You, Me, And God

“You, Me, And God”

         I remember that the February night was cloudless, and that my jacket was woefully inadequate against the chill.  I suppose too that I remember feeling vaguely foolish, but that could just be an insertion, somewhere in ten stupid years of self-reflection.  I do know that even if there was a moment of amazing insight into my predicament, it was far overshadowed by what I thought (foolishly) was a deep and abiding love, instead of a heady rush of post-adolescent passion and hormones.
         But perhaps I’m being too hard on my younger self.  I’m sure it seemed at the time like it was the most important thing in the world, and I doubt any amount of face-slapping or shouting by myself at almost-thirty would have convinced myself at almost-twenty of much of anything, except maybe my ridiculous penchant for survival.
         Anyway, so there I was, huddled against a cold night, my hands thrust deep into the pockets of my too-thin jacket in a general attempt to keep my fingers from going numb.  Part of me was probably aware that there was something off there—I was a good fifty miles away from my nice warm bed on a school night, and I had—or at least should have had—a tingle in the back of my neck that I was sort of persona non grata at this odd assortment of friends and lovers, who, for whatever reason, had piled into two cars in a quest (why?) for, of all things, scrapple.  That wasn’t the reason for my presence—no, not that.  I was dumbstruck by love, or at least my facile understanding of it.
         I remember Adam, even though I haven’t seen him in more than eight years.  The odd thing is that I can remember his dimensions:  the way his half-head on me seemed towering when he was angry, and the way the same frame seemed to shrink down to nothingness when he was upset.  I remember the butterflies in my stomach knocking about whenever he was near, and the way the universe seemed to drop away, leaving nothing but our lips, and the distant, gentle thumping of our hearts the first time we kissed.  I can still see his eyes, the same smooth, flawless blue of the purest glacier.  Sometimes, in stillness, I can just make out the sound of his voice.  But I can never see his face anymore.  I’ve never been able to figure out if that’s by choice, or the natural by-product of space, time, and different companionship.
         I insinuated myself along that night because of Adam.  I daresay, if it’s not vanity, that the trip presented itself as an excuse to get away from me.  And of course, to refuse my company would mean tacit acknowledgement to me, and to himself, that things had changed between us.  Worse still, it would be tacit acknowledgement to our social circle that things had changed between us.
         But perhaps I’m guilty of over-thinking again.  Perhaps it was nothing more than a bad night for him.  Perhaps I’m trying to insert myself with as much impact into his life as he did into mine.  Regardless, it doesn’t sting any less upon reflection as it did at the time.
         I had hung back as everyone entered the all-night diner we’d traveled to in search of the perfect scrapple.  Suddenly, it was just the two of us on the chilly, neon-illuminated sidewalk.
         “Talk to me?” I asked, bordered on begged.  I don’t know if my voice actually quavered as much as I remember.
         What he said to me next has been lost to time.  I can only hope whatever gray matter that was written over has been put to more positive use.  The sting still lingers though, and on those rare occasions where I indulge myself in self-examination, I still feel the response piecing like a knife.  “Shut up.”  “Go away.”  “Fuck off.”  Any or all of them might be correct, but ten years older, and hopefully at least a bit wiser, the effect is the same.
         I spent the next (two?  Three?) hours sitting in front of a quickly-cooling mushroom and cheese omelet, drinking cup after rancid cup of coffee, smoking the occasional cigarette, and trying to make myself look as invisible as humanly possible.  I’m not sure I even ever looked at anyone else.  Needless to say, I wasn’t saying much.  No, I sat, locked in my headspace, playing and replaying the night’s events.
         If he said this then it must mean that, but if he was doing the other thing at the same time, didn’t that mean he actually thought something else?
How would the night’s events have vectored if I’d chosen to act in a different way, used different words, worn different shoes…
         I’d like to say that ten years on, I’m less inclined to analyze every situation down to the molecular level, but if anything, I’ve become more inclined to do so.
