Unraveling

  “They’re okay,” I say.

  “They are. Good tippers.”

  She looks around in her little leatherette folder for my check. She brings it out and hands it to me. “Everything okay, sweetie?”

  For a moment, I think she’s asking in general. I want to tell her that my marriage is falling apart, I have a little boy that I love, and I was testing the waters tonight to see how I fit in with my people, but now I’m really scared, wondering if I fit in neither the gay nor the straight world. And then it dawns on me she’s asking about my meal.

  “Everything was delicious. Those fries!” I smile.

  “They are good, aren’t they? I can’t eat them anymore because of the old ticker, but I remember. Al soaks them in ice water before he fries them.” She rings me up and holds my change out.

  “Keep it,” I say.

  “Good night!” The guys at the table next to mine call out as I approach the door.

  I turn and know my smile looks more like a grimace.

  “It’s okay, honey,” the blond who flirted with me earlier says. “We don’t bite.” He waits for a second and then adds, “Much.”

  Their laughter follows me out of the restaurant.

  I walk all the way to the L stop near Wrigley Field with my ears burning in spite of the cold.

  On the platform, as I await the next northbound train, I wonder if there’s anywhere I’ll ever fit in.

  Because, right now, I’m more of an outsider than ever.

  I can’t wait to get home to where things are safe—with my wife or son.

  I know they say being gay isn’t a choice. But it’s my choice if I have to live the life.

  I suppose those guys in the diner were harmless and they were just having a good time, a night out.

  But I felt like I was standing with my nose pressed against the glass of a window, looking in at a place I could never be comfortable in.

  And it made me sick.

  I shut down my thinking as the train rolls into the station.

  1986, Spring

  From “The Wasteland”

  April is the cruellest month, breeding

  Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

  Memory and desire, stirring

  Dull roots with spring rain.

  Winter kept us warm, covering

  Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

  A little life with dried tubers.

  —T.S. Eliot

  Chapter Seven

  JOHN

  I play the answering-machine message back one more time. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Or just wince from the sting…

  “John, thanks for nothing. Listen, here’s the sound of me tearing up your number. I never want to hear from you or see you again. Prick.” And this is followed by the very effective sound effect of paper being ripped into a million tiny little pieces, one matching each fragment from Dean Corvello’s broken heart.

  The message makes me want to laugh.

  The message makes me want to cry.

  The message makes me want to give up on men.

  Maybe I should try women? It would sure as hell make my mom happy if I did. Maybe I should join the priesthood. It would make my dad happy if I did. And it might make a lot of priests drop to their knees in gratitude if they saw me walk into the sacristy. Hush. I never said that!

  Dean Corvello was my latest adventure in seeking true love and coming up empty-handed.

  What did I expect? We met in the sleazy back room of a leather bar a few blocks west of the Halsted Boystown strip. While patrons just a few feet away were downing bottled beer, watching hardcore porn, and playing pool, the backroom on that particular Saturday night was standing room only—a claustrophobe’s nightmare and a hedonist’s dream come true.

  There’s no pretty way to describe how Dean and I met. The bald, down-and-dirty truth is I was leaning against the wall in said backroom, drinking my Bud Light and watching as shadows moved in the near-pitch darkness, coupling, uncoupling, moaning, and groaning. A guy just across from me was bent over, jeans around his ankles, pulling a train. And we are not talking Lionel here.

  Other assorted characters were involved in much the same kind of activity—anal, oral, manual for the wussies.

  The floor was covered with enough DNA to populate a small country.

  There was very little kissing! This wasn’t your mama’s old-fashioned Harlequin romance, kids.

  Dean Corvello was stealthy.

  Without even so much as a how-do-you-do, he hunkered down on his knees in front of me. Quickly, with no glance upward and certainly no request for permission, he unbuttoned my Levi 501s and yanked them down to my thighs.

  I looked down and through the darkness could see a bearish young man, dressed in a leather harness, jeans, and combat boots. He had a shock of dark hair, buzzed close on the sides and a full beard.

  Now, before you go thinking this was a sexual assault, let me disabuse you of that notion. What Dean and I were beginning to engage in was simply par for the course for the backroom of a sleazy bar in Chicago. You didn’t step into one thinking you might find a partner with whom to share a spirited game of Parcheesi and a bowl of chocolate ice cream.

  I was already excited because of the live sex shows going on all around me, so I didn’t object when he took my cock in his mouth in a way that reminded me of a cow lowering its head to graze.

  We had yet to say a word (his mom raised him right—you don’t talk with your mouth full) as Dean got busy on my stiff and twitching member, sliding up and down, swirling his tongue around the shaft, moving away to lave and bite gently at my balls. I threaded my fingers through his thick, dark hair.

  With his ministrations and all that was going on around me, I didn’t have the heart to stop him to make proper introductions. No, I simply quietly sipped my beer and blissed out on what a perfect stranger was happy to do, unrequested, for me in a bar on a Thursday night.

  You have to admit, sometimes being gay does have its perks. Especially since I came into this bar with the objective of leaving it one load lighter.

