Story 16: Living Apart - Together (1974)

Living Apart – Together (1974)

Shortly after Steve and I broke up, we did the next obvious thing.

We moved in together.

Twice.

Well, we didn’t move in together right away. But we spent enough time together that only those really close to us knew that we had broken up. And even they weren’t terribly sure.

When Steve and I first met, he was sharing a two-bedroom house with a straight guy. A straight guy with a fiancé. A fiancé who didn’t live there but spent each night there. Straight Boy had the front bedroom. Steve had the back bedroom. The back bedroom also happened to be the only one with an adjoining bathroom.

That meant that Straight Boy and Straight Boy’s fiancé had to go through Steve’s bedroom to get to the one and only bathroom in the place.

This wasn’t so much a problem during the first few weeks Steve and I were together because he usually drove out to Kingston to my mobile home (yes, I now owned a mobile home) to spend the night, driving back to Knoxville in the morning for work. Sometimes I’d be in Knoxville and would bring him out for the night and drive him back in the morning.

On weekends, however, I worked in Knoxville, noon to six on Saturday and the same on Sunday. During the week I was program director at a small-town AM Top 40 station. On weekends I played six hours of classic country gospel music and on Sunday NASCAR races on a Knoxville FM station. Sound crazy? Well, on some Saturdays I worked the 6 a.m. to noon shift in Rockwood playing Top 40, then drove to Knoxville and did six hours of country gospel. Then I changed clothes at the station and went out and played club kid. That was my schedule the day I first dated Steve. I had done two air shifts at two different radio stations with two different formats in two different towns and then gone out on a date. The next morning – the first morning Steve and I woke up in bed together – I had to leave and go play six hours of country gospel music.

Over the next few months, things changed. Straight Boy and his fiancé finally moved out and married, leaving Steve with a whole four-room house to himself. I decided to return to Knoxville, find work and finish my long-dormant master’s degree.

And Steve and I decided to break up.

Actually we decided it would be nice “if maybe we saw other people.”

Actually Steve thought of it first, but not much before I came to the same conclusion.
But it wasn’t like the usual “let’s see other people but still be friends” type break up. Somehow, we knew, we still loved each other. We still wanted to be together. But, contrary to the cliché, we really did want to date other people.

No, we didn’t really want to date other people.

We just wanted to trick with other people.

A lot.

Steve brought up the idea one morning at his place. Over breakfast. By the time breakfast was over, we had broken up. By that evening I was moving in to Steve’s old bedroom. The one you had to walk through to get to the bathroom. Steve had set himself up in Straight Boy’s room. Of course this now meant that if I had a trick, Steve would have to walk in on us. And, if Steve had a trick, the trick would have to walk in on us or, more likely, just me. Alone.

Since I had landed work in Knoxville and had gotten back to full-time graduate study, moving in with Steve allowed me to put the mobile home up for sale and avoid the daily commute from Roane County.

Steve was still finishing his degree in commercial art and was a night manager at Arby’s. I was working toward a master’s in communication and working nights as creative director, copywriter and production director for an “easy listening” FM station. We saw each other, if at all, late at night. Unless of course we were out at the clubs. Or in bed with a trick.

The arrangement worked well for several months. We made it all the way through Christmas, in fact. Steve’s gift to me was a new space heater for my bedroom. We had been trying to heat all four rooms with just two space heaters and that just wasn’t working. “I hope you have the warmest Christmas ever,” read Steve’s card attached to the space heater.

Then Steve moved out. Someone he worked with had lost a roommate for his two-bedroom townhouse and begged Steve to move in. I was OK with the idea since the rent for the house wasn’t that bad for me to manage myself. It also meant no more “interruptions” from someone wanting to use the bathroom.

But a few weeks after Steve’s departure I came home to find a sign on the front door of the house.

It had been condemned “for human habitation.”

What?

Apparently the local authorities were inspecting properties in our area and were not terribly happy with something – perhaps the wiring or the plumbing. I’ll never know because I didn’t bother to ask.

I called Steve only to find out that his roommate – the one who had begged him to move into the townhouse – had moved out to be with his newest “relationship.”

So, once again, it happened.

Steve and I were living together.

At least now the bathroom was located between our two bedrooms.