Money Honey
Saturday night. Ten miles and several tax brackets away, I went and attended a little dinner party thrown by my friend “Hank” and his boyfriend “Randy.” Unlike most of my friends who lived hand to mouth at best, Hank, at the not ripe at all age of 19, found himself living the good life. You see, Hank’s amour Randy is twenty-some odd years older than him and had already carved himself out a nice existence that included 38 acres of land and a breathtaking dome house in the middle of it. And though they professed love for each other and pop culture by way of Aaliyah dictated that age is nothing but a number, skepticism always followed the relationship.
“It’s like some twisted Hemingway novel,” a friend of mine said to me once when I told them about the pair. “The Old Man and the Semen.”
And if their age difference wasn’t cause for suspicion, my semi-intimate knowledge of Randy didn’t help matters. You see, some months ago when I was trolling around Gay.com, Randy propositioned me for sex. Well maybe propositioned isn’t the right word but sending someone an e-mail with a picture of your penis in my book counts at least as flirtation.
“How is it?” a mutual friend of Hank’s asked me about Randy’s nether regions.
“Well there is a reason why they sometimes to refer to that area as junk,” I replied.
Now e-mails with penis-picture attachments would make for awkward dinners but what made thickened the plot was that Hank and Randy were in the second year of their relationship when Randy got randy and started making passes at me. I even told Hank as much when we first met each other.
His reaction was not one that I had expected. Instead of anger towards me or Randy or any kind of normal reaction, Hank just shrugged his shoulders. He had just come back from all-expenses paid trip through Europe with Randy and had just gotten a new car out of the relationship. It seemed that the love of money and the security it brought outweighed most other concerns.
That evening at the dome house, Hank, Randy, and myself feasted on grilled steak, salad, and painful pauses in conversation. As they winked at each other and played footsie under the table, I remembered a thing Hank had told me when we had gone out to Culver’s for dinner after an afternoon helping him browse for porn at Left of Center in Hudson.
“I like older guys because they appreciate me more,” he told me. “I mean, they are just so grateful for some young guy to be interested in them that they do all of this nice stuff for you.”
I was still thinking of this comment when Randy decided to make a little toast.
“I just want to say that I’ve never been happier than I’ve been with Hank for the past two years and I’ve never wanted for anything,” he beamed as he leaned over and gave him a kiss on the cheek.
“He didn’t really say that did he?” my friend Gavin wrote to me after I told him about my evening at the dome house.
“Oh yes he did,” I replied. “Hank is staring at me and I’m staring at Randy during this little thing and I keep thinking I need more booze to get through this.”
“I don’t know why they are together,” Gavin typed back.
“I don’t know either,” I wrote. “I mean Hank seems to have some affection for Randy and even if he didn’t a nice car and a nicer home could tide one over.”
“Yeah, that most have been one awkward dinner,” he typed to me with a smiley face.
“Especially when you’re eating dinner on the table that the old man had told me he’d fuck me on if I ever came over,” I wrote.
After talking to Gavin, I couldn’t help but keep thinking about love, money, and all of those investments we make in life, both monetary and emotional. There was a whole NBC show founded on the idea that one had to make the choice between either love or money, like they were two mutually exclusive ideas. And there are always snickers when an older gay gentleman takes up with a younger lad because the popular belief is that the younger guy is only in it for the money, sacrificing a life of hot same generational letter sex for financial security. Not to sound too Carrie Bradshaw, but I couldn’t help but wonder: what are the costs for a long term relationship?
A few weeks after being at the dome house, I found myself coming to the end of one of my longest lasting relationships: the one with my laptop. I got it my freshmen year and it has been with me through everything: papers, exams, instant messages, drunken e-mails, heterosexuality. So imagine my surprise when I went to turn on my computer like I did every morning and it failed to work.
“You might have to get a new computer,” Gavin advised me.
“I can’t get a new computer,” I decried. “It’s my baby. That would be technological infanticide.”
So as my computer sat at death’s door, I decided to do some browsing for a new one. I had forgotten how pricey they could be and without a sugar daddy in sight, I would have to shoulder the burden. The thought of having to throw down a thousand dollars for a computer did not sit right with me so I decided I need to go somewhere to think out this decision. Somewhere calming, somewhere peaceful, somewhere healing, somewhere like the Gay ‘90s.
Sunday night. Agatha, Duran, Agatha’s cousin Lucy, Alex, and I all piled into Agatha’s grey VW and went to the 90s. I was still in mourning over both the death of my computer and the fact I would be financially six feet under after the purchase of a new one.
Alex kept reaching over and patting my head, much to my disliking. You see, Alex and I have always had a very volatile relationship. Sometimes it’s up and sometimes it’s lower than some stocks on Wall Street. Over the course of the summer I had done an internal audit of sorts of my relationship with Alex and determined that when it came to my feelings, he was bleeding me dry.
At the 90s, I shelled out money for expensive drinks like somebody who didn’t have a new computer to buy and sulked like somebody who did as the foursome of Agatha, Duran, Lucy, and Alex went out onto the dance floor in the Retro Room. It was basic math really. Friends should always go in even numbers to places because one always manages to get left out. So I sipped my drink and looked around the dance floor for somebody to dance with, when a guy, an older gent came up to me and looked me up and down in that way only lecherous men can.
“So how much?” he asked me.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“How much?” he asked again, pointing down at my shirt.
I looked down. I had forgotten I had worn my pink Guess shirt that had “For Rent” spray painted across it.
“Trust me,” I sighed, “you couldn’t afford my prices.”
After a couple hours of partying, we left the 90s and went back to Lucy’s lovely place in St. Paul. Alex and I ended up sitting outside, smoking cigarettes. I was drunk and so was he, which obviously meant it was a prime time to discuss our friendship. And he did it in his always tactful, respectful, least-drama-inducing manner.
“What’s with the attitude because you’re acting like a bitch,” he said to me. “I’ve never done anything to you; I’ve never dogged you out.”
As he ranted, my internal audit thing went into overdrive. I added up all of the times of hurt and anger and disappointment we had caused each other. And yes, he had helped me at a crucial point in my life but I had to think that I had done stuff for him as well. It was like I was being emotionally loan-sharked. Because of his one important good deed, I would forever be in debt to him so at that moment I decided that it was best that I returned my investment, our friendship, back to him and declare our relationship bankrupt.
As I stood up, he yelled at me, “You owe me an explanation.”
I turned back to him. “I don’t owe you shit anymore.”
With that, I walked into Lucy’s house and maybe walked out of emotions pit relationship.
A week later, I was still without a computer but had at least ordered a new one from Dell.com. It was going to cost me a thousand dollars but I realized that the cost was worth it to start my new relationship with a new computer.
I went back to thinking about Hank and Randy. Maybe I had judged the relationship too quickly, been too fast to say it was all about money. Maybe they really did love each other. In their relationship, love and money were together as opposed to opposite forces.
So even though I was without a computer and for the moment Alex, I couldn’t help but think that if I could somehow manage to get enough money for a computer eventually I will save up enough courage to find myself the right man.
That’s the thing about relationships and finances. Sometimes they’re cheap, sometimes they are pricey, but the best ones are always worth the price you pay.
10 Points For Realness, Part 1
When you’ve spent a summer dealing with reality of all kinds whether it be work or dating or just the expansive and fucked-up thing called life, sometimes a person just has to have a brief respite from it. Ancient man took up cave drawing, the Renaissance man went to the theatre, and this modern man turned towards a modern diversion: reality television. Who needs to think about the Russian or my mother’s diabetes or the possible dissolution of a two-year long friendship when there are more important issues like if Stephen is going to end up with either LC or Kristin on Laguna Beach or who is going to be fired first on Martha Stewart’s edition of The Apprentice or can Nehemiah and Rachel come to some sort of respectful understanding on the Real World: Austin. If reality shows are a guilty pleasure, the Krispy Kreme donuts of network and cable programming, I decided that this indeed was the time to gorge.
With my summer job over and a week before classes began, I resolved to pig out on both my mother’s home cooking and a marathon of Being Bobby Brown. After three hours and six episodes, I learned that my mother’s diabetes was not stopping her from making desserts for the rest of the family and that what Bobby and Whitney Houston lacked in lucidity they more than up with in their ability to the give the viewer a sense of at-least-I’m-not-that-screwed-up bliss. It was a feeling that I, slumped on a faux-denim couch in the basement of my mother’s condo, desperately needed like Bobby and Whitney needed a hit.
After my eyes stared to glaze over at the antics of Bobby and Whitney and the documentation of the events that would come to form their daughter’s therapy sessions in the future, I crawled into bed. Without the television to distract me, I was left with only my thoughts and I thought about my tiff with Alex. Our friendship, I determined, was not unlike the run of a television show. The first year of it had been original and fun and with this spontaneous energy and the moronic naiveté about how this impact things. The second years of the friendship, like most reality shows, was not as good as the first year, suffered from a lack of interest, and set up the third year of it as the make or break time for the franchise or in our case the friendship. Maybe I had cancelled our friendship too early or maybe I had gotten out before it turned into an Anna Nicole Smith Show train wreck.
Two days later in La Crosse, I was able to tear myself away from the antics of Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List to see my friend Jeremy. He was a high school friend of mine that lived around the corner of the house and was always good for the lowdown on the activities of our former high school comrades while also offering me someone to go on walks with around the neighborhood late at night.
“Are we going to make the usual rounds Sir?” I sighed, semi-bored and exhaling smoke.
“We could,” he said, “Or I could drive us around in my brand new car!”
With Rod Roddy enthusiasm and some Bob Barker Beauties hand gesturing, Danny motioned me to his new car that he had bought a few weeks prior. We christened it with a first smoke in it and ended up driving all around La Crosse. I stared out the car as Gavin DeGraw played out on the radio, singing “Chariot.” I watched the lights of the cars in front, all coming in from Onalaska into La Crosse. It felt like one of those thoughtful montages on TV where there is some weighty narration supposed to be put over it but instead my reality was merely silence between Danny and I with Mr. DeGraw murmuring in the background.
We ended up at the golf course that was right besides the bluff. As we walked around in the dark, I saw the American flag light up on top of the bluff and the lights of the town twinkling in those highly romanticized ways highly romantic writers choose to see them.
“So you plan on seeing the Scot?” Jeremy asked me as he stalked off into the darkness with me trailing behind him, only able to find him by way of the smell of his cigarette.
“I’m not that big of a glutton for punishment,” I retorted, lighting my cigarette. “Besides I think he’s in the Cities or something so unless he plans on stopping through when I’m there, I can safely say that I’m not going to see him.”
