Talking Art Deco with a Trick (1975)

After the party ended, I was hoping for a trick. What I didn't anticipate was a trick with whom I could discuss art deco architecture. Or a trick with whom I'd want to discuss art deco. Or that we'd be having this discussion on the bare floor of a house in the shadow of a casket factory.

Let's flash back to earlier in the evening.

The setting for the party was someone's house in an out-of-the-way neighborhood. The party began as the bars were closing and the attendees had all learned of it at the bars. Not everyone had been told, of course, but enough that the house was packed with sweaty gay males in their best club clothes. That they were at the party, of course, meant either they were already "partnered" for the night or hadn't found a trick at the bar. If the former, they were looking for more party before tricking; if the latter, they were still looking for a trick. Those not in attendance had either not been told of the party or had already found a trick and considered an after-party redundant.

That I don't remember much of the party itself likely means it was a generic after-party. Drinking, dancing, loud conversation. More drinking, more dancing, some groping. And so on.

The crowd faded away within a few hours, again typical for such a gathering. They half dozen or so of us left knew each other barely or not at all. This unfamiliarity faded quickly too as we paired off. One couple left the house, another left the room, and that left us in a bare living room to determine what happened next.

So what would happen next? Was I left with a trick or just someone to talk with?

Neither of us had spoken to the other during the party, neither of us knew each before now, and neither of us probably had an idea of where things were going.

There was no furniture in the room, just a sleeping bag and a few blankets in one corner. So that's where we sat down.

We didn’t lie down, we sat down. Facing each other. Not normal behavior for two guys about to trick. But, then, I don't believe either of us knew if we were going to. After all, we were only together through process of elimination.

He was skinny with tousled hair, and cute in a sort of nerdish way. He was taller than me - who wasn't? - but not by that much. Had I noticed him during the party, would I have put the moves on him? Maybe. Would he have come on to me? I had no clue.

But here we were, face to face, sitting on the floor of an empty room. In the dark except for light from street lights through three bare windows. I looked out the window over his shoulder and saw a factory across the street. The sign in front of it said it was a casket factory. As I said, we were in an out-of-the-way neighborhood.

On the floor below the window I noticed a book, a large coffee table sized book. I could see part of the title from the light through the window. Art Deco. I reached over and picked up the book and began to thumb through it. In the near dark. At least there were some pictures to look at, as best as I could see them with so little light.

"Are you interested in Art Deco?"

His question made me realize that picking up and thumbing through a random book wasn't something I normally did when alone with a guy I was about to trick with. But then I didn't know if we would. Trick, that is. Perhaps now we wouldn't. Perhaps we'd discuss architecture through the night. That would be something I had never done.

"Well, sort of," I replied.

I lied.

I knew vaguely of Art Deco style because of Entre Nous, a gay bar that had opened recently in Knoxville. Everyone - well at least those seeking to appear sophisticated - raved about its Art Deco style. So I'd done a little research about it, though I didn't bother to research what "entre nous" meant. For all I knew, it meant "stylish gay bar with very small dance floor." And my knowledge of Art Deco wasn't much better.

Ironically, given that we were alone in an empty room, entre nous means "between us" used with something spoken in confidence. The phrase may not have applied to the bar, but it certainly applied to our situation.

I needn't have worried. Apparently he knew a good deal about Art Deco and, holding the book near the window light, proceeded to expand my understanding as he thumbed through the pages and discussed various illustrations. I was fascinated.

By his knowledge. By the subject. And by the possibility of architectural style as foreplay.

After a while he put the book aside and we both lay on our sides, face to face, continuing the discussion. Then we both lay on our backs on the blankets and continued talking. About Art Deco, about the house (his friend in the other room lived there), and eventually we stopped talking.

We turned back on our sides, face to face, and held each other. And we kissed and our hands explored each other's body.

And then we tricked. And fell asleep.

On the blankets on the floor of an empty room in an empty house across the street from a casket factory.

I don't recall his name and I never saw him again after that night. But whenever I encounter Art Deco style I think back on that night. I think of what we talked about. And what we did when the talking stopped.

What did we do when the talking stopped?

Sorry. That's entre nous.

Back to work!

Maybe it was getting to sleep late three days in a row or maybe the summer sunshine or whatever, but I'm finally back to writing and on a new story at that. It involves a bar, a phone booth and a really, really big fire. More soon.

New Posts soon, I promise

It's been since March that I've posted a story but it's been a busy, busy time. Now that I get a summer break in another week, I have two stories in progress that, I hope, will find completion. Some time off - and some time at the beach - should allow for that.

Driving to the Great Smokies to Get Naked (March 1971)

This is the most recently completed story. In chronological order, it would be the twelfth of the nineteenth finished so far.

===============

Driving to the Great Smokies to Get Naked (March 1971)


The two-room apartment was spare but homey. It was actually half of a small house. The other half had a separate kitchen. Mine had a front room and a back room and a bathroom. The front room was the "living" room, the back was the bedroom and kitchen. And the bed was barely a bed, more a cot and not a good one at that. I had moved there with a roommate who had bunk beds but when his ultra-conservative parents found out he was gay, they drove up from Chattanooga to take him home for therapy and took the bunk beds with them. That left me with a very modest and worn twin bed, one Charlie has offered me when I moved out of his and Danny's apartment.

