“Wow,” he said, looking at my eyes or my nose. I wasn’t sure. He smiled. “Can I buy you a drink?”
“Hey, you’re the poor college kid. Let me do it.” I grabbed his right hand, in which he was holding his drink, and lifted it to the light. “Looks like a screwdriver to me?”
“Yes,” he said. “Thank you.”
I had sidled up to him as he stood with his back against the wall that faced the heavily traveled hallway from and to the dimly lit meat rack, where a waist-high wooden shelf bordered one wall upon which you could place your drink, or sit and watch the crowd saunter past. A chain-link fence covered the opposite wall, floor to ceiling. Beyond the meat rack was another room with two pool tables and three pinball machines. Beyond that room was a large outdoor deck with its own bar. David had strategically placed himself where I often did, a place where you could see much of the comings and goings through all sections of the bar. From his vantage point, you could also see the new arrivals coming through the front door, and also the traffic headed down the stairs to the video bar.
I came back with our drinks, and David and I moved into the intimacy of the meat rack room. We talked. We felt each other. We kissed. More drinks. I suggested we go out onto the deck, for no other reason than I really wanted to get a close look at his ass, at the movement of cheeks through the thin stretch of his faded and oh, so tight Levi’s. And urging him to lead the way, I saw enough to know I was definitely interested, definitely determined to pursue the fuck.
*
“What a fucking mess,” I say, snapping out of my reverie, and it is usually what I always say as we pass the corner house that provides what I am sure the owner of the property would call a xeriscaped yard. You call this xeriscaping, I would like to say to the young married couple who we know live here. This is lazyscape. This looks like shit. No, this looks like somebody’s idea of a fucking joke! That’s what I’d like to say to the young couple. As we pass the house, their white-haired little girl, who must be at least five and who is still sucking on a pacifier, waves frantically at us from the porch of the house and screams, “Hi! Hi!”
“Hi,” we both say as we wave back at what we’ve both observed is a very ugly little girl.
We walk in silence for two blocks. Sometimes we cover the entire two miles in silence. Have we said everything to one another during the past twenty-eight years that really needs to be said between two people who might as well be attached at the hip? Because that is as close as we have become to one another, day in, day out, year after year. And no, it is not the banter about work or someone’s yard, or the brutal truths we share about an ugly child that I am thinking about. No, it is the verbalization of those things that have kept us together for so long, that have made us comfortable with the silences between us. Have we really said all there is to say to one another? Have we really?
“Oh, look,” David says, pointing to a yard about a block away. “The black dog is back.” I look and, sure enough, the black puppy of indeterminate lineage, who, months ago, excitedly greeted us as we passed his fenced-in front yard, is back. We saw him only that once, when he must have been only three or four months old. Now, there he is looking full-grown. “Do you think he will remember us?”
“Of course. We are…memorable,” I say, smiling, feeling good about seeing the black dog again. We have so often seen new puppies in the neighborhood one day and, after a week or two, the new puppy disappears. Gone. Well, we didn’t realize he was going to shit on the rug or keep us up all night. And he ate the fucking couch! Not just a cushion or a pillow. The whole fucking couch! We can’t put up with that. We simply can’t! And then, of course, there are so many more in our wonderful neighborhood who cherish their animals with a devotion akin to adoration, good parents taking the good with the bad, good parents loving even the ugliest of children.
We stop, pet, and talk to the black dog, who is as excited today to see us as he was months ago. And yes, we can believe that he remembers us as we share the joy of this moment.
We begin the ascent back toward our home.
Our northwest Denver neighborhood is called West Highlands because it sits on a substantial rise that overlooks downtown Denver, barely three miles to the southeast. Our standard route takes us down the rise, and then back up. Again we walk in silence, and my thoughts return to…
*
David’s ass was hairier than I preferred. But damn it! How was I supposed to know that it wouldn’t matter? How in the hell could I have had any inkling that that twenty-two-year-old kid who had still not lost all of his baby fat, and who had trouble taking me seriously, and who laughed at my sternness, and who loved my dogs as totally as I, and who could perform Mozart from memory on the piano, and play every single woodwind instrument flawlessly, and who loved opera, and who had grown up on a farm, and laughed sweetly as he stared into my eyes—placing my head between his hands as he kissed me softly—and said, “No, honey, no you don’t,” when I told him I would love to move to a farm and raise cows and pigs that would never be slaughtered or sold, and horses that would be named after the dogs I had loved and buried, and…Goddamnit, how was I to know that this blond, green-eyed kid who grew up on farms in eastern Washington and detested the thought of ever returning, would be the one? The forever one? And if I had known, what would I have done? What?
*
I asked David to move in with me in November of 1982.
It was only a week or two after David had moved in with me that he dialed his parents’ number and told them he would not be coming home, that he had moved in with a…friend. I was sitting in the living room, and David was in the kitchen. I was flipping through a magazine, attempting not to appear to be listening to his conversation. It was obvious his parents weren’t letting him off the parental hook easily. He was only twenty-two, for Christ’s sake! What did he know about the world? And who the hell was this older man he was moving in with? Soon, David’s entire body erupted in a sob that surely—yesiree, without a doubt—was the result of a laser-directed belly punch from the good folks at home. “Don’t call me that,” he sobbed. “I am not a queer. I am not…” I moved to him, took the phone, and hung it up.