There was an awkward pause.
“Okay,” I sighed, “I realize that on some level he’ll be a figure in my life. And trust me, the thought of that is not comforting in the least. The fact that I’ve lost my best friend Alex because of some unexplainable, internal dislike of him yet somehow I’m forever going to like the Scot is ten times of fucked-up.”
Danny laughed and shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know Alex but I know that the other one sounds like a world class d-bag.”
A few nights later I was safely back in River Falls in my old dorm room in the building I had lived in for the past four years. After unpacking and some dinner, I watched a few episodes of Laguna Beach but became distracted by something outside of my window.
“It’s like a Laguna Beach bomb exploded on our campus,” I said to my friend “Kelly” as we sat at a booth at the newly reopened Ground Zero.
It was your usual bar mix: a few townies here and there playing pool, some metrosexuals sizing up one and another’s message shirts, high percentage slutty college girls adjusting their skirts as they trotted around the circular bar area. It was like central casting for the Real World.
“Last year, maybe a few hotties here and there but now they are everywhere,” I continued.
“I can’t stand that show,” Kelly sneered.
“Well admittedly it would be a better show if they cut down all of those uncomfortable silences but then it would only be like five minutes,” I replied.
“And that’s a bad thing?” she snickered. “So what exactly happened with you and Alex?”
“We fought and that’s all there is to that,” I sighed. “But no matter, I’ve decided to just start
over with some things now that I have him and the Scot out of my life.” There was a slight pause in conversation. “Is it sad that I miss having my computer because I can’t talk to the Rugby Player?”
“I’m not going to lie,” she said with a smirk, “just a little.”
“You know what I say to that,” I replied smiling a bit. “I say boo to that. Boo and hiss to that.”
Speaking of booing and hissing, a group of us were booing and hissing my friend “Brad” and his interest in some 19-year-old girl.
“She’s got such a tight ass,” he shouted with glee. “I could fuck that shit right.”
“Such a wordsmith Brad,” I interjected, stirring around my UV lemonade drink.
“She’s a virgin so you know that shit is tight,” he boasted.
It’s in these moments at the bars that I wish I could have one of those censorship bleeps over things.
“Yeah Brad,” I sighed, “she’s a virgin, Pam Anderson’s tits are real, and Paris Hilton didn’t know she was being videotaped.”
After bar close, I ended up by myself and walked around downtown River Falls. It was cool outside, the air whipping around me as I crossed the street. I looked down the street. The lights were flashing and the streets were empty aside from the last few stragglers from the bars.
As I have learned from a mini-Cold Case Files marathon on A&E, criminals often times return to the scene of a crime. The same can be said about people still coping with the end of a relationship, whether romantic or platonic. I found myself pulled back to the places where Alex and I had hung out together. I stared at his old apartment. I thought back to hiking up those carpeted steps to his little place over a bar. I thought of the time he called me for a sleepover and how I had pulled on my jeans over my Pillsbury Doughboy pajamas and how we had watched bad movies on HBO. I took a deep breath and walked back to the dorm silently.
When you’re in a funk and there is surprisingly no reality television to cheer up, the second best thing is to talk with a friend who is living a wildly more fabulous reality than your own. That’s what I did the next day when I talked to my friend Gavin, the homo not the singer.
“So there are like six guys that are interested in dating me,” he told me.
Gavin, always looking to move on to bigger and better things, was in the midst of his own sexual version of house hunting or more appropriately homo hunting.
“You know what I say to that?” I replied. “I say boo to that. Boo and hiss to that.”
“Jealous,” he said with his usual sense of self-deprecation. “One guy is named Reian.”
“That has to be the faggiest spelling of a name ever,” I laughed.
“Well yeah but once you look past that he’s really pretty hot,” Gavin exclaimed.
While Gavin was moving on with his pursuits in love, I found myself moving on to another bar reopening. This time it was The Library and unlike the library on campus, this one was packed with students even though most of the reading was limited to drink names and the subjects studied were limited to deviant behavior and anatomy.
That night, I partied a lot like Landon or Trishelle from the Real World without the fear of
sexually transmitted diseases. One little, two little, three little UV lemonades followed by a liter UV lemonade and a vodka Collins. Although it wasn’t watching people bitch each other out in confessionals or eating worms on national television, I was still trying to avoid my reality as usual. The Scot, Alex, The Rugby Player, they were all in my head at the moment so much so that I didn’t pay attention at first when I heard it.
“Hey there,” he said.
And just like that, I came face to face with my reality.
10 Points For Realness, Part 2
"Leave me the fuck alone," I yelled as I stormed out of Library, drunk and walking the wrong direction away.
"Would you just wait for one second?" he asked me, the sound of his cowboy boots hitting the pavement behind echoing in my ear. "We need to talk," he said to me as I stopped on the corner in front of the Corner bar.
"What do you want to talk about Alex?" I grimaced, stamping my foot on the ground for added emphasis.
"All of a sudden you’ve just formed this hatred towards me and I don’t understand," Alex said to me. "Can you just explain it to me?"
"I just don’t like you anymore," I spat at him before turning around.
As I walked off from Alex, winding my way through the residential streets with him trailing closely behind me, I realized that we were doing one of the most popular reality television show conventions: the drunken verbal argument on the street. If my years of watching the Real World have taught me anything, it’s that people in their twenties for some reason think that at high points of alcohol consumption is the precise moment to have a heart-to-heart about the issues that are bothering both parties. And though we didn’t have a camera crew following us, we did have a small audience of few couples walking across the street from us, alternating between making out and staring at us.
We kept up the fighting, me swearing belligerently while Alex refused to leave me alone. Every corner I turned, every street I crossed, every internal thought I was having, Alex was right there with his fashionable white newsboy cap placed on top of his dyed black locks. Just like network programming, reality was inescapable.
"You want me to tell you what I think of you," I said, pausing for a moment. "You are no different to me than the Scot."
There was a long pause in the conversation.
"I was there for you when you were just coming out and have helped you and you have the nerve to compare me to a guy you can’t even say the real name?!" he yelled at me furiously. "I have never dogged you out ever!"
Right then, as my friend Andie would say, my bitch chord was pulled.
"Never dogged me out?" I hissed back at me. "In between all of those moments of saving me, you’ve shit all over our friendship. You’ve done and said things to me that would cause most sane people to have walked away from you a long time ago but instead I am standing right here with you because you won’t leave me alone."
I jogged off away from him and ended up crossing the street back to my dorm with him right behind. It was now two in the morning. Most of the lights were dim in people’s dorm rooms, their shades pulled as Alex and I walked past and continued to scream, giving people a show whether or not they wanted it.
"Would you just stop for one fucking second," he asked me again and I did. I turned around and stared at him, at the face that once made me light up when I saw it. I looked at his shining his eyes, his chiseled features and how they looked less than normal, the stress of our reality having chipped away some of their sheen.
"What?" I said.
"I just want to know why you have such a problem with people caring for you?" he asked me, his voice breaking just a little as the question came out.
I stormed away from Alex without answering and turned to see him stomping off into the distance. I came into my dorm room and plopped down on my bed. As much I as I had derided Bobby and Whitney, Anna Nicole, maybe I was the real train wreck, a train wreck of screwed-up feelings and expectations of my relationships. And as I pondered this, the phone rang.
"Can you meet me outside?" Alex whispered.
This was the moment. I could hang up the phone, pop in a season of The Simple Life, and avoid him like I had tried to do since the Gay 90s or I could meet him outside and settle things.
"So what do you want to talk about?" I said to him as I saw him standing behind the building, having changed into my pajamas first.
"I just want to say something and I don’t want you to interrupt," Alex said, leaning up against the railing. "I don’t know what’s going on with us but if you hated me so much why did you help me out of my apartment to my new one. You could’ve said no and if you really hated me you would have hung up that phone immediately. But you didn’t. I know I haven’t been around and when I am I get a little focus-of-attention hungry. But you have to admit, you’re the same way. And what makes you so angry is that I can call you on your shit better than anybody else and you can call me on my shit better than anybody else. And we’ve been through too much for this to end. I have auditions for Rocky Horror Picture Show and I’m so stressed out by it because it’s the biggest role I could get. And I just want to know that you’re going to come to it and support me in it."
As the tears welled up in his eyes, I leaned in and hugged him. I had been so caught up in my own reality that I had completely missed his.
"There is nothing more that I want to do is be there opening night and cheering you on at
curtain call," I told Alex as I hugged him. "I’ve just been so stressed with graduation stuff. Maybe we just need a break, just have some time apart so we can get the stresses dealt with first so we won’t take it out on each other."
"Okay," he said.
A week later, I was listening to the twinkling strains of the beginning of "California," the theme song of the show The O.C. I decided that I had indulged enough in reality shows and decided to get back to the more fun world of scripted television. Besides, mocking E-Mischa-ted Barton’s attempts at emoting is much more fun than any of Kristin’s non-sequiturs on the narration of Laguna Beach.
And speaking of actors, I gave Alex a call.
"Congratulations on getting the role of Dr. Frank-N-Furter," I said to him. "And I’ll see you this weekend at Duran’s 21st birthday party thing."
A few hours later, Alex called me back.
"I tried calling you but you weren’t there," Alex sighed. "And I just knew you were going to find out before I could tell you."
"I was at the Student Voice office so I could get my schedule and sign some papers," I replied.
"Oh yeah, your column starts soon doesn’t it?" he replied.
"Next week," I said. "I just wanted to tell I’m so proud of you and I’ll see you this weekend right."
And as we talked to another, sharing our realities of work and school and friends and horrendously busy schedules, I knew that things were not quite the ways they were before and probably would never be. Yet, I could get a sense that our relationship, through a bit of retooling and some renewed interest, wouldn’t be cancelled after all.
Showing posts with label College Years. Show all posts
Showing posts with label College Years. Show all posts
10/25/05
The Summer Session, Part 2
The Distance, Part 1
Friday night at Bo’s. I was spending the evening with my friend Thad the Cad, guzzling down Long Island Iced Teas and trolling for hotties to fondle by bar time. Thad was one of those boys that were too pretty for their own good with his tanned skin, immaculately styled hair with highlights, a trendy tribal tattoo on his back, and the kind of rebellious yet wholesome persona that the likes of Chad Michael Murray and Benjamin McKenzie have built teen soap opera careers off of.
