Biography

Autobiography

Born: 18 January 1961

Birthplace: Canton, Ohio

Died: ?

Homes: From birth to 1969 - Canton OH; 1969-1971 - Mt. Vernon, OH; 1971-1979 - Garner NC

Graduated: 1979 - Garner Senior High School

College: B.A. in Playwriting from Hampshire College, Amhest MA

Currently serving an indterminate sentence as wage-slave to the State of North Carolina

Those, as they say, are the facts. The beginnings of biography. That great American sage and idiot-savant Ronald Wilson Reagan once observed, in what we can only assume was an ungaurded moment of self-revelation, that facts are stupid things. More prescient minds would amend that, perhaps. Facts —and dates— do not in themselves constitute a life. They are less even than sketches for a census. What lies between birth and early middle-age—or between Mt. Vernon and Amherst? When did clinical depression first set in? When was the moment that consciousness illuminated childish crush and infatuation as fixed and concrete sexuality? Whence that Bachelor's degree?

Blanks to fill. Experience to explicate. Stay tuned.

Johnny

I'm seven. He's —well, I'm not sure. Ten, perhaps? His sister is my sister's best friend. Their father is American, their mother from Japan. Johnny is the most beautiful boy I've ever known. This appreciation is not conscious, of course, although on some level I am aware that seeing, and thinking of him, elicits an emotional and physical frisson I cannot identify. He's taller than me, slender, dark-haired and almond-eyed. More Asian than Occidental. His face is angular, with striking cheekbones that give his lovely countenance an exotic frame.

Two incidents from our friendship stand out. The first involves the two of us and another boy—Johnny's friend, I assume, because I can recall nothing of him—"playing war." This is not something I'd ever done—my inner fantasy life involves animated cartoon characters like Bugs Bunny and Pepe Le Pew; guns and combat intrigue are completely foreign. Johnny's friend is The Nazi—which I, ignorant, hear as "Knotsie." He tells me his plan of attack, which I, thinking that in a make-believe game all parties have to know what actions to perform, immediately relate to The Enemy. Johnny is furious. Angry words are exchanged. I storm away home. Later that evening Johnny calls. He's apologetic, as am I. It's the only argument we will ever have, and he's big enough to patch it up before the sun goes down.

The second event is more painfully embarrassing. I'm at Johnny's apartment. It's the upper floor of a two-story dwelling. I'm always aware, when inside another family's home, of the smells, so strikingly different from our own, which of course I never notice. The house has roaches—the first I've ever seen.

It's small, somewhat cramped, and to me —presumably because of Johnny's ethnicity — somehow ... exotic. I choose the word advisedly, aware now as I could not have been then of the condescention and chauvinism its usage implies. In any case, being in the family's apartment is different than being in the homes of my other friends. I'm not sure where the feeling comes from. Perhaps it's some unintentional, inborn racism on my part.

You reach the apartment from an exterior set of stairs, and it is at the foot of these that the second incident occurs. Johnny and I are talking, and his mother descends, telling him it's time to go inside. He argues with her and she slaps him across the face. His mother is, I recall, normally the gentlest of women, so the act shocks me as much as it does my friend. After a stunned moment Johnny bursts into tears and runs up the stairs to the apartment. His mother apologizes, explaining to me that her son is crying not over the slap itself but because he is embarrassed for my having seen it, and I walk home feeling I've been privy to something that was not meant for my eyes. My emotions are roiling with a mixture of sympathy for Johnny and embarrassment for my self for having witnessed such an intimate, humbling moment.

The most curious aspect of our friendship, as I think about it later, is that I can scarcely remember saying goodbye. My father has gotten a new job in Mt. Vernon. I can remember walking to Johnny's house for the last time, but I am less cognizant of what was said and done at our parting. I know I will miss him. What I did not, could not, know is that the fact of my first crush being on a Japanese-American, the faces and physiognomy of what we used to call "Orientals" would exert a powerful attraction that has so far found its most concrete expression in a play, The Dogs of Foo, in which the young sansei actor at its center would be named Johnny.

