After moving in with Chris I had been going out a little bit more than usual. While living on my own I went out perhaps once every couple weeks but since “co-habitation” came back in my life, I felt a sudden urge to reassert my independence.
“Pee in all the corners…” is how Chris so eloquently put it.
After all those moments of feeling co-dependent, I had now done a 180 due to four years of living on my own. I didn’t need anyone in my life, but it was okay to choose to have someone there whom I cared about.
In short, since Chris was home nearly all the time, I needed some space.
By now, I was a fairly safe boyfriend to have in the bars. Chris was patient, never told me what or what not to do and that was the best thing for me. Tell me I can’t do something and I’ll do it just to prove you wrong. Perhaps it was just some phase, but I was enjoying getting out of the house and being social, usually around happy hour, where the conversation didn’t include wall to wall crowds of 23 year old millionaires who made $30,000 a year and an overpowering amplifier blasting Britney Spears.
I like to think I had two “childhoods”. The usual one involving family and puberty, then the one that began the day I came out, suddenly finding a new life, with a new “family” (i.e. my gay Des Moines friends).
The second childhood, as for many gay men, heavily involved the bar scene. In Iowa, there weren’t many social places for gay men to go other than bars and the woods, so alcohol always seemed to be a part of “playtime” and I admit I was lucky. The friends I met at twenty-one are still my friends today. David and Dan, and we still go out painting the town whenever they come to visit.
I once asked Dan about all the drinking we’d done throughout the years. “Do you think it’s dysfunctional? Some people would if you actually sat down and calculated all the bar tabs.”
He replied, “I don’t know, it’s probably just how you look at it and why you’re doing it. I took one of those questionnaires that asked, ‘Have you ever had more than three beers in an hour?’ When haven’t we had more than three beers in an hour? We don’t drink to forget, at least I don’t. I drink because we have so much fun together and every time, it’s a new funny adventure with another story to run into the ground…”
“Could that possibly be ‘Denial’ or ‘Justification’?” I asked.
“Maybe, but since we all look out for each other in between the giggles and we don’t drink at home alone, I’m not opposed to a little justification.”
As I walked into my neighborhood bar, a group of four people were sitting there. Burl, an overweight guy with as much personality as a gnat, Matt, a really flamboyant man who was a joy to be around, his boyfriend Don and someone I had met a couple times before named Leo.
“Hey Sweetie” Matt greeted while giving me a hug. “How was your week?”
I told him it had been well and that I had just stopped in for a beer.
Don, with that slightly dazed look he sometimes had when drinking, said, “Hello,” giving me a kiss and a hug also.
I nodded at Leo, who put down his martini glass to nod back. There was always something a little different about Leo. He usually looked at you like you were some distasteful American Idol contestant he was going to critique. Perhaps it was the slight upward tip of his head when he’d casually glance over or the way his mouth pursed like he had a lemon in it. In short, I got the impression he was a snob, but I didn’t really know him, so who was I to judge?
Most of these people were just “bar friends”, a category I would never place David and Dan in. Usually any conversation with Leo began with him informing us Project Runway was a television classic and that Madonna was the greatest actress to have ever walked the earth. He also usually looked down his nose at your clothes as if you were wearing a potato sack.
“Hi Burl” I said, looking over at the 5’ 10”, 250 lb man on the corner stool. “How was your day?”
“Sucked. Couldn’t find parking close to here and my car needs new brake pads, then my boss at work was such a bitch today after we had a meeting and my sister is having problems with her girlfriend because the girlfriend woke her up in the middle of the night screaming about the laundry not being done and then my dad called really upset about…..”
Interrupting him I asked, “Okay, okay…how about the weather? It’s a nice day out, the weather is nice...”
Burl commented the clouds were looking gray and if the sun did come out it would probably give him a burn.
“Can’t you ever just say ‘Fine’, when somebody asks ‘How are you’?”
