Rocky and I just weren’t working, there was too much on again, off again and way too much drama. I knew too that I was drinking too much and I also knew that when this school boy relationship had to end it would be me that would call it to an end. Otherwise, we’d just keep bouncing off one another, year in and year out. We’d chew each other up until there was no taste and no passion left and then we’d just be together in our misery. I ended it and now I needed to get out of Wilson. There was too much emotion drowning me in that place.
I met John when Rocky and I were still a couple. With Rocky at his folks for the weekend I’d gone to Raleigh to the bars with my friend Charles. The club was crowded and smoky, dimly lit and loud. The music blared with a rhythmic base and once a cover was paid and one was buzzed in, the outer door kind of spit you into the sensually charged environment of CC’s. Charles and I got drinks, circled once as was our habit and then perched at the far end of the bar. With one drink gone and another on the way we decided to dance. Charles and I had been boyfriends but that didn’t work, as friends we worked.
As a rather self indulged, self centered, self absorbed young man who was in the habit of using up men before they could use me up, I kept my eye on the assorted guys who were watching us dance. That’s when I saw him. On the right side of the club a head popped up over the cruising crowd and then he disappeared only to pop up a few feet to the left. He had beautiful brown hair, longish and just slightly out of style but pleasing. Then he was gone again. He popped up even further left; he was wearing a tight shirt, stretched nicely over a muscular, but not overly so torso and jeans, tight but not too much so. He lighted and moved in front to get a better view of the dance floor and dancers. He was handsome and he was watching me.
I’d always thought and had been told by older gay mentors that the whirling dervish of the gay club was no place to meet a mate or life partner. But my question always was, “Well if not in a gay bar, then where?”
I was never given a satisfactory answer to that question. With a break in the music, I found my nerve. I never really lacked any gumption as a young man; I typically saw what I wanted and took it. I walked straight up to him and wagged my finger, for him to come to me and he walked out onto the dance floor and danced with me. He was my height, a little slimmer than me, well rounded in all of the right spots, his nose very prominent French. Well formed, not bulbous but there was no missing it. And his eyes, his eyes were huge and blue. I could have gone swimming in those eyes. The rest of the evening we danced and drank. His name was John.
Charles had gone off to find his own fun and John asked me if I wanted to go home with him. He lived in Chapel Hill, I lived in Wilson, and we had a big problem. The two towns are an hour and a half apart, but I said yes after John promised to bring me home the next morning, besides he was hungry and I wasn’t ready to let him go just yet, there was something about this man. Charles and I parted and I drove off into the warm spring night with someone I didn’t know, but his name was John. He was hungry and so we went searching for someplace to eat, his idea was the swank Magnolia Grill which was closed, thank God, it isn’t a place for after the bars, I’d learn this fact many years later. The Pan-Pan was open and we ended there, talking about superficial things, asking a lot of getting to know you questions and eating omelets. Then we went to his place.
Our first intimate event with one another was not much of anything. He showered, I noticed that, I showered too but where I took perhaps three minutes to wash the smoke of the bar off, he took thirty minutes. I wandered around his house looking at things. The décor was sparse; there was practically nothing on the walls, the place felt very transient. Finally washed he emerged from the bathroom and we tumbled into bed, mostly making out and exploring. When finished he went to sleep and I started to panic. I kept asking myself as I lay beside him, “What am I doing here?”
Rocky could come home early and I won’t be there and if Rocky comes home early and this guy, this John drops me off at my home, well how am I going to explain that? More specifically, how am I going to fib my way out of it? Then lies and fibbing were pretty standard, I couldn’t let my weakness be self acknowledged. I got out of the bed and moved to the couch in the living room, I tossed, turned and panicked most of the night and even considered hitch hiking back to Wilson. The problem was I had no earthly idea where I was aside from being somewhere in Chapel Hill or maybe I was in Durham. I had no idea where the highway was and so I’d just have to wait.
John was a sleeper. Seven am came and went, I asked him to get up. I had to get out of here. Eight came and he didn’t move. Nine, still nothing and I was starting to fume, Ten, snoring, eleven, stirring and noon up finally, and then another thirty minute long shower and he emerged agitated. Rightly so, I’d disturbed his sleep all night with my anxiety and the drive home was a long quiet one.
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