Design for Loving

by Doug Sanford

  The day after we talked, I had a couple of houses to show not too far from the university, and afterward I drove through the shopping area that borders the campus wondering if he was walking on the sidewalk or was in one of the stores. It was stupid, of course, because I had no idea what he looked like, but I spent probably half an hour doing that—driving and thinking about him.

  There’s a scene right at the beginning of You’ve Got Mail where Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan are walking to work in New York, totally unaware that, after having just communicated anonymously that morning in a chat room, they’re passing each other on the streets and in Starbucks. When we saw that movie—what? eleven years later?—I told Bart and Les that it reminded me of the day after Bart and I first talked—looking for somebody there was no possibility I could find.

  I just couldn’t get him out of my head. Ridiculous as it sounds, after an hour-and-a-half telephone conversation, for some strange reason, I’d fallen hard for a voice on the phone.

  But why? I’d made calls like the one to him more often than I’d like to admit—and with a better payoff—and I’d never had that kind of reaction.

  And considering the fact that I’d spent the last four years of my life—since I’d left Marty back in Chicago—avoiding any kind of entanglements, why in the hell was I suddenly interested in this kid?

  I had no idea what he looked like and wasn’t very optimistic on that score. I didn’t know much about him except that he was smart, open, accepting, funny, straight, and eleven fucking years younger than I was. Did that make me a pedophile?

  “No, it’s fine. I just finished everything I was going to do tonight anyway. I’ve got an Econ quiz tomorrow, but it should be easy.”

  “Economics was never easy for me. Only course I ever took was Econ 101 because I had to, and the only thing I remember about it was that the textbook was written by Paul Samuelson who won a Nobel Prize. That should tell you what an impression it made on me.”

  “We use the same text—probably a later edition. You still have yours? Be interesting to compare the two.”

  Was he giving me the if you show me yours, I’ll show you mine routine? Of course not, but as he’d already figured out about me, sometimes sex is all I think about.

  “No, I’m sure I sold it back to the bookstore at the end of the semester.”

  “When you said you’d call me some time, I didn’t think it would be this soon.”

  Fuck!

  Busted!

  Why the hell didn’t I wait longer?

  “Yeah, well—”

  “It’s cool though. I liked talking to you. You’re a little weird, I guess, but it was fun.”

  “Good weird or bad weird?”

  “I’m not sure. Just weird. Hope you don’t mind my saying that.”

  “Long as you use the possessive,” I smiled, “you can say anything you want. I enjoyed it too. Hope I didn’t come off sounding like a boring old man.”

  “No, not at all. I’m not sure I’ve ever spent that much time talking to one person about so many different things.”

  “Really? Not even with friends, buddies?”

  “I told you, I never had a lot of close friends. Nobody I felt I could trust, anyway.”

  “I’ll be your buddy.”

  Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  Who says things like that?

  Me, obviously.

  “Thanks. I like that idea. I guess it’s easier to talk to you because we don’t know each other, and you’re just a voice on the phone.”

  “I’d be lying, kid, if I didn’t say that I was thinking a lot about you the last two days.”

  “Kid? I’m no kid.”

  “Well, you are to me.”

  “Okay, old man!”

  I laughed. “I guess I deserved that.” I paused.

  “To be serious a sec, Bart, I like you—as a friend I mean—if I can use that term after one phone call. But that’s it. No ulterior motives. And if we’re going to keep talking to each other, I want to say a couple of things I was thinking about earlier today.”

  “What?”

  “Number one: I accept the fact that you’re straight, and I’ll respect that. I don’t want you ever to take anything I say as coming on to you. If we ever meet in person, I’ll never touch you or make a pass at you. I know I get a little raunchy when I talk, and I don’t want you to get the wrong idea.”

  What the fuck was I saying? I sure as hell did want to make a pass at him even if he looked like one of the trolls under the bridge. But—at the same time—I didn’t. Curiouser and curiouser.

  “Okay.”

  “That’s number one. Number two is that I promise to be totally honest with you. No bullshit. And it would be great if you could do the same. For somebody like me who makes phone sex calls to total strangers under an assumed name, that’s kind of an odd thing to say, but I mean it with you. I can’t even tell you why I mean it.”

  “Okay.”

  “No, that’s a lie, and I just said I was going to be honest. I can tell you why.”

  “Why?”

  Deep breath.

  “This is going to sound completely insane, but I think I’ve fallen for you—stop—don’t say anything.

  “That’s foolish, stupid, and ridiculous, and I know it’s impossible to fall for somebody you’ve never met after having talked to them only once on the phone, but I think I have. And I know you’re straight, and in accordance with rule number one, I am absolutely not coming on to you.

  “But I said I wanted to be honest with you, so I told you. Now, just forget it. Don’t say another word about it, and I promise I’ll never mention it again if you still want to keep talking to me.”

  Silence.

  Shit.

  Why did I say something so fucking dumb?

  “So you didn’t like Econ at all?” he asked.

  Yes! Perfect comeback!

  He never mentioned it again, and neither did I until—well, that comes later.

