It's you and me, Buddy
Happy Valentine's Day. I worked (Boss Sunshine was not in evidence). I went to therapy and talked about my crush on Sarge. Now I'm home with pot roast in the oven.
I'm thining of Exes...
J Wooten M Kinda my first love. Or the first man I slept with more than twice anyway. (There was a wonderful guy named Frankie that I washed dishes with when I was in high school, but I didn't find out that he had the hots for me the way I did for him until he had moved to San Francisco, become a dancer, and died.) Anyway, JWM was psychotic. No. Really. Delusional, obsessive compulsive. He worked as a security guard in a nuclear power plant in Delaware, but had gone to the Famous Models School of Being a Famous Model (or something). The first time we went to bed (the night we met), he told me that he had tested HIV positive, but had 'cured' himself with iodized salt because iodine kills infections. I got really dizzy in the kitchen (where I was fixing us some tea), and nearly fainted. Because I knew that he was going to fuck me raw in the very near future and I didn't have the capacity or wherewithal (I was 21) to negotiate condom useage with him. We saw each other for about three months.
How come? Simple. He was gorgeous (alabaster skin, dimpled chin, jet black hair with ringlet curls at the nape of his neck) and the sex was absolutely amazing. We would stock up on snack foods that we didn't have to cook (trail mix and the like) and spend entire weekends in bed. He had this amazing trick that he could do with his anal sphincter. If not the best lay I've ever had, definitely in the top ten. I dumped him when he embarassed me when I took him to the wedding of someone I knew in college by acting like a crazy goofball. But he was.
MMcM My mullato love. We met when I spotted him coming out of a dirty bookstore. When someone would ask us, "Where did you guys meet?" we would giggle and say a restaurant. He wanted to fuck me. A lot. He also had bunches of issues that didn't seem to be resolved. Very sweet and wonderful guy though. Right after we met, I emerged on a Monday morning to walk to work and found a trail of Post-it notes with hearts and runes and such all along my way. MMcM was an artist (he don't look back). He made several plaster casts of portions of my naked body, sort of abstractions of my torso and such. Very beautiful. Tragically and stupidly, I left them behind in Philadelphia when I moved to New York. I left him because we were sexually incompatible. He basically just wanted to fuck me all the time. I mean, all the time. And he had a large dick. I could only take so much of that.
Terry Johnson Deceased. Again, an artist. I met him at the Bike Stop (the leather bar in Philadelphia). Picture a basement crammed with men in flannel, denim, and leather, and right smack in the middle is a guy wearing canary yellow pants and an acquamarine tank top that revealed a pierced nipple, with a shock of blond hair worn in what was known then (late '80s) as a Tin-tin after the Belgian comic book character. Loved this guy. Gave me all the space I needed. Was soooo good about letting me be a boy in my mid-twenties. We got crabs. From scratching, I got these sores on my dick. It was my first venereal disease. I was pretty weirded out. I went to my doctor (picked at random from the HMO directory), who examined my penis. He asked me, "You're a homosexual, aren't you, Son?" When I confirmed this he followed with, "I think what you have is AIDS." Uh huh. Luckily, I went to the VD clinic and the hip young internist who was on duty explained to me what crabs were and gave me a prescription for Quell. Alas, there was only enough for one of us. So Terry had to go and get his own script. Terry called me from work and asked if we could meet. He had tested positive for HIV, and based on a number of factors, came away from the same hip internist with an AIDS diagnosis. Terry got money doing 'corporate Christmas decorations' (which we would refer to as Korporate Kristmas) and the occasional faux painting job. He had no health insurance. I told him I'd take care of him, doing whatever it took. Terry didn't want to do that to me, so he left in the dark of night and went to live with his brother in the Southwest. Years later, I heard that the end had come pretty quickly for him.
JSA We met at Mars, the night of ACT UP's Stop the Church action. I had come up from Philadelphia to attend with my friend Baron von Philadelphia, and that night, the Baron and I had gone to Mars. JSA was staring at me intently and I went over and introduced myself. We were necking in short order. I introduced the Baron to him, and the Baron later told me he was sure he was a serial killer. (I slept with a tried and convicted serial killer mid-career, he was sweet and tender with me, but that's for another time.) I didn't go back to Philadelphia that night with the Baron and callled in sick to work. Thus ensued months of me going up to New York, and a few times JSA came down to Philadelphia. Here's where things went awry. Once, while visiting, JSA (who had a lot of leisure time as he wasn't working) opened a letter I got. It was a response to a response to a personal add I had answered (involving S/M) months earlier, before I met him. He called me at work and said he was going back to New York. I ran all the way home crying. I pleaded for his forgiveness and begged him to stay. (Only much much much later would it occur to me that I had done nothing wrong; he had.) But I moved to NYC anyway. He was moody and petulant and insanely jealous. My attempt at monogamy (overall successful, but I paid such a price) was lamentable. It took me almost a year to leave him. (We lived together, he would do things like come and ring my doorbell--when I found a new apartment--at 3 am when I had to be at work the next morning. Finally I was able to separate.
JC Oy. I still see this guy all the time. He's aging backwards, as in lost a lot of weight and is now dying his hair. I met him at the Spike. He looked like a garage mechanic, and I was delighted to learn that in fact he had a Ph.D. in English. (We discussed James Joyce over breakfast the next morning.) Sex was odd. He once had me give him a blow job after he had sprayed himself with jock itch powder. Not recommended. Truly. I couldn't begin to count the number of my friends who said, "What in God's name do you see in him?"
Then ensued a passel of unsuccessful dating experience. There was Bruce, the stunning bartender from Wisconsin who revealed a propensity for pugilism that was more than a little disturbing; Robin, an architect who was drop dead gorgeous who dropped me without warning; the handsome Israeli who I met at the LURE a few weeks ago, and in a repeat of a decade ago we seem to have stopped calling each other for no reason at all that I can think of; Don, who was a drunk; and one or two others.
And then I met
The Ex My first impression was, 'he seems like a stable, not crazy, and relatively handsome man." We dated. I moved into his apartment. We moved to Brooklyn together. We bought a house in Brooklyn. We broke up. During those seven years, not a week went by that I didn't get yelled at. Sometimes for good reason, most times for things like being obstinate and refusing to change the tie I was wearing upon being ordered to do so. I tried and tried and tried and tried to become the person he wanted me to be. I tried so hard, squelching parts of myself as best I could. Imagine a man who buys a house because he likes the sun room. It's a big old rambling place. One day he's in the bedroom of the house, and notices that the layout is all wrong. So he leaves the room and locks the door. In another room, he notices that the floor is marred. He closes that room and locks the door. And so it goes, until he's in the sunroom. When the vision of spending the rest of my life like that--an empty house full of rooms sealed off, rooms that I've since found hold treasure--became clear in my mind. I left. Note-on-the-pincushion-don't-look-for-me-style. Truly one of my more cowardly acts, but it was absolutely what I had to do to get out of there.
Special Guy I miss Special Guy. I sent him email wishing him Happy Birthday. He's in Palm Springs. I wish nothing but the best of everything for him forever.
Y'know, I wish nothing but the best of everything for all my Exes. Health, happiness, prosperity, friends and lovers. For each and every one of them, there are golden moments I cherish and will cherish forever.
I wonder if they still miss my cooking?
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