Two words: He’s. Gay.
I’m not even mad he didn’t figure it out sooner, because without him I’d probably still be getting baked on Almond Street. And I had to get out of Salt Lake. Going to college there is one thing—you’re kind of insulated from the fact that you’re not Mormon—but as soon as you get out into the world (i.e., try to find a job) it becomes terribly apparent that you smoke, and drink, and in my case, are divorced and are having sex outside of marriage. (With a hasn’t-quite-figured-it-out gay guy, no less.) This puts you at a marked employment disadvantage since there are plenty of other candidates for the same job who don’t, won’t, haven’t been, and never would. (Or are and don’t know it.)
“Let’s move,” I say one day.
“Where?”
“I don’t care, anywhere!”
“Well, it needs to be somewhere I can get a job.” Michael is right. Especially since he’s the only person in this relationship who’s working right now.
“Where can you get a job?”
“Not Los Angeles. They don’t really hire out of Salt Lake. Somewhere smaller.”
Michael works as a television promos producer (“Coming up tonight at eleven…something that’s not half as interesting as I’m trying to make it sound!” ) and the television business is organized by market size—generally the bigger the city, the harder it is to get a job and the more experience you need. If we could go somewhere that he could get a job and I could use my brand-new broadcast journalism degree…Well, that would be ideal.
“I hate San Diego. Too Republican. Too military,” I say.
“I love San Francisco,” Michael says. “But it’s still too big.”
“What about the Pacific Northwest?”
“I’ve never been there.”
“Me neither.”
“How about Seattle?”
“Edward lives there.” Edward is an old flame of mine who also had a bro-mance with Michael. (It was the eighties. Everyone was a little bit bi.) It’s a sore subject.
“Well, then. How about Portland?”
“I’ve never been there.”
“Me neither.”
“I heard it’s nice.”
“Me too.”
“Okay, then. Portland it is.”
Minutes later, it seems, we are rumbling over the Hawthorne Bridge in our white Chevrolet Caprice Classic, packed to the gills, our two cats furiously shedding fur in the backseat.
“So. This is Portland!” I say. It feels just like when Kenny and I drove into Salt Lake. I moved there sight-unseen, too.
“It looks like Mr. Rogers’s neighborhood,” Michael deadpans.
It really does. It has the cutest little train system, and an adorable downtown, and quaint little mountainy hills to the west. When it’s not raining, there are rainbows, and sunsets, and pine trees everywhere. What you can’t see is the chicken-fried steak and the level of gun ownership. I thought Portland was going to be all hippies in Birkenstocks, but those hippies are just the blue chocolate chips in a very, very red cookie. Here, I am a black person again, whereas in Salt Lake, I was just a non-Mormon.
After six months of floundering, I finally land a job in TV news. It’s not that I wanted to work in TV. What I really wanted was a job that would allow me to smoke cigarettes, chat, and drink heavily at posh cocktail parties…you know, exploit my real talents. But no one pays you to do that. (Not in 1991. 2008? Different story.) So television it is.
I get hired to work as an associate producer on a light news program called First at Four. My big break comes just three months into the job. I am at home one night, stoned, watching Twin Peaks, when the phone rings. It’s the five o’clock newscast producer, Sid.
“You’re going to produce the Four tomorrow,” he informs me excitedly. News people love having news.
“What?!” I’m not sure I am hearing him correctly. Marijuana has a slight hallucinogenic effect that messes with my hearing. It’s why music sounds so good when you’re high.
Sid drops his voice. “Gary”—he’s talking about the First at Four show producer—“had an emergency. He’s going to be out for the next month. You’re going to have to jump in and take over the show. Starting tomorrow. But don’t worry, I’m going to help you.”
“Wow. Okay.”