And that night at Bo’s, Thad was looking ever the part of pretty boy in his tight maroon t-shirt with Cash is King scrawled across it, a baseball cap turned backward, the little bits of hair making up a goatee on his chin neatly trimmed, and his feet adorned with the mandatory metrosexual brown sandals. He had come back to River Falls to take a summer school class and had promptly called me when he was bored at his apartment and easily dragged me out to the bars.
“There are no cuties here at all,” he said, sipping his drink and craning his neck to scope out the sparse crowd of people at Bo’s. “Not a single one.”
“I thought you were trying to be good,” I said, stirring my drink with my red straw.
“I am,” he said. “I’m not looking for a girl to fuck necessarily, just some eye candy. I have nothing hot to look at.”
“Well I guess I’m the lucky one,” I smirked, staring right at him.
“So have you kept out of trouble since I’ve been gone?” he asked me as we found a little booth out of the way.
“For the most part,” I replied. “I did see the Russian when I went back to La Crosse for the Fourth of July.”
“Did you fuck him?” he asked me.
“Oh God no,” I interjected.
“You did, didn’t you?”
“We’re not all whores Thad,” I playfully snapped at him.
“I am not a whore,” he hissed at me, sounding eerily like Elizabeth Berkley in Showgirls and just like in that movie it was delivered unconvincingly. “I have been good. I’ve just been here, going to class and working. Nothing else.”
I stared at him a bit, his puppy dog eyes all aglow somehow managed to seem sincere even when telling a boldface lie. That’s the thing about pretty boys. They always know the right thing to keep you just close enough.
A few hours and several drinks later, I convinced Thad to show me his humble abode located all the way across town. We trudged along together, me stumbling just a bit as I heard the smacking of the bottom of his sandals as they hit the pavement.
“So this is where you live,” I said as he unlocked the door to his apartment led me in.
As my eyes looked around I was struck at the normality of the place. No condom dispensers, no sex swings hanging down from the ceiling, his apartment that he shared with a couple of his friends was so refreshingly un-Thad that it made it and him all the more endearing for some reason like the décor of the apartment was some peek into a more responsible part of Thad’s psyche.
“Oh no,” he sighed, looking at the mail. “They’re taking away our Skinemax.”
Or maybe not.
We sat up for another hour, drinking beer and bullshitting until it hit three. I had a long day of shopping the next day and was about to start putting on my blue Converse shoes when Thad stopped me.
“You can sleep on the couch and I’ll give you a ride home in the morning,” he offered.
With my dorm room way across town, a dorm room without air conditioning, and since I was already right there at Thad’s and he had one of those nice box fans, I figured that it would be rather rude of me to leave.
As I crawled under the comforter that Thad had laid out for me and watched him sashay his way back to his bedroom, I wondered how many girls had made the walk I had made but ended up in his bedroom. How many had stumbled home with him in their high heel shoes and camisole tops to wind up next to him in bed so they wouldn’t spend another Friday night alone. One, two, three, four, five? That night I went to bed with that on my mind, counting bar sluts instead of sheep.
- - -
And from bars to brunch, a few days later I was at Perkins with my mother who always knew that on Sunday mornings I only got out of bed for free breakfasts. As I chugged down a glass of orange juice, she tapped her newly manicured nails across the table and told me all the little things she had been up to since I had seen her last. With me being in River Falls and my mother being in Eau Claire, I hardly ever saw her except for these little jaunts she made through on her way to and from the Twin Cities area.
And from all these years of traveling back and forth in her car, my mother had learned that both on the road and in life, it was best to take the most direct path.
“We’re selling your grandmother’s house,” my mother told me off-handedly. “It’s been in the works for the past three years or so and we’ve finally gotten Grandma and your Auntie to finally move out of Georgia Street and into a townhouse in a nicer suburb. Your Aunt is difficult as ever. She keeps complaining about how far it is from work and your Grandma is just trying to wrap her head around not being on Georgia Street.”
“And it’s such a lovely neighborhood with the shootings and the mandatory liquor-store-on-every-corner,” I interjected.
“It’s her life though,” my mother said with a shrug, letting out a little yawn before continuing. “It’s something important that she’ll be losing. But it’s been in the work for three years so she’s had plenty of time to get adjusted to it. And your Auntie, well, she’ll complain the whole time just for the sake of consistency. It’d be easier if I was closer so these things would go smoother but that’s life.”
Midway through brunch, my mother turned her attention to another familial relationship she thought was being impeded by distance: ours. My mother, since retiring last summer, had become a constant commuter on the Internet superhighway and expected me to be as well when it came to her frequent e-mails that filled my Yahoo account.
“I’ve just been so busy with work that I just don’t check my e-mail ever,” I said, trying to get a piece of bacon out from between my teeth. Over the years, I had learned when dealing with my mother that in order to stay close I had to keep her as far away from the truth as possible. “I don’t even see my friends that much. I just work and go to sleep.”
She let out a sigh as she paid for brunch and got another refill on her water. “You know I’m a worrier. That week you didn’t return our calls your father and I were tempted to come all the way up to River Falls just to make sure you were alive.”
“Well that’s good to know that I have parents that will make that long of a trip but I’m just busy all the time,” I reiterated. “But I promise I will e-mail you more often.”
My mother let out a yawn. “I don’t know why I’m so tired all the time now.”
“It’s called being old,” I replied.
“I just need to get home and crawl onto the couch and watch me some Perry Mason,” she said as we made our way out to her light blue Le Sabre. “Then I can nap for the rest of the day.”
“You really are a senior citizen aren’t you,” I smirked.
She dropped me off in front of my residence hall and rolled down my window as I slammed the door shut.
“Remember to e-mail your mother,” she said. “She’s a huge worrier.”
I nodded my head and watched her car around in the narrow little street and pull up to the stoplight. I saw her stare at me for a second. It was the same look she would have when I was younger and would go play with a few of the neighborhood kids. It was like she trying to create a telepathic bubble to protect me from the ne’er-do-wells of the world. And as I stood there on the steps of the dorm, I could still feel her trying to protect me. That’s the thing about mothers, though. Or at least the good ones. No matter how far from them you are, they always manage to be right there with you like the maternal version of Triple A.
- - -
Later that day I got in contact with a man who had for the most part been too far out of reach due to our conflicting schedules: Ridley the Rugby Player.
“Hold on,” he typed to me after I said hi. “I have to go get something.”
And apparently was still out of reach until he returned back to his computer about fifteen minutes later.
“Sorry,” he typed to me. “I’m making bread.”
“You make your own bread,” I typed back with the appropriate sarcastic smiley face accompanying it. “What kind do you make?”
“Wheat.”
“How healthy of you,” I replied. “Are there any other domestic things you do that I should be aware of?”
“Umm, I can sew,” he said with a beaming smiley face. “Cooking is easy though.”
“I’m not really good at cooking meals,” I said. “I’m more of a dessert maker. I kick ass at cookies. If only I had, you know, pats and pans and cooking utensils to make the stuff because then I could get all Emeril on your ass.”
“Oh I bet,” Ridley replied.
“Could you imagine the two of us cooking together,” I joked. “We’d be the gay interracial Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan cute movie montage.” I paused for a moment. “I wish you were nearer. Then we could see each other.”
“Yep but we are too far away from each other,” he replied.
I let out a sigh. They say that absence makes the heart grow fonder but they neglect to mention that distance is such a motherfucker.
- - -
A few mornings later, I was checking my e-mails. I started subscribing to HGTV and getting recipes for my eventual cook off with the Rugby Player. I was determined to win with a triumphant tiramisu, a dish that my mother had recently fallen in love and had tried to make recently to varying degrees of success.
And speaking of my mother, as promised, had sent me an e-mail.
Just checking in. How are you doing?This past week has been a little busy, because I needed to go to LAX for my physical. Since I have lost so much weight, my doctor had me take a number of tests. Unfortunately/fortunately (whichever way you look at this), he discovered that I have diabetes. I am sharing this information with you, not to scare you, but so you will know that diabetes didn't SKIP my generation. Both of my Dad's parents had diabetes. My Dad's mother lived to be in her 80's (that's a hopeful sign). I won't know what I have to do until I meet with my physician, dietician, and nurse on Tuesday, August 2. I leave for Gary on August 3. I am planning to take the Eau Claire Passenger Van to and from the MPLS airport (so I won't get to have brunch with you on this trip). I'll be in Gary until August 8. Your Dad is planning to come to Eau Claire to celebrate our 26th wedding anniversary on August 9.I hope this summer has been a good learning experience for you. We miss you, but we are glad you found a job yourself and are working hard at it. As you know when I'm in LAX and in Gary, I won't have access to a computer on a daily basis. So if you want to communicate with me while I'm there you can call me.Love ya,Mom
I paused. I was stunned by both the news and the way it had been delivered. I started a response to her. I wanted to ask her what type of diabetes she had, how long the symptoms had been around, the seriousness of her condition. But instead, I told Thad I was meeting him at the bars and turned off my computer. I needed some space.
The Distance, Part 2When we were little, our lives were consumed with playing games: kickball, softball, four square. They were simple games with basic rules that told us how to play it, how to maneuver within it, and most importantly how to win. While most of these games died out by the time we reached puberty when pin the tail on the donkey turned into trying to nail the hot ass, we still found ways to incorporate games into our ever changing lives.
Since finding out about my mother’s diabetes, I had decided to play a game of my own: emotional hide and seek. I had been confronted by a serious issue, my mother’s health, and had to make the choice of whether to seek out all the information I could about it or I could merely hide from every feeling that this issue was making bubble up within me. Like any responsible 22-year-old, I decided to hide. But just because I decided to hide, it didn’t mean I wasn’t being sought out by both my parents’ and what I later determined the whole of the universe.
I sat, hold up in my dorm room, and watched what has become for me an antidote for feeling bad: bad reality television. So I ate some donut holes and tuned into another trashtastic edition of The Real World. Between the message t-shirts, the hot tubs, and the totally oblivious nature of the participants, I felt confident I had found the best hiding spot.
“Your mom died Danny,” an off-the-screen voice said to Boston Danny who had in his short three-week stay in Austin, Texas had managed to get into a fight and has to have surgery on his left eye.
“You’re lying,” he kept stammering in his thick Boston accent that normally is somewhere between aggravating and grating but now was painful not because of his odd enunciating but of the hurt that quivered through it.
I watched, unable to turn away for it was both compelling television and I didn’t have a remote easily available. I couldn’t believe it. He kept crying and I kept watching the emotional carnage. At that moment, I had officially hit mother overload.