Jim

My best friend in Mt. Vernon is Jim, who is as unlike me as it may be possible to get. Like Johnny he is dark-skinned, and his face too has defined, angular features. He is lithe, and perpetually sunny, or at least it seems so to me now. I can't recall his mother, but his father was youngish and bearded, which in a small Ohio town in the late 1960s seemed curious and hip and worldly. The hipness factor stems, I suspect, from my once finding a copy of Zap in their living room, the R. Crumb cover featuring a naked man receiving a jolt of electricity from, if memory serves, an electric razor at his nether regions. The picture stirs something in me that I recognize only years later as an erotic response.

Although I am as taken with Jim as I was with Johnny, there is little I remember now about our friendship. The one image that stays in the mind involves the locker room at the YMCA. My family has membership, and there are days —during the summer, I seem to think —when members can bring along non-members for free-style pool time. I invite Jim, and his is the first body of a friend I ever see naked. What strikes me most especially is that I have assumed Jim's skin tone is a seasonal tan, and that his disrobing will show the pale whiteness of skin not normally revealed to the sun. When he is completely naked, I realize with a kind of woozy shock that his body is evenly colored. Since his family name is Polish, I wonder now whether his mother's side was perhaps dark-skinned.

The surprise of pigmentation dispensed with, my most vivid image from that day is Jim, removing his swimming trunks, his back to me. I have of course been aware of his penis when he changed into his trunks, but that signifies less than the revelation of his skin color. Now, staring at the buttocks so casually displayed, my mind takes a photograph. Its details are as radiant today as that summer afternoon. I can see each arc and line of Jim's shapely ass and recall the tingling they produced in my 9-year old loins.

Six month later my father transferrs from Ohio to North Carolina. As with Johnny, I can't recall Jim's and my parting either. I do recall, with a shiver of humiliation, writing to Jim three of four years later, when I am so lonely I can scarcely bear it without screaming. I never hear from him. Since the letter is not returned as undeliverable, I can only assume it reaches him. If he is like most teenaged boys, I now suspect his response is one of distinct unease. What I expect, I don't know. Less cry in the dark than scream of pain, my letter must be as achingly needy as its author. No wonder he never writes back.

Michael

I dislike him immediately. As the sixth-grade best friend of one of my best friends, he is in a sense a rival. But what I detest is the arrogant superiority he wears like a second skin. Perpetually carrying a massive paperback edition of War and Peace I wonder if he ever actually reads, he disdains me as much as I despise him. Knowing of my interest in cartoons, he accosts me once on the playground with a sneering, "Ahh —Monsieur Mickey." A year later, his is the only name I recognize in the posted list for my upcoming homeroom class. Against the odds, we become inseparable.

Health-class this year includes sex education. After one session, which covers V.D., Michael asks me to stay with him after class.

When our classmates have all left for lunch, he asks our teacher whether homosexuals could get venereal disease. As we leave, I ask him why he brought that up? He doesn't answer. I'm not repulsed, or disgusted, or suspicious —merely puzzled. I'm also, sexually, not so much confused as misguided. Since I believed (as I had been taught) that men and women (or boys and girls) naturally gravitated together, it never occurs to me that anyone I might know would be any different —myself included. When I masturbate, I do so with pornographic cartoons I've drawn myself, and they are utterly heterosexual in that they contain both men and women.

Yet that same year I am opening dictionaries and surreptitiously searching for the word "homosexual," experiencing a nameless thrill at reading the definition "one attracted to his own sex" and feeling something else, something I can't pin down or put a name to. It's only with time that I realize I am searching for my own identity in those dry, dusty pages —just as only the passing of years reveals to me why my infatuations are all with other boys: Bobby, Terry, Scooter. Despite close friends I am deeply, agonizingly lonely, and that is what I believe these small obsessions are all about.