  Earlier tonight, I was fixed up with a hair colorist named Troy from Lincoln Park who was all over me, yet couldn’t seem to remember my name, even though I’d told it to him at least three times. We’d had dinner and he’d brought a coupon, which he applied to his meal, leaving me to pay the full price for mine. The last straw was when he admitted, as so many of the guys I seem to run into admit eventually, that he was already in a relationship, not with one, but two guys, but they were in a bad place, and he “didn’t think” they’d be able to work things out.

  At least Dean down there, bobbing away, had an excuse for not knowing my name was John. I tried not to wonder if I was the first guy he’d provided his top-notch service to tonight, or if I was the tenth (hey, it happens every night in this very back room—don’t look so shocked). And if I was the tenth, or the hundredth, that he wasn’t smearing my dick with the clap or worse.

  Funny how his mouth and tongue and his desperate groaning as he chowed down on me like a prisoner getting his last meal made me forget my worries about propriety and infection and let out my own moan (muffled—I didn’t want to attract attention; unlike some of the guys in this backroom, I was not an exhibitionist, despite current evidence to the contrary) as I unloaded. I had whispered, just before things reached, um, a head, “I’m gonna come.” It was the polite thing to do, allowing him to pull away if he didn’t want to swallow, but all it caused him to do was double down on his efforts.

  After I shot and Dean had played out a Maxwell House coffee commercial, making sure that I was indeed “good to the last drop,” he rose up on his feet to look me in the eye. He wiped a drop of my come (at least I think it was mine) from his mustache and grinned.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “I should be the one thanking you,” I whispered. “That was incredible.”

  “I’m good at my work.”

  “You certainly are.” />
  Not only was he cute in a beefy, burly sort of way (kind of like me), he seemed to have a sense of humor as well. So, while my standard modus operandi in a situation like this one would have been to make a hurried exit not only from the backroom, but from the bar itself, I changed my mind that night.

  “Buy you a beer?” I asked him.

  The smile that lit up his face was way out of proportion to my offer. You’d think I’d said “Buy you a Maserati?” instead of a lousy beer.

  We headed out of the backroom, not holding hands, but more of a couple than when we’d gone in separately and alone earlier. Guys seldom emerge from the backroom in pairs.

  At the bar, Dean said, “No one’s ever done this before.”

  I handed him his beer and asked, “Come in your mouth?”

  He laughed and clinked his beer bottle against mine. “No. I mean, offered to buy me a drink after I blew them.”

  “Well, you earned it.”

  “Right? So why don’t any of these fools understand that it might be nice to offer me something to drink, other than their man juice, after getting their nut courtesy of yours truly?”

  “You got me.” I extended my hand. “John.”

  He shook it. “Dean.”

  Now, you’d think, after a start like that, we’d be on our way to white picket fences and a house in Naperville, with a pair of miniature schnauzers we’d call Abbott and Costello.

  Not that night, but Dean quickly wore out his welcome.

  Now, I found myself erasing his bitter, but oddly amusing message from my answering machine. I didn’t need to hear it another time to get his point.

  I lay back on my bed and replayed my brief relationship with Dean.

  We’d exchanged numbers that night, even though I had offered to bring Dean home to my place. I was still a little horny and, even if I wasn’t, I figured I could return his favor and not sleep alone for a change.

  That’s when the number exchange came in, because Dean told me, “I’m not quite ready to leave yet.”

  “Oh?” I asked.

  He swallowed his beer a little too fast and choked for a moment.

  “I didn’t think you were capable of choking. Or gagging,” I said.

  “Even superheroes have their off moments.”

  I nodded. “Well, I need to head home.” I couldn’t admit it to him, because it would make me seem like a prude (but only in this environment), but I was a little put off by the fact that he’d rather stay than go home with me.

  That should have been red flag number one.

  I not so kiddingly said, “Try not to stay out too late, boy. You need your rest.”

  He grinned at me, and I noticed how his gaze wandered back to the entrance of the backroom. “Yes, Dad.”

  I leaned in to give him a peck on the lips. “I’ll call you, okay?”

  I had no choice, then, but to walk away. I hoped Dean was staying because he’d arranged to meet a friend or was in line to play the winner at the pool table, or even because his favorite scene was coming up from the porno playing on the big screen.

  I hurried up the stairs to the main bar and dance floor, where things were a little more innocent.

  I stopped at the door. The bouncer looked at me. “Forget something?”

  “Yeah, my penicillin shot.”

  He chuckled.

  I hated myself for doing it, and thought I was already being jealous and over-possessive of a guy I honestly barely knew, but I headed halfway down the stairs to look over the bar down there.

  Dean was nowhere in sight.

  Now, he could have been in the men’s room. It was possible, although unlikely, because he almost certainly would have passed me since the restroom was upstairs and I’d barely been out of his sight for more than a couple of minutes.

  I turned around, mentally kicking myself, and trying to banish from my mind the image of him again in the backroom, milking a load with his mouth on some other guy.

  I had to fight an internal battle to not go in the backroom once more and check up on him. If he was back there on his knees, I didn’t really want to see. It was way too soon to be so possessive and so suspicious.