         I don’t remember how the night ended up, except a general sense that once we were alone together (where we alone together?), he was far kinder to me.  Or maybe the occasional twinge of nostalgia has rewritten our roles to ones that are more hazy, his more gallant, mine less needy.  In any case, my friend Caitlyn most likely reminded me the next day that it shouldn’t matter how sweet and kind he was in private, I deserved someone willing to be those things all the time.  Which was easy for her to say.  She had potential suitors, both male and female, constantly underfoot, even when she wasn’t looking.
         And once I was alone again, in my solitary room, on the far outskirts of campus, with nothing but my obsessive thoughts to keep me company.

         So, what was this cardinal sin Adam and I had committed, you ask?  Nothing more or less complicated than kissing.  I considered myself then, and I still consider myself now, to be fortunate enough that, as kisses go, this had been one hell of an effort.
         We two seemed to have an affinity for cold, cloudless nights.  A week earlier, we’d sat on a cold brick stoop, only a bit drunk, talking.  I have no evidence to support this, but I imagine the heat was leaching from his butt in much the same way it was leaching from mine.  I think the moon that night was full, but that might be another insertion, designed to make the story more romantic.
         Actually, no, this had started, started in earnest, months before, when he heard, quite by chance, my declaration of attraction during the night (when else?) of a blackout (it would be a cliché, except that it’s true), where a car had struck a nearby transformer, lighting the sky with arcs of purple in a way that seemed more post-apocalyptic than romantic.  Since then, there was an unspoken agreement between the two of us to treat this as deep background, something that might color our interactions, but shouldn’t inform them.
         Whether or not I was the first man to show him this kind of interest, I cannot say, at least not with anything approaching accuracy.  Vanity again permits me to assume that I was the first, and likely the last to whom the affection reciprocated.
         But again, I’m getting ahead of myself.
         Fate has a strange way of putting someone into situations that he or she might least expect.  We made hugely unlikely friends.  I was—I am—a bit of a loudmouth, neurotic to a fault, never willing to stand up for myself, and could probably generously describe myself as a rube who discovered an appreciation for culture through education.  He is—he was—a quiet brooder, cultivating something I think he believed to be a dark, affected psychosis, but always seemed to me to have an air of a natural good boy affecting the gloss of a bad boy.  He was also ten times as worldly as I, despite our mutual habit (mine spoken, his not) for being turned inward.
         I never knew when, or indeed if, we truly became friends.  At the bare minimum, I’d see him every Tuesday night.  I suppose on reflection, that he might have been there to impress a girl.  Or maybe he was just lonely.  In any case, I somehow attached myself to him like a barnacle.  Was it friendship first that became a crush that became something more?  Or was it, as I suspect, in my more self-charitable moments, a case of two bodies moving into each other’s orbit, at the exact time when the other presence was most needed?
         In any case, the first thing I remember being attracted to was those icy blue eyes.  Then his face, with the lips that were really very thin, but still quite kissable.  And then his long, lanky body.  But then eventually it was just his self, the ghost that lingers in my memory still, even after the shadings and details have faded.
         I don’t know how, but we’d settled into a routine.  We’d talk, not too much, not enough to arouse any suspicion, but just enough for me to start to see the person behind the icy eyes, thin lips, and lanky body.  And the night would end with him giving me a ride home, and then we were alone, his veneer of stand-offishness would fade a bit more.
         It continued like this for months, until I was confident enough to spend a calm and beautiful evening, unseasonably warm, drunk enough to be unguarded, but not so drunk as to be improper.  We were sitting, I recall, on the roof, which probably seems odd to anyone else, but for us, it somehow fit.
         Adam had his arm around my shoulders, and maybe I should have read it as merely companionable.  I summoned up all my courage, both real and liquid, and said what I knew couldn’t be undone:
         “I think I’m falling in love with you, and I’m so sorry I just ruined everything, but I want you to know that I have really enjoyed being your friend.”
