemed to leave Williamsburg after graduation, loving the little city so much that he’d stayed there for twenty years. Although he worked in Richmond and spent large portions of each month in the D.C. area, his home was townhouse on Jamestown Road. His advice came too late, though. I’d already pulled on my t-shirt. When I heard steps at the top of the staircase, I pulled the hem of my shirt over my erection. “You didn’t have to do that. It’s just my buddy David. He’s picking up some stuff. You know David?”

It was 1981. I was seventeen and in my first month as a freshman. I barely knew anyone who wasn’t on my dorm hallway. I certainly didn’t know the older kid standing in front of me. David had hair in a shade of light copper, like a penny new from the press; the skin of his lightly muscled arms was pink and creamy. He wore a grey t-shirt with the sleeves cut-off, jeans, and tennis shoes. “I didn’t know you had someone here,” he said. The apology was honest. I could tell how uncomfortable he had been, seeing me.

“That’s okay. Let me get your stuff.” The man stood. His penis was still dripping semen from the tip as he ambled off downstairs.

“I’m David,” said the redhead. He stared at me with eyes of the most intense blue hue I've ever seen. I introduced myself, frightened to move. My t-shirt was covering my still-raging, unsatisfied erection, but any movement would reveal it. I wasn’t entirely stupid. I knew it was obvious what we’d been doing, but I kept hoping for some less embarrassing solution to the situation. “Are you a student?” he asked. When I didn’t answer, he put a hand to his chest. “I’m a junior.”

“Freshman,” I admitted.

David looked at the staircase just outside the bedroom, and hesitated. Then he took a step closer. “You’re so beautiful,” he whispered. His hand trembled as he reached out to touch my cheek. The stroke’s arc took him to the neck of my shirt. He rested his fingers on it and paused, waiting for me to protest.

I did not.

He lifted the t-shirt up and over my erection. I was unsatisfied and still hard, despite the fright. The sensation of his skin’s warmth along my neck made my cock even harder. When it popped out from under the cloth, unrestrained at last, he drew in his breath sharply, surprised at my size. It sounded as if he was hissing. Those blue eyes regarded my cock for a few seconds before he caught my gaze once more and cupped me under the chin. “I wish I had a boyfriend like you,” he whispered to me, his voice barely audible. “Meet me tonight.”

My heart pounded in my chest so hard that my sight seemed to dim. I wish I could explain the way of my thoughts, twenty-two years ago. These days I would’ve said, “Sure!” My seventeen-year old self, however, I could only wish myself gone, away from the embarrassment of that situation, gone from David’s blue eyes and from my friend’s bed. He must have seen the conflict in my face. “Just meet me tonight. Promise. Ten o’clock, Crim Dell. I’ll wait for you. I just want to talk.” The condo’s owner started back up the stairs. “He used to fuck me too,” he whispered. “Ten o’clock?”

“Here you go.” Our friend held out a plastic grocery bag. I don’t think I ever actually saw what it contained, but from the way it hung, my impression was that it held some clothing.

David had taken a step back, away from me. My cock was back under the t-shirt. The man yawned and launched himself back into bed, not bothering to cover up. “Want to stick around?” he asked David. “Boy’s got a prime mouth.”

The red-head looked at me and shook his head. “I have to do things. Later.”

“Come here,” said the man, grabbing at my shirt. I felt the stitching protest at the seams as he pulled me back and guided me down on him. I performed automatically after that, though, wondering how soon was soon enough to make an excuse to leave and hike the mile back to campus, but not too soon so that I wouldn’t run into David on the way out.

(Part II will appear tomorrow.)