I was egging him on, which I suppose was a little mean, but he always came off like Eeyore half the time.
“I’m fat” he’d say in a boring monotone.
“Then lose some weight” I’d silently think.
“I hate my job” he’d blurt out.
“Then look for a new one.”
This would go on for as long as you’d let it, until finally after 5 beers he’d quietly go home, hardly having even managed a smile. Half the time when someone in a bar asks “How are you?” they don’t really care anyway. Just say fine and be done with it.
Matt leaned over to me and quietly sang under his breath, “I’m just a little black rain cloud…hovering over the honey tree…”
Burl would try so hard to be part of the conversation, sometimes interrupting others because he wanted to be included. Usually, his contribution would be of minimal value, he was just so socially inept.
One time I was telling a bartender about my adoption and Burl, who only heard the one word, turned around and piped up, “I hate adopted people, they always have such issues. There should be a ban on adopting.”
Doing my best pause, eyebrow lift and head-turn I dryly commented, “I…am…adopted.”
The bartender also looked at Burl, saying, “I…am…also…adopted.”
The two of us were telling the truth, we were adopted, but by now the four others in our group at the time picked up on the comedy of the situation.
“Hey! I’m adopted!” said one.
“Me too!” blurted another.
“I was left on a doorstep as an infant!”
“I was adopted and raised by a female wolf in the backroom of the Eagle!”
Burl suddenly had to go to the bathroom.
Matt and Don were interesting people. I had met them the previous November when some friends said, “You have got to meet these guys, they are so much fun,” and they were. Matt and I hit it off immediately when he brought up his passion for “I Love Lucy”.
I replied, “I love it too…but, to be honest, I really love Ethel.”
He blurted out “Ethel Mae Potter!” and I joined him with the second half of the saying, “We never forgot ‘er!” This pop culture name-dropping would usually take up much of our time over the coming months (all in a bar, I might add). We’d jump from old movies to classic TV with Matt going off the deep end with Bea Arthur quotes.
Don was much more low-key and for whatever reason, usually concentrated on his health problems, how much money they spent on alcohol (while constantly ordering shots) and how many dick pictures he had stored on his phone. A tall, stocky, muscular man, once he got a little cocktailed his shirt would come off and he’d quietly thrive on the attention, even though he’d look at Matt every minute or so and ask like some big teddy bear, “Is this okay, honey?”
“Go for it sweetie, flaunt it! Flaunt it!” Matt would reply.
They had moved back to Chicago from Los Angeles, and we got together at least once a week. I was really enjoying all this Cheers type escapism where everybody knew my name.
About a month after we met, we were, for some reason, talking about drug abuse in the gay community. Matt said, “It’s sad, but you know, I lost my best friend of fifteen years to Crystal Meth, or at least, I think it was Crystal Meth, so does his family, but nobody’s quite certain. He’s definitely on something though. He changed into someone I barely knew. We ran into him on the bus months ago and he was so weird…”
Don jumped in with, “His eyes were darting back and forth, he kept jumping around in his conversation…he was on something…”
Matt continued, “We only talked for a few minutes when he suddenly stood up, said, ‘Well, this is my stop. See you around.’ And we had been best friends for fifteen years! All those memories and just an ‘I’ll see you around’!? I don’t know what to think about Kurt anymore…”
“Kurt?” I asked.
“Yeah, Kurt Black, you know him?”
I just looked at the ceiling and shook my head. Would this shit ever stop following me around? Deep inside I also had a slight giggle since I assumed this part of my life was history, yet somebody upstairs obviously needed one more laugh. Kurt had been the man I had dated just before my drug abuse period. Much of the reason I now believe I ran to drugs was because of the depression I suffered after Kurt broke up with me. It was one of the first times somebody else left me and it took quite a bit of inner therapy to get through the breakup. When I later found out he had a Meth problem, I hypocritically did it myself to make up for my own lack of self-esteem.