         He paused for what seemed like an eternal moment, gave me his wry half-smile that would later never fail to make me weak-kneed, and said the last thing I expected:  “You don’t have to be sorry.”
         He hugged me, again, somewhere between friendly and tender, and kissed my forehead.
         I walked on a cloud for over a month.
         Stalemate tended to be our normal pattern from then on.  Step forward, freeze.  Step forward, freeze.
         And then it was another clear night, with the butt-chilling stoop and perhaps a bit too much of the old liquid courage.  We sat outside for perhaps an hour, but maybe just fifteen minutes, or less, that vague intoxicated sense of time.  We were both confused, and frustrated, and even though I had bled most of my body’s natural heat into the masonry, I made another decision.
         “Let’s just walk.  Let’s just walk until we’re so cold, we can’t feel anything.”
         He agreed, and we ambled with a close approximation of grace up the street into the night and cold.  Gravel was crunching underfoot, something I remember with absolute clarity.  I remember the crunching, and the cold, and then my world spun quite literally on its axis.
         The musical crescendo with a romantic embrace from Turandot or La Boheme, or a choir of angels trumping down from heaven has been a cliché of the Hollywood Kiss for as long as there’s been a Hollywood, and probably longer.  I would love to report that I was (or at least became) jaded enough to roll my eyes at those kind of reports.  But I’m a hypocrite, because as my back was being pushed against a car body, and I felt his lips brush against mine, “Ode To Joy” might as well have been thundering from a nearby window.  I am fortunate enough to have had amazing kisses and heart-achingly romantic moments in the years since, and I’ve seen and done a lot of amazing things in the same time, but I can honestly say that I’ve never quite felt anything that could quite top that moment.  I’ve come close a few times, but a small sliver of me will remain, perpetually, a nineteen-year-old awkward kid, getting the perfect kiss on a freezing-cold night in February.
         And so that was that.  What was done cannot be undone.
         

         He’d been largely absent from my life in the week following, downright hostile the night of the distant scrapple, and somewhat moody and distant thereafter.  To be fair, moody and distant were something of his default settings.
         Word had gotten out among our friends what had happened between us that night.  I know I wasn’t exactly the model of discretion, but good gossip is the only thing more communicable in college than mono, and so everything was known by everyone approximately four hours after the actual events.  I was oblivious to it, because I was, after all, amazingly in love.
         Adam, I think—though I hate to assume his motivations, because I fear I’m completely overestimating my own importance in the grand scheme of his life—I think he was just embarrassed.  Whether that was because he’d been busted making out with another guy, or because he had been busted making out with this particular guy, I cannot say.  And of course, the way to play that down was to treat me as a total non-entity.
         At the time, I felt like popular opinion was running against me, because the few people who were either brave or compassionate enough to talk to me about it tried to downplay it.  Back then, I thought people were trying to either A) keep me away because they were out to ruin my own happiness, or B) trying to keep me, the man-spoiling hussy, away from their friend.
         Only later did I realize that they were trying to protect me.
         Was I just a moth and he a beautiful, scorching flame?  I’m still not entirely sure.
         Time and experience have shown me that that sparks and fireworks aren’t love.  These things are nice, don’t get me wrong.  As a matter of fact, they feel fucking great.  But I get now that love has more to do with sticking together through the adversity, shared sacrifice, and maintaining a brave face for the other half even when you’re terrified.  Could I have had that with Adam?  I doubt it.  But in my mind then, he was forever.
         Which is pathetic.  Or at least, very young.  But mostly, it was pathetic.
         My memories of what came next are foggy.  I remember with a shocking clarity a night where we started out at a frat party, and progressed to wandering around town on foot for hours, just walking and talking.  And kissing a few times.
         No, the next big event took over a month to happen.  I’d love to make it as eventful as that first kiss, but I don’t think it was.  At least, it doesn’t seem to be, not anymore.
