yeah, we're still back in high school

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i was a pretty good kid, all things considered--throughout my adolescence, i pretty much stayed away from drugs, alcohol and crime. my biggest vice during those years (aside from the pack-a-day habit) was skipping school, which i did with great frequency and expertise.

seriously, from my sophomore year on i don't think i ever made it five days in a row; three days one week and two the next was more like it. this was back when i could sleep for sixteen hours at a stretch, oblivious to everything around me--and that's what i did more often than not.

and my mother tried, she really did--she'd come in every morning and try to get me up, but i'd always wait her out, knowing that sooner or later she'd have to give up and go to work.

and then there were the days i'd actually manage to drag my ass upright, drive to school, interpret not being able to find just the right parking space as permission from god to home and crawl back into bed.

either way, at around ten ms. vesey from the school would invariably call my mom and ask, "what's it gonna be today, ms. f?" and my mom would give her the excuse du jour--flu, sore throat, whatever--and i'd sleep until two and that'd be pretty much it.

how did i get away with it, you ask? it's like this: a smart kid, i learned early to differentiate myself from the typical juvenile delinquent by making sure that when i actually did show up at school, i was always well-behaved, ingratiating and brilliant. thus, i not only maintained at least a 3.6 gpa throughout my high school career, i also endeared myself to my teachers--and, more importantly, to the all-important office staff who held my fate in their hands.

the more interesting question, of course, is why i did it. my mother didn't understand it, my friends didn't understand it, my school didn't understand it and i didn't understand it either--at least, not then. i see it now, though--i was suffering from unrequited grief, unrequited love, the whole gay thing; in other words, i was clinically depressed.

so i chose to disengage, and i started with school. and it wasn't because school was so awful; it was because school happened to start in the morning.

see, mornings were the worst--from adolescence onward, i spent the first three hours of every day of my life more or less wishing i was dead. and because awakening was the moment of maximum pain, i postponed it as long as i could. my mood would eventually improve as the day wore on, until by nighttime i was feeling pretty good and would then put off going to bed as long as i could, thus setting myself up to repeat the cycle--a pattern which plagues me to this day.

whatever--back to our story.

by senior year i'm something of a legend among students and faculty alike. but sooner or later, all winning streaks have to come to an end.

for me, it happened like this: ms. vesey calls me into the office sometime around early march, settles me into my usual seat and, with sincere regret (since in spite of herself she has grown fond of me), solemnly informs me that, at this early date, i've already managed to miss half the total days of the school year (an unprecedented feat at that time by anyone with a still-passing grade, btw, and a record i'd be willing to bet still stands).

she then delivers the coup de grace: if i miss one more day, then--no matter how good my grades are--i won't graduate.

i remember taking the blow, absorbing its meaning, shaking it off, squaring my shoulders, looking her in the eye and replying, "well, ms. vesey, i guess that means i'll just have to show up every day from now until june."

well, you'da thought i'd uttered the funniest line in the history of the universe the way that office reacted to this pronouncement--i'm talking grim, forbidding women who to my knowledge had never even cracked a smile in a student's presence suddenly doubled over in incredulous laughter.

but by god, i showed those bitches. those last lazy hazy crazy days of my senior year--when even the goody-goods were bailing and partying at the lake--i made it to school every god damn day.

funny what you can do when you know you don't have a choice.

[and my second-biggest adolescent vice? car accidents. we'll talk about that next time.]

the great thing about this blog

[text]

[actually, lemme start again, because there's nothing particularly great about this blog]

the great thing about blogging

is that, for the first time in my life, shit's getting written down.

in the past, i'd get lost in a reverie, work some things out, come to some conclusions, vow to myself to take up the thread again at some point in the future and work things out some more.

problem with that strategy is, it's just like tom clancy once said: "if it's not written down, it didn't happen."

and he's right--the minute you move on to the next thing in your mind, those things that previously held your attention in such seemingly indelible ways tend to fade away (in my case, very quickly), until all you're left with is mush. and then, next time you take up the thread, you have to start all over again.