By this time, through the machinations of some Board of Education members, who think (wrongly, as it turns out) the move will benefit their own children, the classes of 7th through 9th grades —what we then called junior high (and which is now referred to, curiously, as "middle school") —are divided into two districts and split. One half of Garner will go here, the other half there. Michael is "here"; I am "there." While I see and speak to him over the telephone from time to time, our friendship has largely lapsed and, despite a pair of very good friends —one of whom is still my best friend today — I am desperately unhappy —taunted and abused by bullies of both sexes and aching for something I cannot name. (In my 30s I will date the initial onset of my clinical depression to this period.)

When my sophomore year begins, at the senior high school and Michael and I are "reunited," the happiest period of my school life begins. In my need to cast off an identity I associate with unhappiness, I ask family and friends to call me by my middle name. The one I have gone through life so far with, "Tim," has for the last year or so grated on my skin the way my clothing has when I briefly experience that odd stage in my physical development in which I have to get my trousers from the "Husky" section of J.C. Penny. Having always been thin, this development makes me feel acutely self-conscious. Curiously, and without any overt changes on my behalf, it ends as quickly and inexplicably as it begins, and I am my normal, skinny self again when 10th grade rolls around.

In the summer following our junior year, I am working for the food shop Michael's father owns. I stay the night with him one evening when we are expected to get to the airport early the next morning to pick up a package. I have never before slept in the same bed with anyone outside my immediate family. We're wearing our briefs and nothing else, and as the night goes on I am acutely aware of his body beside mine. The next day I tell him that lying beside him gave me an erection.

The revelation makes him distinctly uncomfortable, but I press him on it, because my feelings are raw and new, perplexing and, to me, somehow inexplicable. Finally, a day or two later, he reveals himself to me but — typically of Michael — in a manner so ambiguous I'm as puzzled as I was before. My naiveté about sex is as profound at 17 as it was at 12. Finally he becomes more explicit, telling me about his previous emotional and sexual attachments, which included both our mutual friend from sixth grade and a boy I did not like called Tony. A Demascan Road moment for me, in which I suddenly realize not only that I am gay but that he is as well, and that I love him in a way much different from the brotherly love our friendship has previously represented.

The next few months are as rocky as any I'd known. For some reason — an uncmofrtable awareness of feelings he can't reciprocate? concern that he will be "tained" by association? —he repeatedly discounts my identifying myself as gay.

Two observations occur to me as distinctly applicable. In his memoir Palimpsest, Gore Vidal notes of the perfect complimentariety of his boyhood love affair with Jimmy Trimble, "Everything I wasn't he was, and everything he wasn't I was." It was a phrase that leapt off the page when I read it, placing Michael's and my relationship in broad relief. The second is Stephen Sondheim's encomium for his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein: "If he'd been a geologist, I would have become a geologist; I just wanted to be what he was." When Michael converted to Catholicism at 16, I naturally followed suit. To paraphrase Sondheim, if Michael had converted to Judaism, I would have converted to Judaism.

It is this new, self-imposed Catholic identity that drives the wedge between us at the last — that, and Michael's intense, warring guilt at being unable to reconcile his sexuality with his religion. Through that autumn, as I struggle with both my Catechism and my increasingly obsessive feelings of love, my depression recurrs, and deepens, made all the more unbearable by Michael's chiding of me for both; he sees it as "brooding."

The split arrives courtesy of a two separate incidents that feed his own growing discontent.

The first occurrs in the wee hours of a bitter January morning. We have been to a late show of Midnight Cowboy (for which, curiously, he later blames what happened next) and afterward go back to Michael's home. His parents have converted one area of the downstairs den into a bedroom, giving Michael free access through an outside door. We have recently purchased a nickel bag of pot from my friend and theatre colleague Amy, which Michael now augments with Lowenbrau and vodka. (The vodka is for him; I could not, and still cannot, bear the taste of neat alcohol.) When we are both good and juiced, he suggests we go to a secluded place in the woods near him home and light up the weed. (Neither of us had ever smoked marijuana.) We stagger down the street in each other's drunken arms, giggling, and he leads me to his "private spot." A friend has given me a pipe for Christmas and we use it to smoke the pot, passing it back and forth until we are well and truly buzzed.