         It started out ordinarily enough, with the two of us meeting separately (somehow, we never sought each other out—at least he never seemed to seek me out) at an off-campus party, which was, by my recollection, lame, especially given that our friends knew how to throw down like they’d invented the concept.  I think we drifted toward each other, as we always seemed to, and he offered me the standard, innocuous ride home.
         It was raining; I remember hearing a steady tattoo beating down on the roof, and the slow, steady THWP-TWHP-TWHP of the wipers.  I know now that this was another of those Hollywood moments, but I think I’m only aware of that now, as I was too busy concentrating on the moment, and missing the fine details.          
         I don’t know how long we were out there, but it must have been a fairly good length of time, because it had stopped raining by the time I spoke the eleven words that I can’t believe I was brave enough to say.  I can’t believe still more that they worked.
         “The only people who have to know are you, me, and God.”
         Memory is a funny thing.  I would think that the night would be burned into my brain in a Technicolor, high-definition spectacular.  There are certain things that stand out:  the bitter tang of the Irish whiskey I somehow managed to produce from my sock-drawer, how amazingly soft the smooth skin on his chest was, and the way his goatee scratched at my neck.  I remember the soft, flickering candles, the cool shapes they had melted into by morning.  I don’t know why, but I think we moved (more or less clothed) into the bathroom briefly, and scared the hell out of the guy down the hall, who chose that precise moment to answer nature’s call.
         And I remember feeling the need to pinch myself the next morning, when I woke up to a brilliant, breezy March morning, sunlight streaming into the window, and realized the two of us were bunched, barely, into my too-small twin bed.
         If kissing caused a stir among our friends, you can imagine how sex was treated.
         This time, I kept my trap shut.  At least, I mostly kept it shut.  Adam had even okayed the eventual release of the information, just told me to wait a few days before I spilled my guts to various and sundry.  But in my glee, I still managed to tell Caitlyn (her reaction was to stammer out “Holy shit!”) and another friend, Maria.  I swore both of them to secrecy, but the more people in on a secret, the harder it is to contain.  So I imagine it took about three days to reach the corners of the globe.
         To this day, I still don’t know how popular opinion ran, but apparently, there was a fairly sizable chunk of our friends who decided, for whatever reason, that I was making it up.  Caitlyn—to her credit, I now realize—kept herself out of the storm.  Maria, who had always taken her role as my surrogate big sister fairly seriously, was a bit more outspoken.  This is hearsay, but she reported that when a mutual friend, another gay man, reported that I must be living in Fantasyland, because there was clearly no reason for Adam to lie, she barely refrained from smacking him, and told him on no uncertain terms that I was not, in fact, making it up, because she’d seen me the day after and “you just can’t fake that kind of happiness.”
         For my part, I remained blissfully unaware, perhaps intentionally, perhaps not.  I was just in love, and any shabby treatment was just a bump along the road.  I suppose if I was being kinder to myself, I could say I was just blinded by love, but in truth, I was either letting myself be too blinded by love to care, or too stupid to realize I was being treated poorly.  In any case, I should have realized by the time I had a door slammed in my face, and stoically made a two mile walk home down poorly like back roads at 3AM, that something there was very, very wrong, but I think by that point, I was just in too deep to realize it.
         Myself at twenty-nine looks upon myself at nineteen and wants to scream “What are you thinking, idiot!”  But I think I realize that the man I am today was forged in the crucible of those few months.  Or perhaps I’m still, even after all these years, attaching too much cosmic significance to a blip in my personal timeline.  Whether life began or ended in those days, I can’t say accurately, but even still, I tend to view things as “before” or “after.”

         The wheels started coming off another idle Tuesday night, when Adam decided it would be a really great idea to pull the fire alarm in my building.  At his best, he was enigmatic, at his worst, completely inscrutable.  So I’m sure it made perfect sense to him.  It may even have made perfect sense to me.  In any case, I naturally followed like any lovesick, lost puppy would.