From behind him, I locked my arms around his body and held him tightly, so tightly against his sobs, and I said the words, over and over again, “I love you. I love you, baby. I love you. I love you.” Yes, I really said it, and lord—what was this world coming to?—I meant it. Yes, I, such an adorably stern picture of few words and careless passions, I had said it. That was the first time I told David that I loved him.
And as I loosened my lock on his body, he turned to face me, and through those lovely greens washed by such intense grief, he smiled slightly and said it also: “I love you, too.”
As some of our friends and acquaintances, young men, beautiful men, commenced their dying then in that same year, 1982, David and I dug in hard to what I had previously thought were absurdly stupid core principles that provide the basis for solid relationships: monogamy, eating at least one meal a day together, sharing what he called the chores. It was easier for David because that, the relationship, is what I believe he truly wanted in his life. I, oh, I, on the other hand, had been a performer in the Big Party for so long, I had loved so many men for at least as long as it took to complete the fuck, and had accepted, oh, even reveled in what was then the transitory nature of love that the job for me, yes—now I understand it as I write it—yes, the job for me was never to forget that first nonsexual embrace when the pain in David’s soul passed into mine, when his sobs were captured by my embrace, and when the truth of the words we spoke to one another, “I love you,” had somehow, for the first time, made sense.
My job was also to remember that young men were dying, and that, most likely, David and I had saved each other’s lives then, in 1982, then, amongst the detritus the bogeyman had made of the Big Party, then, in the face of the bogeyman’s insidious snicker, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet, baby.”
; *
“Bob and Norma will be here the last week of June,” David says as we stand at the intersection of 32nd and Lowell, the center of our West Highlands business district, waiting for the light to change.
Bob and Norma are his parents who, twenty years ago, arrived at our old house towing their fifth wheel behind their Ford 250. I guess almost eight years of silence between them and their son had been enough. They had come to reconcile. They had come to evaluate the older man who had captured their son’s heart. Yes, and I guess that almost eight years of silence between them and their firstborn son had convinced even them that if this was a phase, it sure as hell wasn’t ending anytime soon.
They’ve visited once, sometimes twice, every year since then.
“You taking time off?” I ask.
“Yes. So are you. Mom wants you to take her up to Blackhawk. She’s been saving her quarters for the slots.”
“We can do that,” I say. “Are they going on to Missouri this time?”
“No, not this time. Mom’s still weak from the chemo.”
We cross the street in silence. His parents usually visit with us, and then head down to Missouri to visit family. The chemotherapy for his mother’s breast cancer ended just weeks ago.
The aroma of the best pizza on the face of the Earth wafts from the little restaurant on the corner. The liquor store across the street is crowded this time of the day with the young professionals from the neighborhood who believe profoundly that each dinner must sport a new and exciting wine. The smell of scented candles oozes from the open doors of the three knickknack stores, which, apparently, have captured their fair share of the market in our little neighborhood business district. The little bookstore remains so pitifully small.
“Are we doing Pride this year?” David asks.
“Oh, I don’t know. What’s the point?”
“The point,” he punches my arm, “is the boys, almost naked boys…everywhere.”
“I know. I know. But the pride part…I suppose if I were to really reflect on that, the pride thing, I’d just think about us. All these years. All these ups and downs we’ve had together. Hell, I’m proud of us.”
David is silent for a moment. He grabs my hand. “Yes,” he says. “Me, too.”
“What’s for dinner?” I ask, both of us smelling the baking pizza.
“Don’t know. Your choice.”
“No, I chose last night. It’s your turn to choose.”
“No. Wrong. Your turn.”
“All right. Let’s wait a while, though,” I say. “Give me time to think this through.”
And this verbalized ritual of the dinner plans takes us to our street, where we turn the corner onto the last block of our walk. I remembered then that…
*
The first time I told David about the Big Party, his response was that he had been born too late. “I was just getting started,” he said as we lay naked together shortly after he had moved in with me. “I was just beginning to understand the…the game, the excitement of the search. Jesus, I’d been to the baths only twice, before you…captured me.”
“What a lovely way to put it. Captured?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I think your mother would know what you mean.”
“No, no,” he said, turning his face to mine. “I think I wanted to be captured. I think I wanted to be…encircled, held, loved, bound together by something more than the sex.”
He was so serious then, and his eyes, his green eyes were so large with the truth of what he was telling me that I wrapped my arms around him and pulled him closer to my body. I kissed his eyes as I told him what, for me, was beginning to be easier and easier to say, “I do so love you, baby.”
*
As I open the gate to our front yard, I notice two things almost simultaneously: the spirits at the upstairs window await our return with their impish grins. They have probably turned on a light or two, or moved my reading glasses again from where I always put them. And the mama finch is alerted to our return, her little gray head perked well above the rim of her nest. As we near the porch, she flutters desperately away to the limb of the maple where, as I unlock the door, she watches our passage beneath her unborn children.