  Chapter 3

  We talked for almost two hours that night with no further allusion to my dumb confession. From then on, for the next two fucking—or, to be more accurate, non-fucking—months, I talked to Bart every single day—at least once a day.

  Seriously. Every day or night—and sometimes both—for two months. Although probably most of the time I called him, he also called me. Yes, I gave him my phone number.

  I’m embarrassed to admit that at the beginning, I would test him. I wanted to be sure I wasn’t bothering him, so I’d say something casual like Give me a call tomorrow just to see if he would. He always did, so I decided he liked our talks as much as I did.

  Somehow, I did become his buddy, his phone buddy—if there is such a thing without sex. I turned into the friend he never had in high school.

  Once we started talking, it was like he—we—exploded on the phone. We weren’t having phone sex, but our conversations were almost orgasmic in their intensity and enthusiasm.

  We’d jump from topic to topic, often never finishing one thing because something we said reminded one of us of something else. It was as if we were trying to make up for—what?—years of not knowing one another.

  We talked incessantly. Because he was curious about it and asked questions, I talked about my often lurid past and what it was like being gay. He talked about growing up and his parents and being away from home for the first time and his classes and his plans for the future. We talked—sometimes even disagreed—about movies, books, and music. We talked about politics too, but we both were Democrats, so there wasn’t much disagreement there. Both of us thought Reagan was a schmuck.

  We were different kinds of talkers. As an ex- teacher, I believed there were right and wrong answers to most things and wanted to make sure people got the right ones—kind of like a guide.

  He was much more open-ended and inquisitive than I was—an explorer. He used conversation as a means of learning new things, not pushing his own views. Age was part of the differen
ce. He really wasn’t old enough yet to have settled views on a lot of things.

  But despite his age, he talked more like an adult than an eighteen-year-old.

  Part of that was his upbringing and his parents’ interests. He learned a lot from his father’s comedy albums—which seemed all to have been from the sixties. He knew Lily Tomlin, of course, but he’d also listened to Mort Sahl and Shelley Berman and Stan Freeberg.

  Besides listening to and really liking Tom Lehrer—and who in the hell still remembered him in 1987?—he’d memorized the words to a lot of the songs, including “Vatican Rag” which put him way up there on my scorecard. All the comedians in his dad’s collection were topical and sophisticated, and it was pretty clear from our talks that he understood a lot of what he was listening to—even though most of them were made before he was born.

  I was happy to find that one album his father didn’t have was the British comedy sketch show, Beyond the Fringe. That gave me a chance to play for him over the phone The Great Train Robbery. We both got silly about the train robbery, “which involved no loss of train, merely the contents of the train” and about the mindermast, Scotland Yard’s code word for a “criminal master mind,” a term they couldn’t use because it depressed the men. When he asked me to play it over again, he had me for sure—as if there were any doubt. By then, I’d have done anything for him.

  Early on I found that he’d listened to and liked most of Sondheim. I know it’s a stereotype, but finding out he was into musicals made me wonder if maybe he really was gay and just didn’t realize it or hadn’t acted on it. Apparently not.

  “What got you into Sondheim?” I asked him.

  “You know that gay couple I told you about that my parents know? They have this weird thing. They buy every Sondheim recording they can find, and they always buy two copies—one for them and one for my parents. The deal is that in case their house burned down or something, my mom and dad would have a full set as a backup. I guess you can tell they were kind of Sondheim maniacs. But I listened to the recordings more than my parents did since I had a lot of time on my hands when I wasn’t doing stuff for school.”

  “But why Sondheim? I mean I think he’s great, but most straight guys aren’t into musicals much.”

  “I’m not really into musicals, just Sondheim. I like his music, but it’s mostly the lyrics that get to me. He uses these amazing unexpected rhymes—none of that moon-June stuff unless he’s trying to make a joke. And the double entendres are really cool. I love “Have a Little Priest” because of the way he finds ways to describe the pies and the occupations with the same words. Priest pies and priests are both too good at least. Politician pies and politicians are both greasy and might run. It’s awesome. I did a paper on that song in my junior English class.”

  “I’m not sure I ever had a student who even knew who Sondheim was,” I joked. Or, I thought to myself, a student who was even vaguely familiar with a term like double entendre.

  “That’s the same thing I like about a lot of comedy routines,” he went on. “In that Great Train Robbery thing you played me, I really liked it when the interviewer says, ‘Who do you think is behind the criminals?’ and the Scotland Yard guy answers, ‘We are, considerably.’ Double meanings, things like that always turn me on.”

  After a couple of weeks, I found that I had to monitor our conversations because his school work began to suffer a little as a result of all the time we spent on the phone. He was humiliated when he got a B on a Western Civilization quiz. This was a kid who apparently wasn’t used to Bs. I started to ask him about upcoming assignments, so I’d know when he had work due and when it was time for me to cut short the talking.

  We both stuck to rule number two: no lying. For him, being honest was almost innate, part of his nature. He was open with his parents, as I was to find out, and he was almost naively honest with me. He really didn’t want to tell me about the history grade, and he prefaced the news by saying, “You know how you said we were both supposed to be honest?” Eventually, his honesty had a big effect on his career, but he never regretted it.