I lay with my back to a pine tree and close my eyes. They fly open again when I realize that Michael is on top of me, kissing my lips. We roll together on the pine straw-strewn forest floor, somehow managing to remove our clothing in the process. He lies on top of me and we belly-rub until we both ejaculate. What should be the joyous consummation of my fondest wish is irreparably sullied in one, careless moment, as Michael, in the throes of erotic passion, calls me Tony. "It's Scott, Michael," is my feeble response. Years later, when I see From Here to Eternity, I identify that moment with the end of the famous beach scene between Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr, which most people remember as a steamy romantic interlude but which ends with Lancaster's cruelty driving Kerr away in humiliation.

When we are both sated and reality, or some form of it, returns, Michael abruptly rises and clothes himself in cold silence. I am as puzzled by his mood as I had originally been elated at our finally coming together. I am also, suddenly, aware of the temperature, and begin to shiver, my teeth chattering all the way home as Michael reluctantly leads me by the hand out of the woods. When we get back to his bedroom he immediately takes a shower as I sit drowsing in a chair. When he is finished I remove my contact lenses and we go to sleep.

When we awake next morning he coolly says he is going to Mass. I say I don't feel up to it —I'm bleary, cotton-mouthed and, essentially, still drunk. He gives me a stony look and observes that I ought to go. I decline, and he drives me home. It is perhaps 7.00 in the morning. Before getting out of the car I ask him if he’ll call me later. "Maybe," is all he can manage. My ecstasy has long since passed, but his coldness remains. When he does speak to me again that afternoon he informs me in no uncertain terms that what has happened will not reoccur. 

The second incident begins with the brief memoir that is our first Psychology class assignment. Mine is as unguarded as Michael's is slippery, and our teacher calls me into her office to discuss the paper, revealing that she's already talked to Michael about the disparity between truth and fiction in his own. Since she is a very special woman, one of our two most beloved teachers, this intrusion bothers me far less than perhaps it might, or should, have. But the upshot is that Michael, with his usual flair for the over-dramatic, informs me coldly that I have brought about "a schism wider than the Reformation." We are no longer friends. Period.

Sometime in the spring, Michael wins a current-events essay contest whose first prize was a trip to the U.N. At the time of his visit I am busily engaged as stage manager for the spring musical. I am taken aback one afternoon late in the spring when he appears at the stage door and asks to see me. We go into the drama director’s office and he tells me how, while in New York, he has seen A Chorus Line on Broadway and has been so moved by the gay dancer Paul’s monologue it has forced him to confront the truth about himself. He apologizes for his behavior, we embrace, and the sides of the “schism” blend into the earth once more.

Sex and love are two separate things with Michael — at least where I am concerned. While he loves me, he is never in love with me. The distinction —which to his credit he never conceals —allows him to engage in sex with me, off and on, for the next two years. But it leaves me as unrequited, as uncertain of myself, and as self-conscious of my imperfections as I had been that cold January morning.

We are on-again/off-again for some time — and always at his whim. I know now (and knew then) I allow his sexual usury. But my self-regard is so low, and my love for him so high, I follow whenever he beckons.  Something in me, aside from simple biological need on his part, must be at work, but more than once he tells me he is simply not physically attracted to me. This instills, quite naturally (if irrationally) a belief in me that I am unattractive. Now, when I see photos of the boy who was me at 18, 19, 20, 21 I think, "Why didn't someone tell me how cute I was?" Alas, when I look into a mirror now I see —as I did then —only the flaws, and the cruel gravity of early middle-age.

There is more to the story, but it’s less important than the primal fact of it. I was never in love before Michael, and I don’t know that I will ever again experience such a depth of feeling. At least, I haven’t so far. I realize of course that adolescence expands the contours of everything it touches. Love is bigger, fuller, more passionate, more intense —and when it goes awry, more devastating —at 17 than it can ever be again, especially when that love is one’s first.

Interestingly, I have no photographs of Michael. The only one I ever took —of him sleeping in my bed, naked under the sheets —did not come out when I took the film in to be developed. That’s weirdly appropriate, I think —the perfect metaphor for phantom desire.

