Daze Gone By

Shortly after I started blogging, I casually, foolishly, posted an entry about the number of men I’d had sex with. I had thought the number was fairly normal for a gay man of my vintage. According to the responses I received I was either badly mistaken or my audience was composed of nuns. Bearing in mind that number (which I still hold is not that astonishing. I’m just friendly.) one might assume I am one of those gay men who has a trail of ex-boyfriends behind me. Nope. R Man is sui generis, my one and only. Many of our friends would point to R Man’s astonishing level of forbearance with me as the reason; I prefer to think that I’m choosy.

The closest thing to an exe I ever had was some guy in college, right after I came out. Let’s call him X. I was determined to have a boyfriend, he had thick blonde hair and was willing to take his clothes off with me, therefore I figured he was the one. Or that he would do. I was very young. One day he wandered back off to Houston and that was the end, or at least as much of the end as there could be for something that never even really existed.

Many, many years later, at a party, I was talking with friends of friends who were visiting here from Houston. I mentioned X’s name and amazingly, they knew him. “Oh, he’s crazy,” one of them said. “Yeah, he was wild, there’s no telling with him…” I answered, but the friend corrected me. “No, honey, you don’t understand. He’s crazy. Like insane.”

It turned out he had had “an episode,” been wildly inappropriate in pubic, lost his business and home and wound up in the bug house.

Fast forward even more years and I was at work, moderating a class for HIV entrepreneurs, and who pops up in front of me? X, of course. No longer blonde, no longer cute, but possibly still crazy. Certainly his conversation was not what one normally deals with in a business class. He informed me at length of the Houston dog pound’s practice of feeding the corpses of dogs to alligators in the bayou that flows through the center of town. Hmm.

I stood there trying on one hand to extricate myself so I could get back to running the goddam class and on the other hand thinking “This could have been my life. Coming home at night to a crazy guy who has theories about alligator fodder.” Just one more reason why I give thanks every day for R Man, a sweet, sensible, smart, lovely man who is not crazy. Pretty much.