I looked at Matt and pointed to my chest, “Do you know…who I am?”
After a pause, it hit, “You were the Terry he dated! Do you remember me?”
By this point, my memory brought back some guy named Matt I had talked to on the phone once when I was dating Kurt four years previously. Matt was also the person Kurt had gone to visit for his fortieth birthday in L.A. after our breakup.
“You were supposed to fly to Paris together but he came to see me instead?” Matt said.
“Let’s not even go there…” I replied.
For the next half hour we talked and formed a small bond over the memory of Kurt. It was obvious Matt needed more closure than I. My baggage had been unloaded off the train long ago, but this was the first time Matt had actually heard the truth, or at least, what I believed was the truth. Matt gave me a lot of answers also.
It felt good to talk to someone whose memory of Kurt was a positive one, at least the memory of the years before the meth abuse stuff. When Kurt and I dated I was very naïve, so I never really noticed how sketched out he had been, all I saw was what I wanted to see and I’m still thankful I never got that PnP visual of him in person. (Party and Play. Party means you do drugs, play means you have sex why you’re doing them.)
Matt got more excited as he let go, “He was the golden boy, the one everyone wanted to be around. Charming, handsome, he was the first man I ever fell in love with. You couldn’t help but admire him. He started out as the band geek, but once he came out, reinvented himself into this fantastic person. He was simply everything to me as a friend, but then, as time went by, he just slipped away. That day on the bus he told me, ‘I am not the same Kurt you knew. We’ll see if you like the new Kurt’. Putting himself in the third person was incredibly creepy. Right now I’m in the same boat you are. He blew up a year ago over some minor thing and disappeared from my life. I miss him.”
Just then, my friend Eric walked into the bar, we were going to go for coffee later. I could not believe the irony of introducing Kurt’s former PnP buddy to Kurt’s former best friend. Although Eric had now been clean and in Crystal Meth Anonymous for quite awhile by this point, he had been a huge help to me in getting over Kurt. The night we first met neither of us had any idea who the other was, but we quickly discovered the connection. Eventually Eric dropped Kurt as a friend due to Kurt’s over the top behavior and I sort of “replaced” Kurt in Eric’s life. Very odd coincidence, but I wouldn’t have put it past God to have been sitting in a director’s chair with a well planned script in his hand during that enlightening moment.
Four years ago if you had told me this would happen I would have said you were nuts. Back then, I suspected I would never have any answers regarding that man, now I had “bookends” on either side giving me the lowdown.
Adam was the regular bartender I hung with. A tall African-American, I had known him for years and he was always a truly fascinating person to talk to. With Adam you could talk politics, philosophy, music, food, whatever. He had a slightly dark sense of humor and our conversations were always interesting, since sometimes in stressing his point he’d back track and stress the other side, arguing both angles at once. Adam was one of the people that made the bar a hell of a lot fun. He also gave me good advice if I ever took the people involved too seriously.
He was a bartender for now, but that probably wouldn’t last much longer since his real estate business was picking up speed. His genuine concern for people who made an effort to better their lives had been paying off in referrals. I had no doubt one day he’d be one of the best realtors in Boystown.
“Yeah,” he told me, putting on a Humphrey Bogart voice, “Real Estate agent by day, Bartender by night. It was a dark and cloudy afternoon for Adam the agent. The kind you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. My door opened and a new client walked in. He had more curves than a scenic railway. I wouldn’t trust him any further than I could throw him. Everything about him spelled trouble. I knew he’d be a tough nut to crack…but I’ve known my share of nuts…”
I looked at him and said, “Sorry Sam Spade, I think you’re the one who’s nuts.”
I sat with him for awhile after Don and Matt left and we talked about adoption among gay couples. Adam and his partner Stan, who was Caucasian, hoped to one day adopt.
He said, “Last night I woke up in a complete sweat. Stan and I had been talking about the adoption thing the previous day and I suddenly had one of those weird moments where my bizarre little mind went off on me.