 

Tripp

Call this "A Tripp is a dream your heart makes." Or "A dream is a Tripp your heart makes." Something like that.

I dreamed of an old friend last night, someone I've not seen in, I would guess, 15 years. It was a sexual dream, and wasn't at the same time. It’s a commonplace, I suppose, but time moves more swiftly as one ages. At least, it seems so to me. I suspect it’s because you’re so busy collecting knowledge and experience when you’re young, and settle into more of a routine in later life. The years of my childhood and adolescence seemed endless to me at times (though I imagine they were much briefer to my parents) and those from, say, 18 to 25 stretched out in a languid arc. It often seems to me I packed more into those six or seven years than I have in the nearly twenty since. Events from my late teens and early 20s have a cast-iron quality. I loved more intensely, I think, and more frequently. God knows I experienced more acute and chronic emotional pain.

Depression, my constant friend these many years, was raging on in me then, happy and undiagnosed. But even that has a stiller quality now, not nearly so unrestrained. But then no one is happier than an adolescent in the throes of emotional upheaval. It’s a romantic dream that holds on as long as possible. When I was 20 or 21, I made friends with a co-worker who went by the nickname Tripp. (I want to say I was 21 and he was 19, but I couldn't swear to that. In any case, we were close contemporaries.)

To be honest, he caught my appreciate eye the day he walked in the door. It was one of those happy/unhappy coincidences that the object of my affectionate gaze was also bright, smart, funny, open, and knowledgeable in many of the areas I cared—and care—deeply about. Tripp was medium height, slender but with the broad shoulders, muscled thighs and well-defined upper body of a swimmer, which he'd been in high school. He wore his hair moderately long for the time, as I did myself—back when I had a lot of it to wear longish. He had thick, dark eyebrows and blond hair, the latter bleached. His face was one of the most guileless and open I’ve ever known. He had largish, rubbery lips—not Mick Jagger grotesque, more sensuous and kissable—and a somewhat piggish, upturned nose I thought of as cute as hell.

He also had a backside to die for. Christ, how I wanted to lay my head between those pillows! The whole package—and I mean his personality and kindness as well as his physique—was attractive enough, but that ass was frosting on a very tasty cake. (I remember one summer afternoon when he pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and I commented on how damp it was. “I’ve got a sweaty butt,” he grinned, and all I could think was a bad paraphrase of Shakespeare: O, that I was a wallet upon that cheek …)

I couldn’t “read” people as well then as I have come to be able to subsequently: he was so open and sweet-natured, his smile so quick and genuine. The more I talked to him, the more frequently I saw him on the stock room floor, the more aware I was of how friendly feeling was quickly turning to infatuation. I sent him a note on afternoon, letting him know I was gay and hoping that wouldn’t interfere with our being friends. His answer was positive, although he noted that he’d “had a bad experience and, once bitten, twice shy …”

I asked Tripp about that later. He told me a slightly retarded neighbor kid had tried something with him when he was younger. Still, I kept wondering about him. One is never sure, when succumbing to feelings of love (which I was) whether the sensations one receives are real, or hoped-for. Tripp had been in a rock band (Another Roadside Attraction, named for the Tom Robbins book) with his best friend, and did once confess to me that he had some erotic feelings for him. Trying, in that well-meaning way a gay boy has of hoping to appear non-threatening, I invoked the “it could just be a phase” cliché. Idiot.

I spent a couple of Friday nights at his family’s house—he still lived with his parents—and tried to match Tripp blow-for-blow in beer drinking. To my great satisfaction, I never threw up during one of these binges, but I certainly tired out. One of my proudest moments was his awarding me a small gold medal he’d gotten for some swim meet in honor of my growing drink capacity. It bore the initials “FHST,” which he re-christened for me as “Fast as Hell Suds Taster.” I think I still have it, somewhere.