I crawled out of my bed and plopped down in front of my computer. I opened a blank e-mail and started to type all of those questions you’re supposed to ask and write all those words of encouragement you’re supposed to say. But midway, I stopped. If I sent off the e-mail, I would get a response back and then all of this would become all too real. So instead I logged onto instant messaging, looking anyone to talk to about anything not related to mothers.
After sitting around, playing endless games of solitaire, I discovered that I wasn’t the only person in hiding.
“Hello,” said Ridley the Rugby Player, who was on invisible mode.
“Are we hiding from someone?” I typed to him. “It’s me isn’t it?”
“No but if you want I could say yes,” he wrote back with a smiley face.
I asked him what he had done that day and he replied: went and sold DVDs, practiced some footwork for rugby, made dinner, and watched the Sci-Fi channel for a few hours. He asked me what I had done and I was even more succinct: worked, ate, and wrote a column. I decided that it was best that “irrationally freaking out about my mother and avoiding my feelings like a two year old” wasn’t something I’d put on the list.
He paused for a moment. “So what else have you been up to?”
“Being sick,” I replied. All this worry about my mother’s illness I had forgotten that I was sick with a slight fever and a runny nose.
“Well if your nose is runny than you should probably catch it,” he typed.
“Not funny.”
“So my act needs some work,” he typed with a shrugging smiley. “I’ll be the greatest someday. You’ll see.”
“And I’ll be able to say I knew you when,” I smirked.
“And when you’re a huge writer I can say the same,” he said. That was the thing about Ridley. He never let the distance of him being in the Cities and my hiding at the moment stop him from getting close and finding me. “Maybe you can be the comic and the writer.”
“Making one rugby player laugh does not a career path make,” I snickered.
“Huh?” he answered back at first. “That was harder to follow than Yoda at first. Did I tell you I am being slow today?”
“Are you still cute?”
“What do you mean by that,” he wrote back with feigned anger. “Of course I am.”
“Well then you’re not totally useless,” I teased.
“Are you?”
“I can’t stop being cute even with a head cold,” I wrote back.
“Maybe that can be your super human power,” he encouraged me. “To bewilder your enemies with your awesome cuteness and shining wit.”
“Don’t forget my inability to blush due to my dark brown skin,” I added. “What would your super power be?”
“Well I could fly and destroy all in my path with my smile,” he said, placing a beaming smiley face at the end of the statement. “Well I have to run. We can discuss super powers more later.”
He logged off shortly thereafter. Though it had been just two guys playing pretend, it had brought me back to reality of human interaction and made me move a little bit out of my hiding spot.
Something I should’ve known better to do from the years of losing at it in elementary school. I’d always be close to winning but I’d get too ambitious and dart out and would be caught. That Sunday afternoon, history decided to repeat itself.
“Your mother and I are coming through town tomorrow,” my father said on my answering machine. “We’ll see you at five or so. Have a good day.”
I deleted the message and sighed. There were no more chances for hiding. I had been tagged out.
The next day my mother and father pulled up along side my dorm in my mother’s powder blue Le Sabre. I slammed the backseat door and buckled my seatbelt as my father pulled away and drove towards the local Perkins.
There, in the confines of the blue Le Sabre, we all played our own game: The Let’s-Not-Talk-About-The-Diabetic-Elephant-in-the-Car. I blathered on about the job, making beds for the Kansas Chiefs and the various things I found in their rooms: bottles of pee, Bibles, porn, the classic film Booty Juice. My father asked about different players, forgetting that I had never had any interest in football and that managed to even decrease further over the weeks of making hospital corners. My mother laughed every so often at a story here and there I told. It was the kind of nervous laughter I had never heard her have before and it scared the shit out of me until she did something that was so classically here that I knew we weren’t so far from our normal selves.
“You couldn’t even send an e-mail with some words of encouragement,” she snickered, looking back at me with a sly smile. “Look at your son. Even when he knows his mother has a disease, he still can’t e-mail her back.”
“Well it’s not like they make ‘Sorry for the Diabetes’ e-cards at Hallmark.com,” I explained with a little chuckle.
“Well I didn’t know when I was going to see you next,” she replied.
“You could’ve called,” I offered.
“I totally forgot about that,” she laughed a bit. “Your mother’s old.”
“Well the first step is admitting you have a problem,” I giggled.
Over dinner at Perkins, my father dished out the neighbors, I gobbled down a hamburger and my mother was, well, acting like my mother as she kept prodding me to shave and asking me if I needed another napkin.
“You know they busted a whole tribe of Black people for drug stuff,” my dad told me as we sat, eating our food. “A whole neighborhood.”
“Don’t call them a tribe,” my mother interjected. “Call them what they really are: a bunch of hood rats. They keep forgetting that La Crosse is not Milwaukee. We Black people stick out.”
“Well besides drug busts what’s going on in La Crosse?” I asked.
“Just the usual stuff,” Dad sighed. “We went to a new bar last Thursday. Very nice.”
Since my going away to college, my sixty-something father had, with a group of his professor buddies, morphed into a twenty-something male who went barhopping every Thursday night.
“Well that’s lovely,” I said with a smirk. “What’s next, you going to start hitting up keggers in the fall?”
It was around the time we ordered dessert that we finally talked about my mother’s diabetes. I know that dessert seems like an odd time to talk about a serious topic and especially about diabetes, but my family had a history of talking about serious things over dessert like an After School Special version of those cheesecake scenes on Golden Girls. In fact, I came out to each one of my parents over dessert. My dad was Dutch Apple at Norske Nooke and my mother was French Silk at Baker’s Square that is oddly enough the same dessert I order at Perkins.
“So I’m type two diabetes,” she explained to me. “I take two pills a day. Then I switch to some bigger pills next week. But I’ve been doing all the proper stuff all along: exercising, curbing desserts, watching intake. So at least I won’t have to a total change in my life style.”
We went back to eating our desserts when I decided that I could for once stop hiding my lifestyle and talk about it.
“I’ve been trying to get some applications to some gay publications,” I said. Both of my parents just stared at me. “Legit gay publications.”
“Well that’s very good,” my dad said.
“It’s nice that you’re taking the initiative,” my mother said with a big smile.
I nodded my head and took another bite of my French Silk. We sat at that booth at that restaurant with no hiding, no pretending. It was just some dessert and us. We had all come a long ways and we all had a long way to go to make the distance from fear to hope, from indifference to acceptance but the place seemed closer than ever. As we laughed, I thought to myself that maybe it’s not the journey or the destination. In life, maybe it’s little pit stops on the way that make all the difference and the wisdom to pull over to them to stop, breathe, and stretch. And that’s what we did.
Friday night at Bo’s. I was spending the evening with my friend Thad the Cad, guzzling down Long Island Iced Teas and trolling for hotties to fondle by bar time. Thad was one of those boys that were too pretty for their own good with his tanned skin, immaculately styled hair with highlights, a trendy tribal tattoo on his back, and the kind of rebellious yet wholesome persona that the likes of Chad Michael Murray and Benjamin McKenzie have built teen soap opera careers off of.
And that night at Bo’s, Thad was looking ever the part of pretty boy in his tight maroon t-shirt with Cash is King scrawled across it, a baseball cap turned backward, the little bits of hair making up a goatee on his chin neatly trimmed, and his feet adorned with the mandatory metrosexual brown sandals. He had come back to River Falls to take a summer school class and had promptly called me when he was bored at his apartment and easily dragged me out to the bars.
“There are no cuties here at all,” he said, sipping his drink and craning his neck to scope out the sparse crowd of people at Bo’s. “Not a single one.”
“I thought you were trying to be good,” I said, stirring my drink with my red straw.
“I am,” he said. “I’m not looking for a girl to fuck necessarily, just some eye candy. I have nothing hot to look at.”
“Well I guess I’m the lucky one,” I smirked, staring right at him.
“So have you kept out of trouble since I’ve been gone?” he asked me as we found a little booth out of the way.
“For the most part,” I replied. “I did see the Russian when I went back to La Crosse for the Fourth of July.”
“Did you fuck him?” he asked me.
“Oh God no,” I interjected.
“You did, didn’t you?”
“We’re not all whores Thad,” I playfully snapped at him.
“I am not a whore,” he hissed at me, sounding eerily like Elizabeth Berkley in Showgirls and just like in that movie it was delivered unconvincingly. “I have been good. I’ve just been here, going to class and working. Nothing else.”
I stared at him a bit, his puppy dog eyes all aglow somehow managed to seem sincere even when telling a boldface lie. That’s the thing about pretty boys. They always know the right thing to keep you just close enough.
A few hours and several drinks later, I convinced Thad to show me his humble abode located all the way across town. We trudged along together, me stumbling just a bit as I heard the smacking of the bottom of his sandals as they hit the pavement.
“So this is where you live,” I said as he unlocked the door to his apartment led me in.
As my eyes looked around I was struck at the normality of the place. No condom dispensers, no sex swings hanging down from the ceiling, his apartment that he shared with a couple of his friends was so refreshingly un-Thad that it made it and him all the more endearing for some reason like the décor of the apartment was some peek into a more responsible part of Thad’s psyche.
“Oh no,” he sighed, looking at the mail. “They’re taking away our Skinemax.”
Or maybe not.
We sat up for another hour, drinking beer and bullshitting until it hit three. I had a long day of shopping the next day and was about to start putting on my blue Converse shoes when Thad stopped me.
“You can sleep on the couch and I’ll give you a ride home in the morning,” he offered.
With my dorm room way across town, a dorm room without air conditioning, and since I was already right there at Thad’s and he had one of those nice box fans, I figured that it would be rather rude of me to leave.
As I crawled under the comforter that Thad had laid out for me and watched him sashay his way back to his bedroom, I wondered how many girls had made the walk I had made but ended up in his bedroom. How many had stumbled home with him in their high heel shoes and camisole tops to wind up next to him in bed so they wouldn’t spend another Friday night alone. One, two, three, four, five? That night I went to bed with that on my mind, counting bar sluts instead of sheep.
- - -
And from bars to brunch, a few days later I was at Perkins with my mother who always knew that on Sunday mornings I only got out of bed for free breakfasts. As I chugged down a glass of orange juice, she tapped her newly manicured nails across the table and told me all the little things she had been up to since I had seen her last. With me being in River Falls and my mother being in Eau Claire, I hardly ever saw her except for these little jaunts she made through on her way to and from the Twin Cities area.
And from all these years of traveling back and forth in her car, my mother had learned that both on the road and in life, it was best to take the most direct path.