I pass through the living and dining rooms, and on through the kitchen to the back of the house where we keep the food for Melissa and Calvin, our Alaskan Malamutes. They stare at me from the porch through the back door window. They both sit, side by side, their eyes and ears perked, pleading for their dinner. I fill their bowls: half dry, half meat, and a goodie or two on top. Melissa, nine years old, also gets a hormone pill, a thyroid pill, and a baby aspirin. Calvin, who is five years old, gets just his food. I open the back door and serve them, chattering as I always do about doggies in China going hungry for days, and fortunate doggies, say, for example, Melissa and Calvin, who haven’t missed a meal since they were born and…And they ignore me as they quickly devour the best dog food money can buy. Tomorrow, David and I will run / walk our two miles in the park with Melissa and Calvin leading the way.
David has taken his magazine into the living room. He sits on the love seat and flips to the page with the creased corner. I don’t even think he notices me pass as I cross the living room to the stairs. When his stomach begins to growl, he will remember that we have yet to eat dinner.
I climb to my second-story study, which faces the front yard, and from which our spirits watch our comings and goings from our old house. I believe they are elsewhere right now. I sit down in my big, black leather chair.
I have been reading lately about Tchaikovsky. Last night I read that his death from cholera on November 6, 1893, was most likely caused by his decision to intentionally drink a glass of cholera-infested water, seeking the comfort of death rather than living with the painful knowledge that his beloved nephew, Vladimir, had forsaken their relationship by associating with female prostitutes.
Love hurts, or so the song says.
Yes, and love laughs and love cries and love is silent and love is cacophonous and love is ugly and love is pretty and love is all there is and love is lacking and love is fulfilling and love is a tear and love is a smile and love is a nod and love is a mystery and love is known and love is unknown and love is brilliant and love is stupid and love is bright and love is dull and love is tough and love is easy and love is…a many-splendored thing. And, yes, enduring love is a prideful thing.
*
Love? No, I still don’t know exactly what the hell that word means. I just know that the years David and I have had together have been…lovely.
And I guess that’s really all that needs to be said, except…yes, except that the spirits have returned. They whisper in my ear, their breath a cool wisp against my cheek. “Continue,” they say in a voice as old as the walls of this house, but as vibrant as the new spring. “Continue,” they say as softly as the creak they make as they pass through the floor to surround David sitting on the love seat below. “Continue this,” they say softly, sweetly, as they leave me to kiss David’s eyes with their smiles.
Or so I would like to believe.
Afterword and Acknowledgments
I don’t know about you, but I have a little tear in my eye about now. It’s gotten dusty in here, hasn’t it? Unless we’re more sentimental than we’d like to admit. We hope you’ve enjoyed our looks at love and romance and will seek out more of these fine writers.
My thanks go out yet again to Radclyffe the Magnificent, the inimitable Sandy Lowe, Cindy Cresap, Stacia Seaman, and the rest of the Bold Strokes Books staff for putting some very fine stories into print. And, of course, I have to thank the authors of those stories, whose creativity once again astounds me. On a personal note, I’d like to thank, as usual, Ryk Bowers and our dogs, the noble Duncan and the Lady Lexie as they slept at my feet.
And, of course, my late partner, Jamz, who showed me what romance was all about in the first place. Thanks, bigbear. Miss you.
Contributor
s
’Nathan Burgoine (nathanburgoine.com) lives in Ottawa with his husband Daniel and their husky Coach. He appears in dozens of anthologies, has a novella in On the Run (Wilde City Press), and his debut novel Light (Bold Strokes Books) was a Lambda Literary Award finalist.
Jerry Rabushka, from St. Louis, MO, is a novelist, playwright, and musician. His novel The Prophecy is published by Bold Strokes Books. He has many plays published with Brooklyn and Heuer Publishers, which are produced nationwide and internationally. He’s also produced several albums of original music.
Dale Cameron Lowry (www.dalecameronlowry.com) lives in the Upper Midwest with a human and three cats. Dale enjoys writing and publishing stories, wasting time on Tumblr, getting annoyed at Duolingo, and reading folktales.
Michael Bracken is the author of several books and more than 1,100 short stories published in Best Gay Romance 2010 and 2013, Best Gay Erotica 2013, Hot Blood: Strange Bedfellows, The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 4, and many other anthologies and periodicals. He lives and writes in Texas.
Erzabet Bishop is the author of Sigil Fire and Club Beam. She is a contributing author to The Big Book of Submission, Slave Girls, Bondage Bites, and many other anthologies. She lives in Texas with her husband, furry children and often plays at local bookstores. Follow her on Twitter @erzabetbishop.
Thom Collins is married and lives in North Durham, North East England. His novel, Closer by Morning, a racy, romantic thriller, is due for publication in 2016. He loves creating strong, sexy characters in a world of glamour, excitement, and danger. He’s currently working on the first novel in a trilogy of thrillers. Contact him at [email protected] or Twitter: RealThomCollins.
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