and that's what i've always done--gone back to an old memory, trod the same ground over and over again and never gotten anywhere new.

which is why i've found this blog to be useful; these days when i write about something that happened in my past, i take it about as far as i ever did in my mind--only now i have an actual written record to look at later, and to build upon. as a result of this process (and with the help of certain people who read, comment and email me--you know who you are), i'm actually figuring out new shit, and making connections i never did before.

take the story of david in my previous post, for instance [and if you haven't read it yet, not only will the picture of that glorious '72 caddy up there not make any sense, little of the following will either].

noblesavage opined that it would've been a stronger piece if i'd gone into all my feelings of longing and unrequited adolescent love during that time. i chose not to do that for a couple reasons: first, because there are already many such stories out there, by far better writers than me; and second, because, even though i've gone over that period of my life countless times in my mind, i really didn't understand my feelings much better now than i did then.

until i wrote it down the other night and came back and looked at it later, and some things made sense in a way they hadn't before.

see, at 15, i was a kid who had (a) from the age of about six (when i first realized what was up), systematically set out to eradicate any and all signs of sissy from my affect; and (b) from age 10 through 13--and starting with my father--suffered through the sudden and tragic loss of several key people from my life.

in the course of so doing, i had learned, from (a), that being yourself was wrong and could give you away; and from (b), that loving somebody could end up biting you in the ass and, as such, was to be avoided at all costs.

so i was pretty much well on my way from open, happy kid to emotionally shut-down adult by the time david walked into my life--and what a can of fuckin' worms his arrival opened up, lemme tell you.

see, it's one thing to have an unrequited crush on someone from afar who'll never know you're alive; it's quite another when he's your straight best friend and crashing in your bed on a regular basis. trust me on this--i've done it both ways and there's really no comparison.

[and, to refresh, remember that in my short life i had learned the following two things about emotions: (a) showing people who you really are is dangerous; and (b) caring about people is painful because they'll fuckin' leave you.]

so i learned to--what was it they called it when bill could "love" hillary but could only fuck gennifers and paulas and monicas? oh yeah: i learned to "compartmentalize"--to stuff my erotic and romantic feelings about david behind a little partition that only opened in the middle of the night when i'd wake up--defenseless, shields down--with him all warm, softly snoring into my ear and smelling like only he could smell. and sprawled, trusting and oblivious and unconscious, half on top of me in his t-shirt and boxers.

lemme tell you, it was torture (torture i wouldn't have traded for all the tea in china, but torture nonetheless).

and the rest of the time? hell, we were best friends like any other best friends. david and i were there for each other during a tough time in each of our lives--god, we had so much fun just driving around, hanging out and doing nothing--and i wouldn't have traded that for all the tea in china, either.

here's the bottom line: if i had to do the pleasure/pain equation as far as david's concerned--the dual-edged sword that i believe comes into play in all aspects of life--it'd probably come out pretty much like this:

downside: considering the gay = pain lesson i learned from that time, david's probably a big reason i put off coming out until i was 34, and am thus the emotionally-stunted wreck you see today.

upside: seeing as how so many of the gay men of my generation who came out young are dead now, david's probably a big reason why i'm still around to bore you with this shit.

it's all in how you look at it, i guess.

every single word of this is true

[text]
one of the things i often tell people who ask is, "i never touched a guy until i was 34."

and it's almost true (which makes it far truer than any other "true" thing you're likely to hear in this goddam town).

and god knows it's true i waited until i was 34--until i was grown up and safely sixteen hundred miles away from texas--before i ever allowed myself the freedom to truly be myself with another guy.

but to be honest, 34 wasn't the first time i ever touched a guy; for better or worse, that happened long before.

rewind back to my fifteenth summer: i'm working as a busboy/dishwasher in a sizzler steak house. it's all glass, and as i'm busing my tables one day i look out a window and see a baby-blue sedan de ville driven by a gorgeous blonde (her name is jenny, i find out later) pull up to the front entrance. she rolls to a stop and this equally gorgeous blond boy gets outta the passenger side, slams the door and walks into the restaurant; i avert my eyes as he passes and heads to the back.