“We’re selling your grandmother’s house,” my mother told me off-handedly. “It’s been in the works for the past three years or so and we’ve finally gotten Grandma and your Auntie to finally move out of Georgia Street and into a townhouse in a nicer suburb. Your Aunt is difficult as ever. She keeps complaining about how far it is from work and your Grandma is just trying to wrap her head around not being on Georgia Street.”
“And it’s such a lovely neighborhood with the shootings and the mandatory liquor-store-on-every-corner,” I interjected.
“It’s her life though,” my mother said with a shrug, letting out a little yawn before continuing. “It’s something important that she’ll be losing. But it’s been in the work for three years so she’s had plenty of time to get adjusted to it. And your Auntie, well, she’ll complain the whole time just for the sake of consistency. It’d be easier if I was closer so these things would go smoother but that’s life.”
Midway through brunch, my mother turned her attention to another familial relationship she thought was being impeded by distance: ours. My mother, since retiring last summer, had become a constant commuter on the Internet superhighway and expected me to be as well when it came to her frequent e-mails that filled my Yahoo account.
“I’ve just been so busy with work that I just don’t check my e-mail ever,” I said, trying to get a piece of bacon out from between my teeth. Over the years, I had learned when dealing with my mother that in order to stay close I had to keep her as far away from the truth as possible. “I don’t even see my friends that much. I just work and go to sleep.”
She let out a sigh as she paid for brunch and got another refill on her water. “You know I’m a worrier. That week you didn’t return our calls your father and I were tempted to come all the way up to River Falls just to make sure you were alive.”
“Well that’s good to know that I have parents that will make that long of a trip but I’m just busy all the time,” I reiterated. “But I promise I will e-mail you more often.”
My mother let out a yawn. “I don’t know why I’m so tired all the time now.”
“It’s called being old,” I replied.
“I just need to get home and crawl onto the couch and watch me some Perry Mason,” she said as we made our way out to her light blue Le Sabre. “Then I can nap for the rest of the day.”
“You really are a senior citizen aren’t you,” I smirked.
She dropped me off in front of my residence hall and rolled down my window as I slammed the door shut.
“Remember to e-mail your mother,” she said. “She’s a huge worrier.”
I nodded my head and watched her car around in the narrow little street and pull up to the stoplight. I saw her stare at me for a second. It was the same look she would have when I was younger and would go play with a few of the neighborhood kids. It was like she trying to create a telepathic bubble to protect me from the ne’er-do-wells of the world. And as I stood there on the steps of the dorm, I could still feel her trying to protect me. That’s the thing about mothers, though. Or at least the good ones. No matter how far from them you are, they always manage to be right there with you like the maternal version of Triple A.
- - -
Later that day I got in contact with a man who had for the most part been too far out of reach due to our conflicting schedules: Ridley the Rugby Player.
“Hold on,” he typed to me after I said hi. “I have to go get something.”
And apparently was still out of reach until he returned back to his computer about fifteen minutes later.
“Sorry,” he typed to me. “I’m making bread.”
“You make your own bread,” I typed back with the appropriate sarcastic smiley face accompanying it. “What kind do you make?”
“Wheat.”
“How healthy of you,” I replied. “Are there any other domestic things you do that I should be aware of?”
“Umm, I can sew,” he said with a beaming smiley face. “Cooking is easy though.”
“I’m not really good at cooking meals,” I said. “I’m more of a dessert maker. I kick ass at cookies. If only I had, you know, pats and pans and cooking utensils to make the stuff because then I could get all Emeril on your ass.”
“Oh I bet,” Ridley replied.
“Could you imagine the two of us cooking together,” I joked. “We’d be the gay interracial Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan cute movie montage.” I paused for a moment. “I wish you were nearer. Then we could see each other.”
“Yep but we are too far away from each other,” he replied.
I let out a sigh. They say that absence makes the heart grow fonder but they neglect to mention that distance is such a motherfucker.
- - -
A few mornings later, I was checking my e-mails. I started subscribing to HGTV and getting recipes for my eventual cook off with the Rugby Player. I was determined to win with a triumphant tiramisu, a dish that my mother had recently fallen in love and had tried to make recently to varying degrees of success.
And speaking of my mother, as promised, had sent me an e-mail.
Just checking in. How are you doing?This past week has been a little busy, because I needed to go to LAX for my physical. Since I have lost so much weight, my doctor had me take a number of tests. Unfortunately/fortunately (whichever way you look at this), he discovered that I have diabetes. I am sharing this information with you, not to scare you, but so you will know that diabetes didn't SKIP my generation. Both of my Dad's parents had diabetes. My Dad's mother lived to be in her 80's (that's a hopeful sign). I won't know what I have to do until I meet with my physician, dietician, and nurse on Tuesday, August 2. I leave for Gary on August 3. I am planning to take the Eau Claire Passenger Van to and from the MPLS airport (so I won't get to have brunch with you on this trip). I'll be in Gary until August 8. Your Dad is planning to come to Eau Claire to celebrate our 26th wedding anniversary on August 9.I hope this summer has been a good learning experience for you. We miss you, but we are glad you found a job yourself and are working hard at it. As you know when I'm in LAX and in Gary, I won't have access to a computer on a daily basis. So if you want to communicate with me while I'm there you can call me.Love ya,Mom
I paused. I was stunned by both the news and the way it had been delivered. I started a response to her. I wanted to ask her what type of diabetes she had, how long the symptoms had been around, the seriousness of her condition. But instead, I told Thad I was meeting him at the bars and turned off my computer. I needed some space.
The Distance, Part 2When we were little, our lives were consumed with playing games: kickball, softball, four square. They were simple games with basic rules that told us how to play it, how to maneuver within it, and most importantly how to win. While most of these games died out by the time we reached puberty when pin the tail on the donkey turned into trying to nail the hot ass, we still found ways to incorporate games into our ever changing lives.
Since finding out about my mother’s diabetes, I had decided to play a game of my own: emotional hide and seek. I had been confronted by a serious issue, my mother’s health, and had to make the choice of whether to seek out all the information I could about it or I could merely hide from every feeling that this issue was making bubble up within me. Like any responsible 22-year-old, I decided to hide. But just because I decided to hide, it didn’t mean I wasn’t being sought out by both my parents’ and what I later determined the whole of the universe.
I sat, hold up in my dorm room, and watched what has become for me an antidote for feeling bad: bad reality television. So I ate some donut holes and tuned into another trashtastic edition of The Real World. Between the message t-shirts, the hot tubs, and the totally oblivious nature of the participants, I felt confident I had found the best hiding spot.
“Your mom died Danny,” an off-the-screen voice said to Boston Danny who had in his short three-week stay in Austin, Texas had managed to get into a fight and has to have surgery on his left eye.
“You’re lying,” he kept stammering in his thick Boston accent that normally is somewhere between aggravating and grating but now was painful not because of his odd enunciating but of the hurt that quivered through it.
I watched, unable to turn away for it was both compelling television and I didn’t have a remote easily available. I couldn’t believe it. He kept crying and I kept watching the emotional carnage. At that moment, I had officially hit mother overload.
I crawled out of my bed and plopped down in front of my computer. I opened a blank e-mail and started to type all of those questions you’re supposed to ask and write all those words of encouragement you’re supposed to say. But midway, I stopped. If I sent off the e-mail, I would get a response back and then all of this would become all too real. So instead I logged onto instant messaging, looking anyone to talk to about anything not related to mothers.
After sitting around, playing endless games of solitaire, I discovered that I wasn’t the only person in hiding.
“Hello,” said Ridley the Rugby Player, who was on invisible mode.
“Are we hiding from someone?” I typed to him. “It’s me isn’t it?”
“No but if you want I could say yes,” he wrote back with a smiley face.
I asked him what he had done that day and he replied: went and sold DVDs, practiced some footwork for rugby, made dinner, and watched the Sci-Fi channel for a few hours. He asked me what I had done and I was even more succinct: worked, ate, and wrote a column. I decided that it was best that “irrationally freaking out about my mother and avoiding my feelings like a two year old” wasn’t something I’d put on the list.
He paused for a moment. “So what else have you been up to?”
“Being sick,” I replied. All this worry about my mother’s illness I had forgotten that I was sick with a slight fever and a runny nose.
“Well if your nose is runny than you should probably catch it,” he typed.
“Not funny.”
“So my act needs some work,” he typed with a shrugging smiley. “I’ll be the greatest someday. You’ll see.”
“And I’ll be able to say I knew you when,” I smirked.
“And when you’re a huge writer I can say the same,” he said. That was the thing about Ridley. He never let the distance of him being in the Cities and my hiding at the moment stop him from getting close and finding me. “Maybe you can be the comic and the writer.”
“Making one rugby player laugh does not a career path make,” I snickered.
“Huh?” he answered back at first. “That was harder to follow than Yoda at first. Did I tell you I am being slow today?”
“Are you still cute?”
“What do you mean by that,” he wrote back with feigned anger. “Of course I am.”
“Well then you’re not totally useless,” I teased.
“Are you?”
“I can’t stop being cute even with a head cold,” I wrote back.
“Maybe that can be your super human power,” he encouraged me. “To bewilder your enemies with your awesome cuteness and shining wit.”
“Don’t forget my inability to blush due to my dark brown skin,” I added. “What would your super power be?”
“Well I could fly and destroy all in my path with my smile,” he said, placing a beaming smiley face at the end of the statement. “Well I have to run. We can discuss super powers more later.”
He logged off shortly thereafter. Though it had been just two guys playing pretend, it had brought me back to reality of human interaction and made me move a little bit out of my hiding spot.
Something I should’ve known better to do from the years of losing at it in elementary school. I’d always be close to winning but I’d get too ambitious and dart out and would be caught. That Sunday afternoon, history decided to repeat itself.
“Your mother and I are coming through town tomorrow,” my father said on my answering machine. “We’ll see you at five or so. Have a good day.”
I deleted the message and sighed. There were no more chances for hiding. I had been tagged out.
The next day my mother and father pulled up along side my dorm in my mother’s powder blue Le Sabre. I slammed the backseat door and buckled my seatbelt as my father pulled away and drove towards the local Perkins.
There, in the confines of the blue Le Sabre, we all played our own game: The Let’s-Not-Talk-About-The-Diabetic-Elephant-in-the-Car. I blathered on about the job, making beds for the Kansas Chiefs and the various things I found in their rooms: bottles of pee, Bibles, porn, the classic film Booty Juice. My father asked about different players, forgetting that I had never had any interest in football and that managed to even decrease further over the weeks of making hospital corners. My mother laughed every so often at a story here and there I told. It was the kind of nervous laughter I had never heard her have before and it scared the shit out of me until she did something that was so classically here that I knew we weren’t so far from our normal selves.