  As an ex-teacher, I was accustomed to keeping things hidden, and being honest was more difficult, but I didn’t hold anything back from him.

  Considering the way he talked about his parents and how well he got along with them, I felt I had to explain the ambivalent feelings I had about mine who were killed in an accident the year after I’d left home in Evanston and moved into Chicago.

  “Did you ever tell them that you were gay?” he asked.

  “Sort of, and I probably shouldn’t have. I inadvertently came out to my mother one afternoon when she asked me who was at a party I’d been to the previous Saturday night. When I mentioned some names, she asked, ‘Weren’t there any girls there?’

  “For some stupid reason, I thought that she probably knew about me, so I said, ‘No, of course not. You know I’m gay.’

  “Turns out she didn’t have an inkling, or so she claimed, and that resulted in a torrent of crying and exclamations of ‘Where did I go wrong?’ and ‘Don’t tell your father; it would kill him.’ It was like a scene from a bad movie.”

  “Wow!”

  “I never did tell my father. And even though I knew that my mother was from another generation, and it was harder for her to understand—especially in 1979, I never quite got over my disappointment that she wasn’t better able to accept me for who I was.”

  “My parents are so cool about the gay thing,” Bart said. “I can’t imagine them acting that way if I told them I was gay. But you’re right. That was a while back, and things have changed.”

  Was he trying to tell me something? No. Just more wishful thinking on my part.

  I eventually told him about the failed relationship which was responsible for my leaving Chicago. I really loved Marty and had no idea at all about his S&M interests when we met. I was pretty shattered when we broke up, but I knew that there was no way I could do what he wanted me to do to him. That experience made me wary of getting into any more relationships, and, from then on, it was all one-night stands and phone sex instead. They were safer—well, at least emotionally safer.

  S&M sex was nothing Bart knew very much about other than through Tom Lehrer’s “Masochism Tango.”

  “I thought that song was funny, but I didn’t think it was real. You mean men really want to be hurt by women? “

  “And the other way around, and men with men, and women with women.”

  “I don’t think I could do something like that to someone I loved—hurt her.”

  “From what I know of you, I’m not surprised. You don’t seem the type. I’m not either, which is why I left.”

  That led me into telling him a lot more about my sex life than I’d ever planned. I’d always been very sexually active, but I wasn’t particularly proud of having spent most of my college years cruising the men’s rooms in the library and the social science building. After I met Marty, I gave those up, but as soon as the break came, I went right back to my old habits.

  The most difficult thing to admit to him was my foot fetish. I’d had it since I was a kid. One of the first things I notice about a man is his feet.

  I told him by admitting that it wasn’t just the climate that attracted me to Tucson. What really got to me was that practically every guy in the city, especially around the university, wore sandals or flip-flops nearly all year long, and I got to see their feet. It’s hard for me to talk about this, even now, but it was something that I felt I had to tell him if we were both going to stick to this honesty thing I’d insisted on.

  He had lots of questions about that one. He’d never really heard about fetishes before. He wondered if he had any, and I chuckled to myself about that—coming from a kid who’d had no sexual experiences at all and barely masturbated.

  I admitted that I’d cruised the U. of A. campus. He found that funny. He had no idea what went on in the men’s rooms in the library and, after I told him, he started to notic
e things and would ask me about them—like the time the guy in the stall next to him started tapping his foot rather obviously. This was long before Senator Larry Craig made bathroom cruising a subject for the nightly network news.

  What happened in the bathrooms and my own past sexual experiences interested him intellectually, but, as far as I could tell, not pruriently. He wasn’t getting off on them; he was just curious. He really seemed to be straight, certainly by the standards I’d always used to identify gay people—except for the Sondheim thing and the fact that by the age of eighteen, he’d never had a girlfriend.

  He asked me if I had cruised the campus since we’d started talking. He said he thought it would be ironic if we’d seen each other in the bathrooms without knowing it. By then, I was no longer surprised that he was an eighteen-year-old who was able to use the word ironic correctly in a sentence.

  I assured him that I hadn’t.

  And that was true—because what I didn’t tell him, rule number two be damned, was that my sex life pretty much ground to a halt after that first phone call to him. No crap. I became almost celibate. I no longer cruised. I barely masturbated, and when I did, it was more romantic than sexual and always involved him in some way even though I had no idea what he looked like. I was a mess.

  The phone sex calls were also over. His was the last one I ever made.

  I’m not boasting here. I just had no interest in that any more. What was the point in cruising when I had a full-blown love affair in my life—even if it was non-sexual, non-reciprocated, and existed only in my own warped imagination?

  My life had become totally wrapped up in this kid, and though I couldn’t have him the way I wanted him, I didn’t want some second-rate substitute.

  Because of him, I joined the YMCA near campus. Two reasons actually. First, he mentioned that he worked out there sometimes. I hoped that I could find out what he looked like by hearing his voice. Turns out that was a stupid idea because Bart was a loner, went on his own, and solo exercising isn’t the best activity for hearing a person’s voice—unless grunting counts.