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An Unspectacular Life, Part 2
02/26/09

I was an outcast at high school but when I returned on the Monday after my
weekend away something had changed. My pathetic social standing had become
less of an emotional burden. I stopped caring that in my final year of high
school I had only one friend. I had a lot of drum corps friends. High school
was a riddle that I was never able to crack but that was now unimportant. I
was worldly and above my peers. After all, my friends were older and I got
into big city clubs. I'm sure that I was the only person in my high school
that knew who Grace Jones was.

My one high school friend was Kim. She was twenty-five. Kim left high school
a few credits short to have a baby. She was married to the baby's father and
told me that sometimes they would get a baby-sitter just so they could take a
walk together. I thought that that was one of the most romantic things that I
had ever heard. We were in every class together. I came out to her early on.
Another unspectacular reveal. I was going away almost every weekend and in
class on Monday mornings I would tell Kim all about my club adventures,
edited for gay content. One afternoon she told me that she wanted to ask me
something but didn't know how. She had spoken to her husband and he said to
just ask because it wasn't a big deal and she thought about it and it wasn't
a big deal so was I gay? I said yes. First outside reveal. My, what felt like
jet setting, weekend stories got better. Now Kim could know about the drag
queens.

John and I spent New Years Eve, 1982 out of town and in a hotel suite. This
way we could go to the club then come back to the hotel and party with our
new boyfriends. My first love was Ben. He was in his last year of high school
too but was a year older than I. He was a rich kid. He threatened his parents
with dropping out if they didn't rent him an apartment. He had a room mate
who looked exactly like Rob Lowe. His name was Rich and even though he was
super cute he was a little slow on the uptake. He never really listened when
you spoke to him which made it impossible to have a conversation with him. He
liked to play the acoustic guitar and while he played he'd hang his head over
his guitar and his long bang would sway with the rhythm. Ben told me that he
and Rich would sometimes have showers together but it wasn't sexual. I
thought that was strange but anything was possible in this brave new world.

The weekend after New Years was spent in complete emotional bliss with Ben at
his apartment. John had come as well. It was another weekend of listening to
the new extended club mix eps we bought that week, drinking teenager liquor
like root beer schnapps, going to the club and sex. When I got back home on
Sunday, I walked past my parents in the living room going into the kitchen.
My mother asked how my weekend was. I said it was alright, opened a cupboard
for a glass and began to uncontrollably cry. Wail, really. I was having a
spontaneous emotional free fall. I always thought that I would come out to my
mother first but when the time came, I couldn't. She thought, hoped that I
was so distressed because I got a girl pregnant. Frustrated, she left the
kitchen and sent my father in. I didn't tell him as much as I answered his
questions. After a few very cryptic queries like, "So is the reason that
you're upset the same reason you don't have a girlfriend?" he asked me if we
were talking about the same thing and I said that we were. We never said the
word gay. It was inferred but not uttered. He went upstairs and told my
mother. Telling her an hour earlier that I didn't get a girl pregnant was the
last thing that I would say to her for months. I lived with my family for two
weeks after that night. I was a ghost to my mother. She could look right
through me to the wall. Something in her brain had rewired itself to not
recognize me. After the first week, my father asked me if I was still gay. I
told him that I was and he thought it would be best if I moved out. I was
finishing high school a term early in another week. I could stay until I
graduated. A week later, I took my clothes and pillows and walked over to
John's apartment while my family was out at my sister's hockey game. I never
cried. I became impervious. I was excited.

John was now living in a different apartment and with his mother. His sister,
Susan, and her girlfriend, Laurie, had moved to a bigger apartment and wanted
to live alone. They were having some problems and thought that if they could
limit outside influences, they could make right everything that was wrong.
John's new apartment was a small, short basement bachelor. There was a
pullout bed and a couch. John's mother slept on the pull out and he slept on
the couch. I got the pillows from the pullout to make a mattress on the
floor. John worked nine to five at a t-shirt transfer shop. He would play
Barbra Striesand records while he got ready. John was obsessed with Barbra
Striesand and it would eventually be Barbra that came between John and I.