“You couldn’t even send an e-mail with some words of encouragement,” she snickered, looking back at me with a sly smile. “Look at your son. Even when he knows his mother has a disease, he still can’t e-mail her back.”
“Well it’s not like they make ‘Sorry for the Diabetes’ e-cards at Hallmark.com,” I explained with a little chuckle.
“Well I didn’t know when I was going to see you next,” she replied.
“You could’ve called,” I offered.
“I totally forgot about that,” she laughed a bit. “Your mother’s old.”
“Well the first step is admitting you have a problem,” I giggled.
Over dinner at Perkins, my father dished out the neighbors, I gobbled down a hamburger and my mother was, well, acting like my mother as she kept prodding me to shave and asking me if I needed another napkin.
“You know they busted a whole tribe of Black people for drug stuff,” my dad told me as we sat, eating our food. “A whole neighborhood.”
“Don’t call them a tribe,” my mother interjected. “Call them what they really are: a bunch of hood rats. They keep forgetting that La Crosse is not Milwaukee. We Black people stick out.”
“Well besides drug busts what’s going on in La Crosse?” I asked.
“Just the usual stuff,” Dad sighed. “We went to a new bar last Thursday. Very nice.”
Since my going away to college, my sixty-something father had, with a group of his professor buddies, morphed into a twenty-something male who went barhopping every Thursday night.
“Well that’s lovely,” I said with a smirk. “What’s next, you going to start hitting up keggers in the fall?”
It was around the time we ordered dessert that we finally talked about my mother’s diabetes. I know that dessert seems like an odd time to talk about a serious topic and especially about diabetes, but my family had a history of talking about serious things over dessert like an After School Special version of those cheesecake scenes on Golden Girls. In fact, I came out to each one of my parents over dessert. My dad was Dutch Apple at Norske Nooke and my mother was French Silk at Baker’s Square that is oddly enough the same dessert I order at Perkins.
“So I’m type two diabetes,” she explained to me. “I take two pills a day. Then I switch to some bigger pills next week. But I’ve been doing all the proper stuff all along: exercising, curbing desserts, watching intake. So at least I won’t have to a total change in my life style.”
We went back to eating our desserts when I decided that I could for once stop hiding my lifestyle and talk about it.
“I’ve been trying to get some applications to some gay publications,” I said. Both of my parents just stared at me. “Legit gay publications.”
“Well that’s very good,” my dad said.
“It’s nice that you’re taking the initiative,” my mother said with a big smile.
I nodded my head and took another bite of my French Silk. We sat at that booth at that restaurant with no hiding, no pretending. It was just some dessert and us. We had all come a long ways and we all had a long way to go to make the distance from fear to hope, from indifference to acceptance but the place seemed closer than ever. As we laughed, I thought to myself that maybe it’s not the journey or the destination. In life, maybe it’s little pit stops on the way that make all the difference and the wisdom to pull over to them to stop, breathe, and stretch. And that’s what we did.
Whip-Smart: The College Years, Summer Session, Part 1
An Independence Day Fairy Tale
Prelude-Once Upon a Time . . .
Once upon a time in the state of sexual confusion, there lived a young man who was trying to figure out whether his loyalties lied with King Heterosexuality or Queen Elton John. In the midst of his quest, he ran into another young man, a man that was a representive of the Queen and who was dashing and foreign and seemingly a Prince Charming.
And just when the young man leaned in to give his Prince Charming a kiss and live happily ever after, he realized that his Prince Charming was nothing but a Scottish toad. Without the aid of Disney mice or a fairy godmother, the young man felt stranded but even more determined to conquer the Scottish toad and turn him into the Prince Charming of his dreams.
A Bar Tale, Part 1-Your Carriage Awaits
Sunday night. Yours truly was home from the weekend, sitting in front of my laptop computer and talking to friends on AIM and Gay.com. My friend "Gavin" was ecstatic, talking with lots of smiley faces because he had found his own Prince Charming, Prince Chaddy Chaddy Bang Bang. Feeling like an ugly stepsister, I nevertheless congratulated him on his storybook romance before he set his messenger window to away and galloped off into the Wisconsin sunset.
As I was listening to some Ciara, I noticed someone had come online. It was the Hot Scot. My intellectual side said that I should just ignore him but my fingers were cast under a spell of boredom/masochism and were suddenly typing him a friendyly hello. Uncharacteristically, he replied with a friendly greeting and asked me if I wanted to go downtown with him and share a fishbowl. Part of me wanted to say no. I felt like Snow White being offered the poisoned apple yet I decided to say yes because just like Snow White, I was retarded.
"Where are you going?" my father asked me as I scurried past him.
"I'm apparently going out to the bars with The Scot," I said.
"I thought you hated him," he replied.
"Oh, I do," I said as I headed out the door.
I stood outside, smoking my ten millionth cigarette of the day and wondered to myself if I was strong enough to handle this. Could I really make friends with the Hot Scot? Or would I end up like I always had, in an emotional coffin with my group of friend trying desperately to revive me? And just when I was about to go back in and put on my pajamas and call the whole thing off, he showed up. I got into the car, slammed the door, and prayed for this, my fairy tale, to not end up grim.
Fantasy
"Hey, you interested in a threeway?" a guy asked me.
He was one of those guys that looked like just a clump of testosterone than an actual human being. Needless to say, I flatly refused him.
"Are you into threeways?" another guy asked me, a cute one with an unfortunate sense of taste since he was wearing a puka shell necklace and dating the aforementioned clump.
"Your boyfriend already asked me," I sighed.
"And?" he said.
"I told him no," I replied. "He's not really my type."
He paused for a moment. "Are you interested in just a one-on-one? It's always been my fantasy to be with a Black guy."
"Ahh," I replied. "You know, I have a fantasy as well."
"What's that?" he asked excitedly.
"Not to be hit on by guys with Negro fetishes," I glared before walking off.
A Bar Tale, Part 2-Gone Fishin'
The Hot Scot, his cousin, and myself had gotten a table at Who's On Third, one of those college/townie bars that was always packed with girls in tube tops and the boys that buy them their mixed drinks in the faint hopes of hitting a home run.
"Here we go," Hot Scot said, setting down a 64 ounce fishbowl of blue raspberry vodka lemonade at our table that was perched too high.
His cousin decided to make a longer straw. She did it and then The Russian yet my motor skills, a thing I've still yet to master, failed me once again.
"Do you need help?" he giggled.
"I do," I sighed. "I'm stupid."
"Just a little," he said as he fixed my straws.
I searched his face for the meanness, the cruelty that usually accompanied such remarks but instead he just looked at me and smiled and handed me my new straw.
Half an hour later, The Scot's cousin had left him and I by ourselves. The Scot was anxious and decided it was time for us to go over to the gay bar Players. He looked around, the skuzzy bouncer working the door having his back turned and gabbing on a cellphone. With the half-full fishbowl, The Scot motioned for me to follow behind him and we ran out onto the sidewalk.
"Are you seriously planning on sneaking this into Players?" I asked him as we looked both ways for cops.
"We just cut through the parking ramp and head in the back way," he smiled before sprinting across the street. I stood, frozen a little bit and then he yelled, "Well come on."
I trailed behind in the parking lot and checked to make sure police weren't lurking about in their popo mobiles like they usually are in downtown La Crosse. We casually walked over to Players and walked through the back entrance and found a table of three lesbian friends sitting together.
"Told ya we could do it," he beamed before sailing onto the bar.
A Bar Tale, Part 3-Queen of the Ball
The Scot and I were camped out by the AC, his now sore leg propped up on a bar stool. I stared at his face. In the two years he had gained weight and had partied hard and it showed yet I still saw those exotic yet boy-next-door features that had initially attracted me to him. And as I was staring at him, I saw this one piece of glitter on his face.
Imagine that. Glitter at a gay bar.
Anyway, I reached my hand to his face. He recoiled at first, leaning away from me for a second. I was about to put my hand down when he calmed down and leaned towards me. I moved my finger from the bridge of his nose and to the tip. I leaned back, happy that he had mellowed enough for me to even make the gesture. By the way, the piece of glitter was still on his nose.
At 2, Players closed and The Scot and I made our way to Brothers to find his cousin so I could get a ride home. He bummed a Marb from me and I lit it for him. His leg was acting up so he sat down on the ground in front of the bar as men in too tight t-shirts piled out with bleached blonde girls with spray tans.
"Are you okay?" I asked him.
"I'm fine," he sighed, leaning his head against the window. "I'll be okay."
His cousin eventually came out and told us we were invited to an after bar party. I declined. I lied and said I had to get up early. In reality, I wanted to leave the night, the bars, The Scot with still positive feelings.
We piled into the car with some other party people with the Hot Scot crammed in the middle. We pulled up to my house and I got out. I was about to walk away and stroll back into the house when I looked back and saw this extended hand. I walked back and grabbed hold of the hand and shook it.
"Have a good night," The Scot said to me, firmly shaking my hand.
"You too," I said. "I had fun."
He moved over to where I had been sitting as the car pulled out and went to the after party. It was dark on the corner where my house is, the streetlight out again as usual. I pressed the button down and a green neon light came on. It was 2:17 and it was July Fourth. Then it hit me. It was now the second anniversary of when The Scot and I had first met each other.
Postlude-And He Lived Happily Ever After . . .
The young man eventually packed up his stuff and went back to a distant land to find new magical adventures. He would write the tales of the toads, the minstrels, the revelers, and tell it to everyone. And one day, he hoped that he would find Prince Charming. But for now, he was content on living, looking, and making his own happy ending.
The Rules of Distractions
There is a couple I know that have been dating for about nine months or so now. They're totally enamored with each other, as evidenced by their detailed accounts on their blogs about the great sex they're having. Futons, bathtubs, beds, they've been fucking on any available flat surface. But I had to give them credit for being able to find somebody to be committed too. Or at least I did until I talked to one of them, the older one with a Lord of the Rings obsession and a propensity for liking his men barely legal young undergraduates, and found out that they're devotion had a special clause.
"We can have sex with other people as long as we tell one another and take pictures," he told me, casually as I sat down on the futon that most likely had been the sight of numerous acts of sodomy and he turned on the fan in his tiny white room of a bedroom.
"What's your definition of sex?" I asked, curious to see the specificity of this agreement.