His bedroom had bunk-beds. He would lie on the top bunk and I would take the bottom. If I remember correctly, the assignments were by choice—I’m acrophobic, and none too steady after getting drunk. I’d fall asleep quickly, under the influence, but wake up early. While he slept I’d lie on my back, staring up at the top bunk, and imagine how it might feel to be up there with him. To wake with him beside me. To feel his warm, nearly hairless, silken flesh snuggled up against my own.

I’m aware that I’m going into more detail than is strictly necessary. But this is a part of my past I’ve never written about before, and Tripp has a small chamber of my heart even now. I’m collecting impressions, trying to get it all down before something slips way. Like the debt I owe his father, a conservative Republican, in making me defend my leftist positions through knowledge and intellectual acumen, not simply emotion and instinct. “Why do you feel like that?” or “What makes you think that?” were, as Tripp told me, his dad’s way of telling me I needed more information if I wanted to hold my own in a debate. It’s a lesson I’ve never forgotten. Now, if I have a gut feeling about something but no data to base it on, I try to keep my mouth shut until I know something about the subject. My own father never gave me that.

I’m also aware of how rambling, and possibly incoherent, these musings are. Which is the way with memory—it isn’t linear. One thought or memory causes one to recall another. Bear with me, please.

I’m reminded now of how he got his nickname. He had a younger cousin (if cousin it was—some relation, anyway) who, when he was a toddler, couldn’t say Tripp’s real name. Using one of the slang terms of the ‘70s—is it still in use? I’m not sure—someone had said in front of this child that my friend was “a trip.” The kid couldn’t pronounce _________ but he could say “Trip.” So, Tripp it was.

Since Tripp wanted to leave home, and my so-called “studio” apartment consisted of a dingy room with a kitchenette, bathroom, and cockroaches, we decided to put in together and located a two-bedroom in the suburbs. It was already a curious relationship, slightly masochistic on my part. I wanted him desperately, loved him deeply, and it would have made far more sense for me to keep a respectful distance. The last thing my pain required was working with Tripp and living in close quarters at the same time. But you can’t maintain a cool reserve, can you, when someone comes to mean something to you. My tendency throughout my adult life is to live in hope. I’m not sure why, since it’s never panned out, but it seems a part of my nature—a coping mechanism, maybe. I can live on a vague, unintentional hint the way a bear can survive hibernation on his own stored blubber.

I was largely passive in those days, and much too susceptible to the acts and opinions of others. My best friend (and on-again/off-again lover) had helped get me hooked on cigarettes, and Tripp influenced my future brand. I’d always smoked lights. He smoked light Menthols. While in the middle pf moving my stuff to our new apartment in a borrowed truck, I’d run out of Camels. He gave me his Merit Menthols to tide me over, and that was that. I used to switch brands in those days fairly regularly. Merits, then Benson & Hedges, then something else. I finally settled on Salem Ultra Lights. So the brand changed, but the Menthol stayed.

I should say that life with Tripp was hardly all Sturm und Drang, regardless of my thwarted desire. We continued to enjoy each other’s company, go to movies together, drive to other cities for late shows, discuss music and television and books. But there was an irresistible force and an immoveable object, and it made for an unspoken something, a tension, a frisson that lay between us like the elephant in the room no one will talk about. As long as I didn’t press it, we could pretend it wasn’t there.

Having this boy, for whom I burned so brightly, around made for some interesting contours. Instead of a bed, Tripp had a simple mattress on the floor of his bedroom, usually strewn with clothing. For the first—and so far, only—time in my life I became something of a furtive pantie-sniffer. Not, if memory serves, his actual undershorts, but the bikini-style briefs he wore when swimming. When they were lying around, discarded, on his mattress and Tripp was out, I would bring them to my face and inhale him, deeply—crotch and seat. Then I’d take off my trousers and slip on his briefs, get hard, and masturbate.