Eighteen months later, I’m a newscast producer. I’m responsible for every aspect of the show—fifty-nine minutes and thirty seconds of airtime every day—where I decide on the order of the stories, I write all the lead-ins (“Two people are dead after a big fire in northeast Portland tonight; reporter Joe Blow is there now with all the details. Joe?” ), and I take all the blame when the news anchors get pissed off. I’m not really cut out for this kind of work—for one thing, I’m not the most detail-oriented person and this job is a festival of details—but most nights I manage to slide into home base. Barely.
The news business has awakened my inner adrenaline junkie. Live television is filled with risk—you’re working against outrageous deadlines, and it’s all do or die, or at least it seems to be, since if you miss your slot or make factual errors you’re certain to be fired sooner than later. This is the kind of risk I can enjoy taking, where the hair on the back of my neck stands on end every single day but I’m never actually in any physical danger.
As my star rises at work, it begins to fall at home. Michael and I settle into a narcotic routine of work and television and marijuana, with weekend binges at the bar and the disco. People ask me if I am going to marry him and—gay notwithstanding—I know I never will. It’s hard to pinpoint why, but I guess the simplest answer is he’s just way too committed to me for me to commit to him. There is something I have always been looking for in a man that I still haven’t found yet.
(Daddy.)
And so, I leave Michael.
Then he comes out of the closet. Which makes me feel a lot better about leaving him.
MY NEW BOYFRIEND LOOKS like a movie star. His name is Brandon and his eyes are enormous splashes of blue sky, his hair is dark-dark-dark and tousled, his mouth is out of a fairy tale. He looks exactly like a thicker, more masculine Rob Lowe, but he hates it when people say that. He prefers to think he resembles Ray Liotta. Probably because he wants to be a gangster. Come to think of it, he looks way more like Snow White.
We meet when I look across a room—okay, a bar—and see the most amazing creature staring at me. Him. Looking like a supersexy satyr.
Is he staring at me?
Normally, receiving the amount of pure sexual attention Brandon is directing at me would send me scurrying away, but I guess all the therapy I’ve had in the two months since Michael and I broke up is working, because I find myself doing the unthinkable. Walking across the room to talk to him.
“Hey.” He says it quickly but suggestively. He nods his head a little, then smiles r-e-a-l-l-y wide, showing a mouth full of perfect teeth the approximate size and shape of pieces of Dentyne Ice. “I’m Brandon.”
He’s wearing a leather motorcycle jacket, holding a motorcycle helmet, so it’s safe to say he rides a motorcycle. For a moment, we just look at each other. He shifts his weight from his left foot to his right, tapping his right heel on his left toe as he does it. I take this to mean he can dance.
“What’s your name?” His voice is slightly raspy but not quite as deep as the motorcycle jacket would suggest.
“Tracy.” I offer my hand to him. We shake. It’s intense. We make conversation, but it’s not that great. (Why is it that the guys you have the powerful sexual connection to are the guys with not that much to say?) The high point is when he tells me he’s always figured he would die by the age of twenty-three. Which, I guess, means he’s not twenty-three yet.
“How old are you?” I ask, laughing.
“Twenty-one.”
Oh boy. “Insurance tables say if a guy lives past his twenty-third birthday, he is statistically likely to live out his natural life,” I say. This is the kind of thing you end up talking about in
bars when you work in TV news. Not such sexy banter.
Who cares what he says in return? All that matters is that he’s taking my number and telling me he’s going to use it. “Call you tomorrow,” he says, in a way that makes me know he will.
Later that night, on the way home, my friend Beth says, “I would never, ever date Brandon.”
I think to myself: Me neither. But I’m going to anyway.
By the end of our first date, he’s looking at me like he’s already in love.
“I had a great time with you tonight,” he says softly. We’ve had a lot to drink and I am lying on my bed with my eyes closed because there’s nowhere else in this apartment to sit. Not that I could hold myself up even if there was. Although I’m halfway passed out, I can hear in his voice how much he already needs me. He’s not all defended like so many other guys. Maybe because he’s only twenty-one. He’s probably never even had his heart broken yet.
Brandon leans over and kisses me. Whoa. I swoon, but I try to stay cool. (I’m nearly twenty-seven. I am all defended.) I’ve never been kissed like that.