         No, that’s unfair.  I am not, and was not, some naïve innocent.  Willfully blind, perhaps, but I can’t say I was dewy-eyed and unaware of what was happening around me.
         I can no longer be completely sure of what happened next.  I can’t quite decide if my official version of events is the truth, or something a bit more relative that got mixed in along the way.
         I’m not sure I actually saw the misdeed, but I suspect that’s a bit of judicious editing.  I do remember—and why either of us thought this was a good idea, I can’t say—that in a completely conspicuous manner, we ambled down the road well in advance of the rest of the residents, who I imagine were grumpy or groggy at being roused from a night of sex, video games, study, or even good old-fashioned sleep.
         Regardless, while Adam hadn’t permitted me to kiss him yet, he told me on no uncertain terms that if the cops came up behind us, we should jump into the bushes and (his words) “make out like bunnies.”
         That seemed like a fine idea.
         Or it did until the police cruiser hit its lights behind us.
         We were separated, I’m sure so we couldn’t coordinate stories.  Despite my white bread upbringing, I had the presence of mind to repeat the story “I didn’t see him pull the alarm.”  I guess I reasoned that if I didn’t lie, at least not boldly, I could be kept at least partly innocent.  That wasn’t a phone call I was looking forward to having to place to my mother, regardless.
         The idiot in me resigned himself to being hauled away in irons.
         And then they let us go.
         Adam had copped to what happened, and exonerated me in the process.  When he told me later that he’d done this because they had told him I was breaking down, I took it as a sign of devotion on his part.  And I guess, in some idiotic way, the notion of him throwing himself upon his sword was a gesture of decency, since a lot of what came before and after was anything but.  But even I knew enough to believe less than half of what the cops say.  That’s what Law & Order reruns have taught me.
         In any case, because he was so clearly rattled, I suggested a nerve-calming trip to the ocean to watch the sun rise.  He rebuffed this cruelly telling me that the last thing he wanted was a romance-drenched experience with me.  That bit still stings, too.
         Of course, I hastily (and only mostly honestly) explained, that no, I wasn’t thinking of myself, but that I had remembered he always spoke to me about what a peaceful and spiritual experience watching the ocean was for him.  He slackened a bit, and while we never found the ocean, we did find a reasonable facsimile, and that seemed to be a bit of a tonic for the both of us.  We went back to his apartment and slept (apart), in reasonable peace.
         It was all downhill from there.
         
         As the semester waned, I made my summertime plans.  And then turned around and cancelled them when Adam promised me that if I stuck close-by during the summer, and he found suitable female companionship, he would make sure that he could sneak away for some time with me, as well.
         This is another of those moments where I just want to smack my younger self for being so goddamn stupid.
         I had known, of course, that he was on the make for female companionship to reassert his heterosexuality.  When he started showing undue attention to our mutual friend Ginny—not flaunting it, not exactly, not being deliberately hurtful—I remember pulling her aside, and begging pathetically in a soft voice “You can get any guy you want.  Please don’t take mine.”
         To her credit, and earning my everlasting gratitude, she listened.
         I think everyone around me, Adam included, knew that things were coming to a head, but I was, as ever, oblivious.

         My world ended on a warm Friday night in May.
         We were at a party, of course.
         To tell you the truth, I mostly don’t remember that night.  I’m not sure if that’s the result of alcohol, a self-defense mechanism, shame, or a combination of the three.  But I do know I’m grateful for whichever, because while most of my bad memories of Adam cut like a knife, this cuts like a machete.
         It began as an average night.  It always did.  I remember the two of us sequestering ourselves in an upstairs bedroom to talk about some of the previous night’s events, which are interesting enough to form the basis of their own story, but that one isn’t mine to tell.
         I remember an attempt to sneak out onto the roof, to hide ourselves in a bathroom, and finally, behind that closed bedroom door.  I think I remember kissing.  I know I remember being choked, and though my eye wasn’t obviously black the next day, I leave it to you to draw your own conclusions.