"Anything that involves a penis going into an orafice," he replied. "We don't have to tell everything, though. Jerking off with somebody because that's just masturbation."
"It just happens to not be your own hand," I added. "So have you actually done this fuck-outside-of-the-relationship thing?"
"I haven't but he has with an old friend," he said to me.
"And you're okay with it?"
"Yeah," he replied with a little smile. "We're together and that's all that matters."
As I stared at his face, a little sweaty from the humidity but also beaming as he thought of his boyfriend, I didn't know whether they had found the way to be truly committed to each other or just grounds for commitment to an institution.
-----
The Board
A wise man once said, "Judge not, lest ye be judged." I soon found out that I indeed was in no position to make comments about the sanity of my friends' relationships because according to my friends I gone a bit nuts myself.
"You saw the Scot?!" they pretty much all screeched in one form or another.
I tried to explain the evening--the fishbowl, the dancing, the impressions, the handshake--but the way they stared at me with piercing eyes I could have been talking about Paris Hilton really being an alien sent to earth to conquer by rendering everybody stupid. In their eyes, I was certifiably crazy and for the moment I was okay with that because I knew that the Scot had changed and things were going to be different. Each one rolled her eyes and I realized that if they had been a competency board, I would’ve been carted off to a padded cell in no time.
Two days later, I chatted with Ridley the Rugby player over Yahoo! Messenger as I laid on top of my twin bed, trying my hardest to keep the green cover on it. There were several lulls in the conversation, the longest one lasting ten minutes. Paranoia set in and I was sure that I had scared off Ridley with all my talk about the Scot.
“I’m so sorry I started doing dishes in between statements and then I got busy,” he replied. “But that’s good you made peace with him.”
He logged off right after that. It was my shortest therapy session to date.
I’ve always had an obsessive compulsive nature, cleaning at two in the morning when stressed as an example, so I went through my live journal blog to clean out old entries. As I went through each entry, most dating back to the end of first semester, there was an old chat conversation I had posted when I was at a dearth of things to talk about. And as I read it, it was some of the best therapeutic advice I could’ve received then or now:
Moi: do you think i'm attractive? not for you, just in general
The Scot: I will answer with another question
The Scot: Do you think I am cute?
Moi: yes
The Scot: well a lot of people find me ugly
The Scot: another half find me cute
Moi: well count me in the half that finds you cute
The Scot: you need to find the answer inside of you
Moi: i know, i know. sometimes it's just nice to know someone besides yourself thinks you're attractive
The Scot: now, if you really thought so... would you ask me that quesion?
Moi: it's just frustrating having no one interested
Moi: people just usually say I'm funny, not cute. Sometimes you just want to be cute.
The Scot: well I never thought you were funny if that makes you feel better?
Moi: well i was never looking to make you laugh
Moi: i guess i did well at that
The Scot: u have the same problem that I have but with magnitude of 2893423
The Scot: become happy with yourself and then find someone to be happy. HAPPY FOR YOURSELF. You know what you need to do to become happy
The Scot: just afraid of it - it takes some effort
-----
LoveGames
"What you up to?" I typed to the Scot a week after last seeing him.
"Not talking to you," he typed back.
"What?"
"I'm not in the mood to talk to you."
I sat back in my brown plastic chair, rereading his words to me. It was just a small thing, something must people would brush off as him being moody or having a bad day and just being in a funk. But I knew better. I knew that this was just the first sign, the beginning symptoms of the fat comments, the gleeful needling, the other Russian personality returning to form. In my little dorm room with its bare white walls, I finally got it. I had been suffering my own kind of mental disorder when it came to him.
We were in a manic depressive relationship. Our high highs always bottomed out to this intense lows that when I was in the midst of my Hot Scot high, his seeming change ever present in my thoughts, a small part of my sanity kept echoing to me that he would return back to himself. But I silenced that little voice with prescriptions of delusion and hope and desperation. People say that people act crazy when they are in love but at a certain love crazy can cross over to just plain crazy.
Doctors say a lot of mental disorders can be controlled and treated if caught in the earliest stages and I did the same with him. I deleted his pictures and his name off of my messenger list. But just like the real thing, my Hot Scot disorder would never be fully cured. There would always be traces that I would have to medicate with friends and new loves. And I knew I would never make it back to being “normal” but eventually I could, and I would, find some peace of mind.
10/24/05
Whip-Smart, College Years: The Spring Session, 1-6
My Drunky Valentine
With everything reminding me that it’s Valentine’s Day soon and that I should sign-up for an online dating service so I won’t be alone forever and thus die a sad old man with nothing but a bunch of Precious Moments figurines, I thought either the song was right and one really is the loneliest number or all this hoopla is just some really savvy pro-two propaganda. In either case, I wasn’t about to let Cupid make me feel sad about being single and the only man in my life is Chuck Taylor, so I decided to throw an Anti-Valentine’s Day party as a big F-You to the holiday and a larger I-Heart-You to my single, and therefore fabulous, friends.
With everything reminding me that it’s Valentine’s Day soon and that I should sign-up for an online dating service so I won’t be alone forever and thus die a sad old man with nothing but a bunch of Precious Moments figurines, I thought either the song was right and one really is the loneliest number or all this hoopla is just some really savvy pro-two propaganda. In either case, I wasn’t about to let Cupid make me feel sad about being single and the only man in my life is Chuck Taylor, so I decided to throw an Anti-Valentine’s Day party as a big F-You to the holiday and a larger I-Heart-You to my single, and therefore fabulous, friends.
The night of the party, I ambled around the soiree and alternated between disparaging the upcoming holiday and wincing in pain since I had developed a pinched nerve in my foot the day before. Cupid had heard my F-You to him and sent one right back like the cherubic bully he is.
People caroused and drank while I passed out party favors such as little plastic bottles that were decorated with candy heart stickers and filled with bubbles inside. There were also jelly bracelets, the accessory of junior high whores with a sense of retro fashion. The rules say if you snap a bracelet you get the sex act that correlates to the color performed on you, all of which makes me wonder whatever happened to cooties? And to carry on the hooch theme, there was a wide variety of flavored lube because, although we were anti-romance, we were not anti-screwing.
The one person who wasn’t with the anti-romance tenor of the evening was my best friend “Alex.” Alex was giddy about a potential new guy he met over the Internet, which has gone from information superhighway, to a global singles club without secondhand smoke or Rohypnol. Alex was excited by the prospects and I did what millions of singles do when a friend starts talking about a new possible love; I smiled and faked happiness until my eventual real glee showed up.
As Alex continued to blissfully gush about the boy, I realized that the influence of Cupid’s arrow was inescapable. No matter how hard you try to get rid of him, he still manages to sneak in like an underage freshman into a bar or Michael Jackson into a child’s birthday party.
My cynical side decried that love interests are just buses. Some are so exclusive and high maintenance that not everybody can get on while others are dirty and everybody’s ridden at least once. Some are just “special.” And in all cases, if you miss one another will come along in fifteen minutes.
But my optimistic side flared up as Alex talked and said that even though I’m alone now, except for my Chuck Taylor, and most guys I’m going to meet are just short buses in coach bus disguises, sometimes it’s just the knowledge the true ones might be out there and in working order that makes all the difference.
So in the meantime, there is no need to complain about the lack of a love life and fear that the last image I see before I die is some big-eyed angelic figurine with a trite religious phrase scribbled on a ceramic scroll. Life’s too short for a pity party, especially when there are a whole bunch of fabulous keg parties to attend instead.
Oh Me of Little Faith
When you’re single, gay and have a few bits of money to throw around, it’s mandatory that you make at least one pilgrimage to the Holy Land, otherwise known as the Gay ‘90s. So on an incredibly snowy and chilly Sunday night, a group of the devoted went to the ‘90s to go worship at the high altar of Madonna, Britney Spears and Donna Summer and celebrate a friend’s twenty-first birthday.
“This is what I love about the ‘90s,” my friend “Agatha” said to me as we entered the packed club. “No matter how crappy the weather outside, gay men won’t be begrudged their disco.”
We made our way to the Retro Room where dance disciples were grinding to Britney Spears as Mrs. Federline preached the good word of Bobby Brown’s “My Prerogative.” The birthday girl, Agatha’s friend “Raquel,” and her party posse were tearing up the dance floor while Agatha, Alex and I hung back and sipped our expensive drinks.
I spotted a man in all black, looking like a limp-wristed Johnny Cash, grooving his way onto the floor with fag hags. It was the crush, the guy I had spent the previous semester trying to get to no avail. As I hung back at the wall with Agatha and Alex, I determined that this was the strange paradox of gay dating: the pool’s large enough to feel totally adrift in, but its small enough to doggy-paddle into someone you know.
While I was stuck somewhere between heavenly bliss of hot shirtless men dry humping each other to a crunk beat and the hell of seeing The Crush that I wasted so much time chasing after, Agatha’s boyfriend “Duran” was down in the Men’s Room, AKA the porn room, being baptized in the way of gay.
“No glove, no love,” one of the gays said to Duran, pointing at one of the several televisions that were playing hardcore gay porn on them. The one on was a stirring tale of a simple farm boy learning the pleasures of the great outdoors and the missionary position. “We’re all about safety.”
“Look at the camera work,” the other gay said as it zoomed in on the farm boy and his buff barn beaus acquainting themselves quite nicely with each other on a bale of hay. “It’s Oscar-worthy. Keeps my attention more than Ray did.”
Back in purgatory, otherwise known as the Retro Room, I was dancing with my friend Alex as a chorus of voices sang “Love Shack.” I kept looking over at the crush until Alex gave me a hit on the shoulder.
“Is that the crush? The one only dancing with girls?” Alex asked. I sheepishly nodded my head. “Well, forget him. Obviously, he doesn’t get the point of gay at all.”
I laughed a little. It was the kind of endearingly bitchy counsel that only gay men and mean girls have been able to master.
While I danced with my friends and cute strangers and flirted and laughed and smoked and drank the rest of the night, I had a little epiphany on the dance floor. I realized that at the Gay ‘90s, like in church, it all boils down to faith, hope and love. There is the faith to let go of the things that never were. There is the hope for better things to come. Yet, most importantly is something I observed as my friends and I caroused together that night. There is the love of all the things that currently are. In the name of the gay, the straight and the everything in between, amen.
Good Eats
To be young, available and fabulous at UW-River Falls is akin to going to Rodli Commons for dinner. You can sample the healthy things like education and higher learning, the vegetables and fruits of growing experiences. While moving down the line, you can also neatly add friendship and dating to your plate - the meat and potatoes of social life on campus. And at the end of the meal you can have a big helping of ice cream (AKA sex); incidentally, in both cases, a generous helping of whipped cream never hurts.