  I did call him the next day, and we went out to dinner the following Friday. It wasn’t a bad date. We went to a near north side Italian place that was too expensive but really good and got to know each other. Dean worked for a supermarket chain that had locations all over Chicagoland, Jewel (or the Jewel as we locals called it) and was a butcher. He did seem to know his meat. I liked that he was a simple guy and hardworking. No pretense.

  I didn’t like that he was a heavy smoker.

  Red flag number two.

  And that he refused to sit in the nonsmoking section of the restaurant to make me happy.

  When we went home, he was a total bottom, and I fucked him, safely of course, although he told me he’d just been tested and was “clean,” by which he meant that I could toss that rubber aside.

  Uh-uh. I opted to keep it on. “Just in case,” I told him tenderly, as I thrust hard into him.

  Red flag number three—doesn’t play safe.

  And that remark about being clean? Um, without getting too gross here (and I know he meant being free of disease by clean), but he wasn’t really all that clean, judging from the skid marks he left on my sheets.

  Red flag number four—if you’re a bottom and you like to get fucked, you need to make sure that hole is squeaky clean.

  After he left in the morning, and I was washing my sheets in the laundry in the basement of my building, I excused him by telling myself that maybe he tried to clean himself out properly, but sometimes you missed a spot. Accidents happen.

  Shit happens.

  The next date was for breakfast at Ann Sather the following Sunday. I was coming down with a cold, so I asked if he wouldn’t mind if we’d sit in the nonsmoking section.

  He refused.

  Really? I was coughing and sniffling. What was more important? Me or the cancer sticks? Wait, don’t answer that. I knew if I asked out loud, the answer was clear, and I didn’t want to face that I’d lose out to a fucking cigarette.

  We had an okay breakfast, but after paying my half of the bill (plus a little extra because my eggs Benedict cost more than his French toast), I told him I needed to get over to my mom and dad’s for early Sunday corned beef and cabbage.

  It was all a lie. I had no such tradition with my parents even if they were hardcore South Side Black Irish.

  But I needed to get away from Dean and the images I couldn’t remove from my head, not the least of which was a Marlboro Light extinguished into a slice of half-eaten French toast. Dean may have lost his gag reflex, but I hadn’t, and just conjuring up that image made my skin crawl and the bile rise.

  In the end, I did what I despised other gay men for doing to me in the past—and that I cursed them for—I simply stopped calling him and, worse, didn’t return his calls, which got more and more frequent the less inclined I was to answer them.

  His latest answering machine message, I hoped, was the last I’d hear from Dean.

  Didn’t he get that no response was a response?

  I thought about throwing on some clothes and going out tonight. Vince had called me at the fire station that morning, hoping to make plans. I’d told him we’d need to play it by ear because I might be too tired.

  And the fact was—I was too tired.

  Too tired of everything.

  I stripped off, got under the covers, and pointed my remote at the TV.

  Just before I pushed the power button, an image came into my head. That guy from Sidetrack last winter—the guy with the big mustache and the terminal case of shyness.

  I don’t know why he came to me in that moment. I mean, yes, he was cute. And his fear and vulnerability brought out something protective in me. But I’d seen countless men since last winter, both from a distance and, from time to time, more up close and personal.

  Why was this one man stuck
in my head? Was it simply because he was unexplored and, thus, free from defect?

  I threw the remote control on my nightstand, deciding I was too tired for even TV. Besides, I thought it might be kind of nice drifting off to sleep with an image of him in my brain.

  I turned over and closed my eyes, feeling a phantom arm reach around me to draw me close. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.

  I’m a simple man with simple needs.

  Chapter Eight

  RANDY

  It was time to emerge from my hole again.

  Hole, I suppose, is too crude and too mean to describe my home with my wife and son. I love them both with all my heart and our time together is sweet, surprisingly without much conflict or strife.

  If only…

  After the debacle of trying to go out last winter and ending up in that café, where I felt like someone who simply didn’t belong in the gay world—whatever that was—I hid.

  For months. And, for a while, our family evenings at home began to seem like normal like my attempted suicide in the hotel had never happened. I could forget. I could tell myself, maybe I can just go on this way… It’ll be easy. Just play the part.

  And then I would see the line of thinking as the betrayal it was—to who I am deep down. To my soul. To my well-being. To my sanity.

  I’d read somewhere something along the lines of: once you wear a mask too long, you can’t remove it without tearing away some of your skin.

  It was an odd place I was in. I knew I was gay and thought I was coming to terms with that fact. Yet, acting on my attractions seemed too hard, too much to handle (and neither of those things in a good way).

  And I thought even if I did act on my feelings or make a move toward that end, I’d just find I didn’t belong in the gay world either.

  That was my big fear—that I didn’t belong anywhere.

  This is where my therapist, Marshall, came into the picture. After I’d confessed my paralysis toward exploring my sexuality a little more fully (and that could be defined simply as finally having a gay friend or two—someone who might understand me, accept me for just who I was, rather than who I thought I was supposed to be) to Violet, she suggested I find someone to talk to.