I jacked off in the oddest places in those days. Part of my job with the big office supply distributor for which I worked involved keeping inventories. Now and then I would take an inventory binder in hand and wander to the basement. (I had no stock there to count, but the basement personnel probably didn’t know that.) In my wanderings I had discovered the small, dark, dusty room where the boiler resided. You walked in, and next to the boiler was a concrete partition. If you crouched there, no one could see you, even if they were actually in the boiler room itself. So, several times a month (whenever my libido was too randy to ignore) I would grab a couple paper towels from the men’s room, stuff them in my pocket, and mosey down to the boiler room. Hidden behind the concrete wall I’d drop my pants and shorts and bring myself to orgasm. Usually while thinking about Tripp.

When I still lived alone, Tripp took me to a local movie-house for my first taste of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The theatre was small, the audience was sparse, but I loved the experience, and loved it even more for being shared with him. When the audience pulls off shirts and jackets to wave at the smoke on-screen, my heart skipped a beat to see Tripp remove his T-shirt. He kept himself, scrupulously I now think, or at least chastely, clothed around me. The brief glimpse of hairless, sculpted chest was intoxicating.

Tripp struck up a friendly acquaintance with a couple of girls that night, and we all stood chatting comfortably outside the theatre when the movie ended—until he took me aside and confided that they would come with us if we asked them. To my place. He all but begged me, and I refused. The thought of him in sexual congress that close to me was more unsettling to me than the notion of fucking the other girl. I didn’t want to end up participating in either event. It was one thing to “share” him with some young woman, but to be in the same room? Thanks a lot, but—no thanks.

He wasn’t angry, or even all that disappointed, though he pressed me fairly hard at the time. On the drive back to my place, he pumped me for my reaction to the movie, wanting me to share his enthusiasm. Didn’t I think Tim Curry was “sexy”? I did. But Tripp was sexier. And he was alive, beside me. Unattainable, but at least in the here and now, not several years, a few cameras and several thousand miles away.

I puzzled over that one. “Isn’t he sexy?” Was it the fish-net stockings? The half-feminine look and sound and expression? I didn’t think so. But I would never pin Tripp down on that one. But what was it that made him tell Michael, within minutes of meeting him, that he “might be bisexual”? That Michael wasn’t living with him, and pining for him, under the same roof? It was also the kind of thing that, in those days, served only to reinforce my own negativity about my physical self. Michael had made me feel unattractive, so I believed I was. (Typical of Michael, too, to repeat Tripp’s comments to me—sadist to my masochist. At least Tripp was never cruel.)

In hindsight, and with photographic evidence, I now understand that I looked as good then as I ever had, and better than I ever will again. When I see old photographs of myself at that age, my heart flutters slightly. Who is that cute kid? Aw, fuck—it’s me. Why didn’t someone tell me?

And now, in the meandering turns of memory, each remembered occurrence feeding off another, I recall how I posed Tripp for a photograph in my ratty old apartment. I had the sense of atmosphere in my head, although of course I had neither the photographic acumen nor the lighting equipment to realize it. But I saw him very specifically, and tried to make it real. First, I sat him at my small, cheap wooden table, my sporty cap on his head, a scarf around his neck. Then I gave him a hand of cards before carefully (and as slowly as I could manage without making him self-conscious or causing my own fingers to tremble) I unbuttoned his shirt and opened it, gently pulling the sides apart to reveal as much of his naked chest as possible. I can’t remember what I said to him about the look I wanted him to give the camera, but whatever it was, he got it. In the photograph he’s staring up, and his gaze is the living embodiment of the term “bedroom eyes.” They smolder, sensual and grave. It was all I could do not to sit myself on his lap.

I remember now, too, the night he asked to stretch out on my bed and nap. Was he sleeping, or only pretending to, when—after what I considered a decent interval to insure his slumber—I knelt by the side of the bed and, watching his back rise and fall with each breath and his incredibly shapely bottom curving up on my mattress, slid down my trousers and masturbated until I came? I have a feeling he knew very well what was going on, maybe even wanted it to happen, but he never said a word to acknowledge the event, and it’s sure as hell I didn’t either.

Looking back from this distance, I don’t entirely blame myself for what eventually happened, as I did at the time. I think he was complicit to some degree, even if it wasn’t wholly conscious on his part. Although never an overt or even covert sexual tease, I wonder now if some part of him didn’t enjoy being the object of my desire, and perhaps even illicitly (and wholly un-consciously) even encourage it.