         I think—I hope—I was too inebriated to remember much of what happened next.  I know my friend Becca and her girlfriend Paris tended to me like lesbian, clucking mother hens while Maria stood guard by the stairs to keep away gawkers and well-intentioned folks.  I remember nothing specifically, just the general sense of being mothered.  Which was just what I needed.
         There are times when I’ve been hurt, and times when I’ve been crushed, but nothing, before or since, compared to that either.  I think, in some cosmic sense, this is a case of balance.  For an action, an equal and opposite reaction.  I had felt great joy, and now I must feel great pain.  The light and the dark.  The bitter and the sweet.  The yin and the yang.
         There was one specific of the evening I remember that I wish I didn’t.  I remember, confusedly, asking for Adam, and having the message “Tell him I said to fuck off!” relayed back to me.
         Some of the moments in this story slice, and others stab.  That one, though, that one, even now still feels just a little like my heart being torn out.
         
         So, what next?
         I’d love to be able to say that I healed well.  But I didn’t, at least not for a long time.  I don’t think it happened until I scraped bottom again, this time, a bottom of my own making.  None of that time is the proudest period of my life.
         But I woke up one morning, and it didn’t hurt so much.  And the next morning, it hurt just a little less.  And then less.  And then less.
         I feel somewhat shamed to say that, as if I have some greater right to pain and hurt than someone else.  But in my own meager defense, I would like to think that grief reduces us to our most primal selves, and it’s a slow, and very deliberate trek to get back up.
         I healed.  That’s good enough for me.
         Forgiveness, well, that’s something else.  I forgave Adam a long time ago.  Forgiving myself…well, I’ll get back to you on that one.
         I deliberately avoided trying to assign motives or feelings to Adam.  The truth is, I don’t really know, and I doubt I ever will.
         Almost two years later, having left the dark time reasonably firmly behind me, I remember sitting down with my friend Jeremy, who had been close (in a respectable, manly man way, of course) to Adam in the period just after.  We sat for a long time talking about crappy relationships, intellectual curiosities, and eventually, both roads lead to Adam.
         It turns out the reason no one believed me at first was because no one could believe he could treat me so badly.  And that meant I clearly must be making it up.  You can imagine public opinion swung the other way afterward.
         “Why?” Jeremy asked me.
         “Because I really did love the son of a bitch,” was my best, and really, my only answer.
         I told Jeremy something that I had never really said out loud.  “I’m still not sure why he did it.”
         Jeremy didn’t quite roll his eyes at me, but said simply “You know why.”
         No, no, I really don’t.  I suspect Jeremy was trying to tell me he’d done it out of pity, or because Adam was messed up on drugs, or because he was drunk.  I guess any of those could be true.  But I prefer not to think so.
         I should know.
         I was there.

         For a long time after, whenever I’d catch a glimpse of Adam—or even someone who looked like him—my heart would leap into my throat.  I’ve never known if it was from fear or excitement.  Even today, older, and arguably wiser, I’m sure I’d blanch, if only momentarily.  Eventually, though, I got most of that Pavlovian reaction under control.
         The last time I remember seeing him, Becca and I were sitting on a very familiar stoop, talking about an art show we’d just seen, and waiting for the LSD to kick in.  Guess who walked up?
         Becca just sat back, and watched us, and listened.
         He and I spent a long time talking about art, and freakish things that get called art, and whether or not I could appreciate art.  Then he gave me a hug, and excused himself, having his own art (right and proper, and the kind even I could appreciate, I’m sure) to return to.
         As endings go, that’s a pretty good one.
         Once he had gone, Becca, who’d held my hand through the worst of it, turned to me and said, the light-bulb visible turning on over her head (or maybe that was the LSD), as if for the first time and said “So that’s why you loved him.”
         Yes.
         Yes, it was.