This is exactly the kind of sexual connection I’ve been studiously avoiding. I mean, my last boyfriend was gay. Gay guys don’t kiss you like that. My boyfriend before that was a philosophy major. Intellectuals don’t kiss you like that. My boyfriend before that was my husband. Husbands don’t kiss you like that. My boyfriend before that was in high school. High school boys don’t kiss you like that.
You know who kisses you like that? Guys who ride motorcycles, who are way too young, and who, when you lose track of them at the nightclub, turn out to be dancing in the go-go cage. On your first date.
That’s who.
BRANDON AND I MOVE IN after twenty-nine days. We don’t really mean to. It happens after he and his gun-toting, Mohawk-sporting, Aryan Nation–looking roommate get evicted from their house because of Portland’s skyrocketing real estate market. The plan is for Brandon to come stay with me until he can find another place to rent. Of course, he never leaves.
Which is totally fine, since if he lives with me, I know he’ll always come back, sooner or later. Which is probably the only way I would risk giving myself so completely to someone. I am truly, madly, deeply, and sexually in love with Brandon. It’s the first time in my life I’m not withholding anything.
Not even orgasms.
I’ve noticed that the moment you stop doing something you realize exactly why you were doing it. Or in this case, the moment I started doing something I realized exactly why I hadn’t been. It wasn’t that I didn’t have orgasms because I was frigid. It was that I was refusing. Refusing to let go. Refusing to let a man have an effect on me. Refusing to be vulnerable. Refusing to be with someone completely. Refusing to lose control.
And I’m not in control of Brandon. Not in control of him. Not in control with him. Not in control of any of it. So not in control.
It’s not that Brandon is a bad guy. He’s not at all. In fact, for a twenty-one-year-old, he’s surprisingly mature. He works as the head chef and kitchen manager at an upscale Asian-fusion bistro downtown. It’s one of those places that has an open kitchen with a bar around it, which is good, because it would be a crying shame to waste Brandon’s face in some dungeon in the back. Like a lot of chefs, Brandon has mad sex appeal. A fair number of single women come to eat at the bar (no doubt to watch him work), and he always makes them feel good by smiling at them while he cooks. I tease him that if he can’t fuck them, at least he can feed them. It’s pretty much the same thing.
But this is the first relationship I’ve ever had that has sex at its core. Being with someone I want this bad feels dangerous to me. Maybe because the men I am superattracted to carry a lot of my dad’s sexual energy, and I know all too well what that means. They’ll abandon me. Somehow or other.
Until Brandon, all my relationships have made sense—they involved good guys, with nice jobs and bright futures, sensible choices, the lot of them. I have selected every partner against a set of very rational criteria. Is he going to “fit” my life? Is he going to be nice to me? Is he never, ever going to leave?
Sexual compatibility was fifth or sixth on my list of qualifications. In fact, it was an anti-qualification. I have a theory that you can tell who’s having the least sex (or is secretly gay) by who has the most stable relationship. Passion is very destabilizing. And stability has, until now, been the most important quality I looked for in a man. My inner foster child demanded it.
But besides his regular job, nothing about Brandon is a concession to my inner foster child. And she’s none too pleased about it. Because Brandon does a lot of stuff that scares the living shit out of her. Like drink. Way too much. And disappear, sometimes for hours. And worst of all, Brandon flirts. Ceaselessly. With women, men, children, and mailboxes. Then my inner foster child freaks out and I have to talk her back into the relationship. The conversation goes something like this:
I can’t take this anymore!
“It’s not that bad,” I say to her. The grown-up me likes Brandon. I especially like the sexual freedom I’m experiencing and I don’t want to have to give it up. I know he’s not actually going to cheat on me, and I wish the little girl in me would just calm the fuck down so I could enjoy him. But that little girl gets kind of hysterical.