‘What’s wrong?’ Stan asked. I blurted out, ‘My God, once we actually get children do you think we should tell them they’re adopted?! Will it cause issues if we do!? Should we tell them!?’
Stan chucked and said, ‘Homosexual, bi-racial couple. Don’t you think they would eventually figure it out?’ I ended up laughing at my own neuroses. Here I had just had a vision of two teenagers, sobbing at the dinner table one day, ‘You mean you’re not our real Dads!?’”
Just then an acquaintance named Kirby rushed through the bar door, waved to everyone without looking at any of us, said hello to some guy in the back, gave him a kiss, along with a few words, then back out the door he went with a “See you later, Bitches!” hardly cracking a smile during the two minutes it took all this to transpire.
An interesting little guy around thirty, Kirby was cute, brunette, muscularly compact and usually had a perpetual scowl on his face. He was also very short. I didn’t know him really at all, but suspected he must lead a fairly wild life.
One night while I was sitting at this same spot, he came in, drunk as a skunk, leaned over the bar stool with his behind up in the air, yelling at me, “I need to get take it right up the ass! Are you a big hairy leather Daddy top?!” all the while swaying his hips back and forth, eyes crossed.
Several years ago, I probably would have taken him up on the offer, even though I do not really fit the hairy Daddy mold. Now I was simply amused he was so cocktailed he couldn’t actually make out who he was saying this to.
He had a boyfriend but Kirby could not be faithful for much more than an hour, having numerous trysts with men in a single day, in an alley, somebody’s basement, in the bathroom of a restaurant, wherever. He’d be more than willing to tell everyone about each encounter, usually seeming very proud of the conquests. (Although to me, “conquest” meant you did the invading, I doubt if Kirby played anything but Poland to some anonymous Germany’s invasion.)
One evening, he was hitting on some guy at the bar, going on and on about how hot and skilled a top he was. Turning away, the guy looked at Adam and said, “A top…really…of what, a wedding cake?”
A week later a friend of mine took me aside and said, “Did you hear the news?”
“What news?” I asked.
“About Kirby...I probably shouldn’t be saying this…and…hee hee hee…it isn’t anything to laugh about (snicker), but…but…” and he had a hard time keeping in the chuckles, “but... Kirby’s boyfriend… left him today…(snicker)…for a…for a…
“For a what?” I asked, hoping he’d finally spill it.
“…for a dwarf.”
Go ahead, call me a callous jerk, but I had to stifle a smile myself. Two days later, Kirby again approached me in the bar, slightly drunk once more, but sober enough to realize I was not a hairy leather Daddy top this time. He appeared honestly sad about his lover leaving him, plus a little embittered. I was surprised by the irony of him screwing around, yet he was mad at his lover for running to another man.
“Adam! Gimme another drink!” he said, and after he downed a shot of Jack Daniels, “You think you got problems, my lover left me for a fuckin’ dwarf! I mean, look at me! I’m 4’ 11”! Guess I wasn’t short enough for him! Ain’t I got enough self-esteem issues already!? A dwarf! And I introduced them in a three-way! I fucking suggested it! Now, he fucking left me for a dwarf.”
Taking a swig on his next drink he wryly commented. “I’m gonna be in fucking therapy for years with this one…”
I sincerely apologize for sacrificing political correctness for the sake of a laugh, but this is how the story was related to me and those were the words used. Adam told me one day, “And guess what, the little person involved is actually hot!”
Another week went by. Adam and I were walking down the street when he pointed to a couple together on the street. “I don’t even need to tell you who those two are, do I?”
I yelled out, “My God! He is hot!”
My hand to God a week or so later someone sent me this joke.
“I rear ended a car a few days ago.......The driver got out of the other vehicle and he was a dwarf!! He was pissed! He looked up at me and said, ‘I am not happy!’
I asked, ‘Which one are you?’”
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