I’m not going to recite my misdeeds with Tripp here. The catalogue is long, and some of it embarrasses me still. The long and the short of it is, I made him uncomfortable enough to leave. Reading over this account, it occurs to me that I may have given the impression that my feelings for Tripp were entirely, or perhaps largely, sexual. They weren't. Had it been merely a matter of physical attraction, I doubt I could have been so tormented by our friendship and our close proximity. It could have been treated as a kind of cosmic joke. But I wanted Tripp in every way it is possible to desire another human being; only love can make us behave so badly. But as that great Western philosopher Woody Allen once remarked, the heart wants what it wants.

A few years later, in a moment of rue and rather typical self-hatred, I wrote him a fairly long letter in care of his parents, apologizing for it all and wishing him well. That I never heard back didn’t altogether surprise me. Perhaps he never even received it.

I saw him again around 1990 or 1991. I was having dinner with a friend on her dinner break. She worked at a Waldenbooks in a local shopping mall, and she had just leant me enough money to put to rest a very expensive and extremely inconvenient bill from the IRS. I was giving her my undivided attention … when the doors to the mall opened and Tripp walked in.

He was dressed in business attire, which took me a bit aback; jeans, a T-shirt and an unbuttoned long-sleeved shirt over that were his everyday attire when I’d known him. He caught my eye, smiled that sweet smile of his, and moved off to get himself some food.

I ached to go and speak to him, but I couldn’t. I felt I owed her my solicitude. It would be rude, wouldn’t it, to get up and talk to someone else? This is the way money affects me. If someone—parent, a friend, whomever—loans or gifts me emergency funds, I feel beholden in a very immediate and all-pervasive way. I just couldn’t excuse myself and go talk to Tripp—could I?

I never saw him again. Until last night. In Dreamsville, Baby.

I don’t know what prompted the dream. Probably a combination of things. As autumn chases summer’s dreams, my seasonal depression is taking hold, aided this year by the numerous jolts of the last couple of months. I’ve been wool-gathering after going to bed of late, and my anxiety takes in both the future, of which I am uncertain and scared, and he past, which is filled with regret. I was also loading some old files into a new PC last night, among them a couple of erotic fantasy stories I’d written about Tripp, so that may have contributed to the mix as well.

In my dream, he had agreed to a sort of sex-date with me. It wasn’t just fucking—I never wanted anyone I loved in that period of my life in only those terms—but was to be the initiation of our making love. Odd that we were planning it rather than allowing it to happen spontaneously, but that’s the way with dreams, isn’t it? They hold their own logic, of which logic knows nothing.

In the dream he told me it would be that night, when he got home. In the meanwhile, I was to prepare the music—in particular, I was instructed to listen to a specific cassette which he gave me. It had a hidden track of some kind (which, in typical dream-logic, was actually a second strip of tape in the cassette itself) that pertained directly to us.

I never heard what was on that tape, though in the dream I listened to it. I also, maddeningly, didn’t get to witness our union. It wasn’t so much “discrete fade-out” as it was never fade-in. The dream segued from my perusal of the tape to the two of us, the following day. We were walking and Tripp was talking to a third person whose identity is unclear to me. He was speaking almost as though I wasn’t there, and when asked about his opinion of whatever it was they were discussing, said “My girlfriend agrees with me, but my boyfriend doesn’t.”

In the dream I was flush with equal parts pleasure and amazement. Shock that he would admit a same-sex relationship to a third party, wild excitement that his “boyfriend” in question was me.

That was it. All of it. So little, to provoke so much. But old yearnings may, unlike old soldiers, not fade away so much as receded for a time, until resurrected by a look, a phrase, a melody, or a dream.

Of all my regrets, and have more than my share, Tripp has always been high on the list. Regret for my actions, rue for our never having been together as I so fervently desired, and a strong prickle of anxious sorrow for that last glimpse of him.

What would I have said? Does it matter? Does any of it? I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.