a few minutes later, i'm back at my busing station with my little cart, scraping the food off the plates and sorting out the silverware, and my boss comes outta his office with his arm around the blond boy's shoulders. "mike, this is david," he says, "he's new--show him the ropes."

david, turns out, was almost exactly a year older than me--about to enter his junior year. his family had just moved to town from wyoming, and he knew no one.

seriously, has any horny, lonely gay teenager ever been given a greater gift/curse from god?

because of course we immediately became best friends--working together in enforced proximity, we had the whole summer to become inseparable before (a) school started; and (b) he got fired (among his other sterling attributes, david was not only a smartass, he was--in the words of our boss--a goddam yankee smartass).

and even when school started, the fact that i was a sophomore and he was a junior didn't matter because this particular high school was new to both of us--we were equally alienated--and our pattern was set for the next two years.

and it didn't matter that our stations in life were different: i lived in a middle-class neighborhood befitting the family of a dead oilman, while david's dad had just moved his family into a grand five-bedroom neo-colonial manse in an upper-class neighborhood suitable to a prosperous still-living oilman. it didn't matter--he fell into my family, and i fell into his. if he wasn't over at my house, i was over there--i immediately loved his mother and his brother and sisters (jenny included), and even his big, strong oft-absent dad (who, turns out later, had a whole 'nother life up in oklahoma city--but that's another post for another day).

point is, david and i became very close--close in a way that only adolescent boys can become. and while i saw nothing unusual about it at the time, i remember david's little brother saying something like, "so i guess you're the new 'joe.'" and when i asked him what he meant, he said, somewhat resentfully, "david used to be all mushy about his friend joe back in wyoming the same way he's all mushy about you now."

and, all these years later, i still remember the thrill that went up and down my spine as i scornfully replied, "you're so full of shit."

we settled into a routine, david and i--thing was, without dads around (mine was dead; his was usually in oklahoma city (not only on business but also, as it turned out, with his mistress)), our moms were occupied with their households and their younger kids. as a result, david and i were pretty much free to do whatever we wanted--which in those days consisted mostly of hanging out on whatever nights we weren't working, and cruising up and down broadway (usually in whatever new cadillac david's guilty dad had just given his mom) every friday and saturday night with all the other kids and then crashing at either his house or mine whenever we got tired.

and usually it was at my place--not only because we could smoke in my house (david's mom didn't smoke; mine did), but because it was generally looser and easier at my house than it was at his--we could come in at any hour we wished. whatever, most friday and saturday nights, we'd end up at my house, listen to music in my room until 3 or 4 a.m. and then pile into my bed and sleep until noon.

my twin bed.

yeah--as unbelievable as it might seem, for two goddam years of my adolescence i slept almost every weekend pretty much on top of a guy i was totally in love with in a tiny little bed--and nothing ever happened.

and not because i didn't want it to--god knows all the nights i laid intertwined with him, my hard-on pulsing with my heartbeat, dying to slide my hand from my dick over to his. it's just that, all the nights he slept with me in my little bed, my desire never overrode my fear.

like so many other things in my life, that took alcohol.

it happened like this: midway through his senior (and my junior) year, his parents are on vacation in hawaii or somewhere, and we're at his house, responsible for his younger brother and sister. and, like any responsible high school kids with the run of the house, we break into the liquor cabinet and get shitfaced, fall into his bed (a double, btw--much bigger than mine), and pass out talking about girls we'd like to fuck, only to wake up in the middle of the night rolling around in each other's arms.

and what happens next, you ask?

simple: soon as i realize what's happening, i pull away, he rolls away, we pass out.

next day, nothing is said, life goes on.

within a month or so, he's dating christy, i'm working more and we see each other less and less--until he shows up at my window one night at four in the morning with an armful of bloody sheets, asking "mike, how can i get these clean? my mother's gonna kill me!"

because, see, there were virgins back then.