Mixed together in their proper portions, it makes for quite a delightful meal. Unfortunately, a diner may skip the fruits and vegetables, only push the steak and potatoes around the plate and indulge in the rich dessert until he or she develops an emotional version of a cavity.
My friends Agatha and Duran had not fallen into such a trap and had, in recent weeks, decided to put marriage at the top of their menu. Being the best man and starved for some social contact, I tagged along with them to look at reception sites for their wedding.
We checked out the Zuhrah Shriner Center and Harrington Mansion located in Minneapolis. The mansion was this gorgeous, dream-like place with fireplaces and deep cherry red carpeting and a mural delicately painted on the ceiling above the staircase. While Agatha, Duran and Agatha’s mother looked through pages and pages of different wedding cakes and decorations, I hung back in my swivel chair behind them.
That night I slept over at Agatha’s house and spent most of the evening thinking about the diet of men I ... how shall we say ... had the pleasure to dine with. Who had all been satisfying at first but eventually left me emotionally malnourished. I fell asleep that night with an empty stomach but a mind full of thoughts.
The next morning, we all went to Summit Avenue to look at a large mansion. While Agatha’s parents talked turkey with the representative over how much things would cost, Agatha, Duran, Agatha’s younger sister and I ate cookies and toured through the home.
We wound our way through the mansion - classical music piping through on the first and second floors. On the third floor, looking out at the street and the other large houses that dotted the neighboring blocks, I listened to Agatha excitedly talk about how they could have drinks out there on the enclosed balcony while people danced in the ballroom. Duran nodded along perkily and followed Agatha out onto the dance floor.
I stopped for a second, looking at the two sweetly staring at one another, and imagined them married with all of us there, dancing and whirling and stuffing our faces and downing champagne. I thought to myself, for the very first time, I want what they’re having. And though what I would be having would not be a marriage but a civil union, the sugar substitute of commitment ceremonies, I still felt the first few hunger pangs for something more than just a quick bite.
In the end, if being single is like eating at Rodli Commons, it seems as though it is not just about the vegetables, the fruits, the meat and potatoes or even that big dessert. It’s really about one day your plate being stacked high.
Cirque De So Gay
When you’re single and about to throw yourself back into dating, it can sometimes feel like you’ve left the reality of the real world and have instead walked right into a three-ring circus. This Spring Break, I decided to run off from the dullness of no dating and instead join the colorful world of Cirque De So Gay (coined by my friend Alex) and hopefully try to find love under the metaphorical big top.
“You know,” an older gentleman whispered to me in a voice that I’m sure was supposed to be sexy but came out desperate. And to clarify, desperation is not sexy whether you’re a housewife or a homo.
“I love me an ebony boy. Can you help me get my groove back?”
Barely three steps into the circus and I had already managed to encounter one of the standards of both the real and the dating circus: the clown. While in the real circus clowns intend for the audience to laugh at them, a large majority of the dating clowns do not have this goal and instead suffer from the kind of delusional craziness not seen by the general public, except for maybe the people on the casting special for American Idol.
“That’s nice and all,” I replied, “but that ‘get my groove back’ line is so old it could date Ashton Kutcher.”He grimaced a little bit and walked off, highlighting another big difference between real clowns and dating clowns: real clowns handle getting pied in the face more gracefully.
The next day I ran into another member of the circus: the juggler.
“One of the guys I’m porking loves your column,” the hipster said to me. “Which is weird since my boyfriend hates it.”
“My column or you screwing other guys?” I asked with a laugh.
“A little bit of both,” he replied.
And what circus or dating experience is complete without a magician, a man that can make svelte assistants or self-esteem disappear in a blink of an eye, while also pulling a bunny or a bullshit excuse out of his hat? The magician in my life was no different, elusive as the puff of smoke he generated whenever he vanished from my life at one point and reappeared at another.
Out of thin air he messaged me and asked, “Are you in town? Are you going out?”
“Yes and no,” I replied.
There was a brief pause in the conversation before he typed back, “You are so boring.”
Right before my fingertips hit the keyboard in front of me to send him back a suitably sarcastic response, I realized that in doing so I wouldn’t just be making myself a clown but also his assistant. I had allowed myself to be emotionally sawed in half too many times before.
“You know,” I wrote back to him, “you’re absolutely right.”
He signed off shortly after that. That’s one of the things about magic and its practitioners; the moment you stop believing in it and them, they lose their entire mystique.As I headed back to River Falls - the dating equivalent of a fun house - I figured that while life can be filled with clowns and jugglers and prick magicians, there is always the possibility of finding that trapeze artist that will catch you or the boisterous ringleader that will lovingly put you in the center ring with a large spotlight. But for me, at this point in my dating life, I’m leaving the big top and heading over to the freak show to find myself a strong man.
Undergrads in the Mist
The scientist Jane Goodall once went to the African jungles to study the social habits and behaviors of gorillas. As a sexual anthropologist of sorts, I decided to do my own study of the mating habits of an American animal: the well-groomed, sexually liberated, dollar rails guzzling undergraduate native to the UW-River Falls campus. And like any good scientist, I did field research: the bar scene on a “Thirsty Thursday,” since undergraduates are mostly nocturnal creatures. With spring upon us, the undergraduates have awaken from their hibernation, shed their cocoons of winter clothing and have put on the bright and tight clothing that helps attract a mate.
With my co-scientist “DJ” by my side, I made my way through one of the various watering holes that undergraduates gather at. There was a smell in the air as we made our way through the packs of people.
They say that dogs produce a pheromone that let other dogs know they’re up for mating. As the pungent aroma of Axe Body Spray, Britney Spears’ perfume Curious, cheap cigarettes and imported beer wafted around me, it became apparent boozehound undergraduates do the same.
We moved to another part of the watering hole, and, as we observed the girls who shook what nature and a push-up bra from Victoria’s Secret had given them, I spied one of my closet friends, “Thad the Cad.” True to form, he was in the midst of a swarm of girls, which wasn’t all that surprising since they gravitate to boys like him like slightly tipsy moths to an American Eagle outfitted flame.
“He’s like the king of the jungle since so many girls want to swing from his obscenely large vine,” I explained to one of my friends.
As he continued to dance, DJ and I spotted on the outskirts of the dance floor another staple of the jungle: the slithering snake. There was a whole bed of them clustered together, coincidentally enough all having activities about bed on their minds.
“Where’s Riki Tiki Tavi when you need him?” I thought to myself.
With undergraduates being constantly migrating animals, I wasn’t the least surprised when Thad grabbed me on his way out the door as he headed to the next watering hole where all the animals of the jungle invariably end up: Boomer’s.
Male tigers will sleep with any female that is receptive to their advances and as I walked into Boomer’s that night and observed If-It’s-Good-Enough-For-Demi-It’s-Good-Enough-For-Me women somehow coupled with pretty boys half their age out on the dance floor, it stood to reason that the same was true in human mating.
But right before I could write off the jungle as a whole, I spotted out of the corner of my eye the most rare creature of the jungle: the lovebirds. They seemed completely unfazed by the noise of everybody else pawing at each other and instead were intensely focused on cooing in each other’s ears. And unlike the dodo bird, I’m fairly certain that lovebirds will never become extinct.
That’s the thing about the jungle. It can be a crazed, dangerous place with vultures ready to sweep in on you at any second. There can be cobras to poison your mind, lions that will pounce on you and bugs that can eat away at your hope. But in the heart of the jungle, you also have the chance to find somebody that has a heart. And when you do, they might just give one of the most beautiful things to come from the jungle, real or dating: butterflies.
Jon Err
When you’re an English major, you spend a lot of time reading and critiquing and just generally nitpicking a piece of literature. While busily underlining passages in Mrs. Dalloway, I realized that as a single person, I end up doing the same thing. And where I can discern things like satire from parody in my academic critiquing, my powers of reading people always seem to fail me. I couldn’t help but wonder: when it comes to the matters of the heart, is it possible that singles have become emotionally illiterate?
It was in the midst of pondering that I got an instant message from someone that, if my life were ever turned into a book, which would most likely be called Divine Secrets of the Ho-Mo Sisterhood, would clearly be the antagonist. Dealing with him for the past three years had, for me, been something akin to reading Shakespeare. Both were regal and sophisticated yet to the even most well-read, potentially impossible to figure out.
“So do you have any big plans for the summer?” I asked him.
“Not to read your column.”
“I thought you didn’t read my column.”
“I do read your column,” he replied. “It’s sad.”
In writing, they call this a flashback. For me, I call it hitting a raw nerve. The last time I had seen him in person was two Spring Breaks ago. I had come over to his place to help shave his head and it was mid-shave that he dropped a gleeful little bit of information on me.
“You know the last time I did anything?” he grinned, his Scottish accent both inviting and menacing.
“Last week, directing a few people in a sex scene. Not a porno, though.”
“The last person I did stuff with was you around winter break,” I sighed. “Which was wonderful until, you know, your boyfriend called.”
“You want my pity?” he asked. “You worked out in the gym, lost weight, learned how to be funny and not boring maybe you’d find someone. It’s sad.”
They say in coming-of-age stories, the protagonist has to make a choice. At that moment I chose to see the proverbial writing on the wall and flee.
“I’m going to go now,” I said, holding my peacoat in one hand and seizing the melodrama of the situation in the other. “There is nothing here for me. I just misread all of this completely.”
Sometimes in life, like in fiction, some endings are inevitable. Bridget Jones gets the guy. Romeo and Juliet die. The Scot and I part.
The Scot disappeared from our chat conversation, having exhausted himself with one pithy line. I was deeply invested in the travails of Mrs. Dalloway when I got an instant message from my friend named “Ridley,” a member of a gay rugby club in the Cities. I was chatting with him about life and love and all of those l-words when he said something surprising to me.
“You should have more confidence in yourself when it comes to guys,” he wrote to me. “Just with your way with words alone.”
“Gay guys say, ‘I love his arms/dick/ass/pecs,’” I typed, “not ‘His clever turn of phrase makes me so horny.’”
“Well they should,” he replied.
“Maybe you should get on that one and make it a revolution,” I replied.
“It’s not the phrases that turn me on,” he wrote to me. “It’s the fact that you can make me laugh. That’s the turn on.”
I smiled a bit. That’s the other thing about life and fiction; sometimes things end with a pleasant twist.
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