It is that bad! Did you see him last night? I thought we were just going to go play pool and have a beer and the next thing you know, he had jumped into a car with that guy Demetrios and they were taking off across the Burnside Bridge! I was really scared! I didn’t know where he was going or when he was going to come back!
“I know. It sucked,” I say sympathetically. “But he doesn’t mean anything bad by it. He really doesn’t. Anyway, once we caught up to them, everything was fine.”
I don’t want to have to catch up with them! And who’s this fucking Demetrios, anyway? We’re Brandon’s girlfriend! He’s supposed to be taking care of us. Not running off with some idiot because he’s all drunk.
“You know he loves you. Us.”
That’s what he says. But what about when he was talking to that chick from the ice cream shop? You could tell she liked him, and he was going along with it! We walk down Twenty-third Avenue and it seems like he’s had sex with every pretty girl we see. I don’t even like going out with him anymore.
“That’s just how Brandon is. He would never cheat on you. You know that.” I say this emphatically. It’s definitely true.
Maybe. Okay, all right, yes. But it sucks. I’m scared!
“He always comes home,” I remind her.
So? I’m scared…I think we should break up with him.
“No. I mean, no. You can’t do that.”
Why not?!
“Because.”
Because why? There are other guys out there. Nice guys. Who aren’t scary.
“Because I said so.”
That’s not a reason.
“Okay,” I say. “Because I want him.”
And that’s what it comes down to. Big Me doesn’t really care if Little Me is terrified by Brandon’s behavior. Big Me wants him, and what Big Me wants, Big Me gets.
IT SUCKS TO WANT A MAN in particular, which is the way I want Paul. It’s fine to want a man. And it’s fine to be particular. But you have to keep the “want” and the “particular” far away from each other. Preferably not even in the same sentence. Definitely not in the same man.
I must have known this intuitively because up until Paul, I’d managed to pretty much sidestep all desire for a specific man—one single man whom I needed above all others, one single man for whom I couldn’t substitute some other single man. This is how I stayed safe.
Brandon would have been the exception. But I always knew I didn’t want to marry him. He was too motorcycle-y and too blue collar. I was too art-snobbish and too ambitious. We just didn’t have enough in common. And that gave me power—having the knowledge that even though I wanted him like crazy at that particular moment, I would never
want him for eternity. It wasn’t Brandon’s fault. He was like a starter house. You’re not meant to live there forever.
Paul’s different. He’s the man I want who can’t be replaced by any other man. I’ve never dared to want someone this much before. There is a brilliant sex therapist named David Schnarch who calls this phenomenon “not wanting to want.” He says you might refuse to want your partner as a way of defending yourself against the knowledge that they can walk out on you any time they want. (Unless you chain them to something.) In the world of a sex therapist, not wanting to want leads to low sexual desire in a couple. Come to think of it, that’s what it leads to in my world, too. Like with Scott, and Michael, and Kenny.
But not with Paul. Paul, I want.
It’s nice to know that I must be growing psychologically if I’m willing to want someone with the intensity of my want for Paul. But it’s not much of a consolation. Because the downside of wanting only one particular man is steep and rather treacherous. And that is:
If you’re not careful, you might find yourself doing anything to keep him.
NEW YORK IS AWFUL. Brandon and I got here the day before yesterday, after two weeks in Dallas with one of my college friends, preceded by ten days with Yvonne in Boston (the most I’d seen her since leaving Minneapolis), preceded by three weeks on an island off the coast of Honduras, four weeks in Guatemala, four weeks in Mexico, a week in Southern California, and two weeks in Salt Lake.
The journey that brought us here began when we took HIV tests and—for the week it took to get the test results—fantasized about what we’d do if they came back positive.
“Well, I would quit my job and travel,” I say.
“So would I,” Brandon says back.
“Why wait until we’re dying to live?”
“Yeah, why wait?”
The tests came back negative, but the idea was a pretty good one, so, on New Year’s Eve turning into 1992, we locked ourselves in the bathroom at the stroke of midnight and made a pinky promise to hit the road come April.
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