Tale

The first gay bar was La Avispa in San Jose, Costa Rica, when we were all 20 years old. I was there with some anglo students from the University of California. I don't remember how I felt, but, it was difficult for me to be there, around the gayness, the alcohol, and the cigarettes. I used to be so pure.

Years passed.

Mark was the first. British, fair thinning hair, a little shorter than me. Mark was a friend of Lawrence Moala, a aboriginal Kiwi living with Rich and me in Catford.

On our second of three dates, we took the tube back to a house on the nice part of town, where he was staying. We made out in the kitchen where he cooked. Him standing and me sitting on the counter. We watched the footie on the couch and were together upstairs. I only saw him once after that, retreating from my new-found freedom.

Roger was probably second. Midwestern, part native American, an urban cowboy with the belt buckle to prove it. When I lay with him, I couldn't help but run my fingers over the knob in his collarbone where a break had healed badly. He'd broken it at a rodeo when he was young. I would sit in his bedroom and watch him practice the pipes.

Tony was true rough, a near homeless skinhead sometime junkie that we took in after he got out of prison. He was from the old neighborhood: years before, I used to hang out at with him and his girlfriend before he got into trouble. All the time in the prison yard had made him tough. Tony was basically straight, but he got me off anyway. I kicked him out when I found out he was using meth, but, I miss him to this day. I saw him a couple of years later with his new wife.

Cory was young and wore his heart on his sleeve. I tried to keep him at a distance, so that I wouldn't hurt him too much when I left, and in doing so I hurt him a lot. He never understood how I could be with him and still see no future in us, as if love could somehow overcome the fortress around my heart.

Andrew knew my heart wasn't in it for the time we were together. He could read me so well. His insight frightened me. He was skinny and strange. He was, on paper, everything I wanted, but, he was a grown up. I wasn't ready to be a grown up. I wanted another shot at young love.

Of all of them Andrew is the only one to have given me a gift: a rubber duck.

Brian was two days and one night on AIDS Lifecycle 4. A hard-drinking bartenter and artist from Philly, he was everything I'd ever hoped for, and fate was cruel to introduce me to him and then take him away. I was too sensible to track him down afterwards, and I regret it.

Of all of them, he is the only one for whom I have a photo.

There were others, fleeting, whose names I can't remember.

I once wanted to be married for life. Still do, I guess. But sometimes all you can hope for is life with some of the rough edges filed off.