The rest of the furniture was not much to speak of either, but it was adequate for my needs.
But it wasn't a place to bring a trick home to. A trick might not pay attention to the ratty couch or what barely passed for a dining table, but the bed would be another matter. It's difficult enough for two people to share a twin bed, but this particular bed presented even more of a problem.

In my previous apartment, the one I rented the day I fled Atlanta for Knoxville, I could easily move the two parts of the sectional couch together. The enormous living room allowed for that. The current living room was too small to make that convenient.

This all became apparent one night shortly after my roommate had been abducted, er, had left.
I was up for a trick or at least an evening of hunting for one. You know how hunters say they really aren't in it for the kill, but for the thrill of the hunt and being out in nature. I was a hunter of tricks. If I didn't find one, there was still the thrill of the hunt and being out in gayville.
Knoxville hadn’t yet entered the age of the gay dance club. K-town gave gay boys a choice: either a dive of a beer bar located down a dark alley or a dive of a beer bar located near another dark alley a few blocks away.

I took the first choice. Both bars were run by lesbians (most gay bars were then), but I liked the, um, ambience of the one down the alley. All bars, gay or straight, had to close at midnight sharp and would begin shutting down around eleven-thirty to be sure to be in compliance with any Knoxville Beer Board inspectors who might be driving around at that hour. Beer only. No booze, no setups, no BYOB. And, of course, no dancing. Sounds grim, but it could be fun.

What was grim this particular night was the crowd. There was no crowd. The bar staff outnumbered the customers and there were only four people working.

I was about to head for the other bar but decided to stay long enough for a beer. The other place sort of scared me, unless I was there with some friends. And since I was trick hunting, I was flying solo.

In scanning the empty booths to decide where I would sit alone I realized one of the booths wasn't empty. It was occupied by someone I didn't know, but someone I realized I would like to know. At least for a night. So I grabbed my beer and headed for his booth.

I don't recall what tired cliché I must have used to explain why, with all the other booths empty, I chose to sit in the one he was already occupying. I guess I just assumed he was looking for someone to join him. This was a gay bar, after all. He must have known that. If I wasn't what he was looking for he would certainly let me know. But he apparently had no problem with my joining him and the hunt was on.

Whether I was hunting for him or he for me didn't matter. If we left together, if we tricked together, it didn't matter who had propositioned whom.

The conversation–what there was of it–was awkward at first. That wasn't so unusual then. In later years, in a crowded dance bar full of buff, mostly shirtless men, a guy could be more direct with a pickup line. We knew where we were (a gay club) and we knew what we wanted (a trick.) In a back alley neighborhood beer bar, however, you had to exercise some care. Maybe he was just there for a beer. Maybe he didn't know it was a gay club. We didn't have rainbows everywhere then. And the place was almost empty he might have just figured it a good place to grab a beer or two.

This guy was too young, too small-town to be part of the vice squad and those guys didn't hassle the bars anyway, just the restrooms in public buildings. And they did that during the daytime.
Back then I never gave much thought to the possibility of what we now call gay bashing. Maybe it was because I was usually drawn to guys not likely to overpower me or who were so likely queer as to fear that I might bash them.

This guy was tough to figure out though. Most pickup conversations avoid direct propositions but this one was indirect to the point of near obscurity. I began to think the night would end right there in the booth.

Yet somehow, I don't recall how, he left with me and followed me in his car to my house.
We were undressed and in bed within minutes, perhaps seconds.

And then a problem arose. Or, rather, didn't, um, rise.

No, it wasn't what would be today a Viagra moment, but neither of us somehow could get turned on enough to do anything.

It wasn't our hormones' fault.

It was the bed's fault.

Then I got an idea.

“Why don’t we drive to the Smokies?”

“Huh?”

Somehow I managed to explain my idea. The bed just wasn’t working and maybe what we needed was something radically different. Like sex in a car on a lonely road. Or sex in the woods. I told him I knew of several out-of-the-way places in the mountains – about an hour away – where we could get it on. How this would be more comfortable than an a bed indoors wasn’t really clear to either of us. But he bought into the idea and off we went to the Great Smoky Mountains.

Now where did I ever come up with such an idea? A few years earlier I had worked for a radio station in the Smokies that was a thirty-mile drive from Knoxville. And most of that thirty miles was very rural, although the road was a wide four-lane. One day, while rounding one of the road’s many curves, I saw a young guy standing by the side of the road hitchhiking. Only as I passed did I notice something unusual. He was wearing jockey shorts. Just jockey shorts. For some reason—maybe I was just in a hurry to get work or didn’t believe what I saw—I continued on without stopping. But I didn’t stop thinking about what I saw. Or letting what I saw develop into a fantasy.

No, it wasn’t a fantasy about being stranded on a lonely highway in only my jockeys. On that stretch of highway I wouldn't want to be stranded fully clothed – and armed.

Instead I imagined being with this hitchhiker somewhere in the Smokies, somewhere secluded and safe. Somehow the phrase, "sex in the Smokies" kept running through my horny mind.
Now the guy in my bed wasn't the hitchhiker and he wasn't wearing jockeys. Or anything else. But, hey, fantasies are flexible and he was flexible enough to agree with the idea. So off to the Smokies we went.

Where exactly we were going I wasn't sure. And I was the one driving. But the nearest place I had in mind was almost an hour away so I had time to think. Or so I thought.

But after we had passed through Sevierville and Pigeon Forge on the way to the mountain bypass around Gatlinburg, I still wasn't sure of a safe destination so I pulled over into an parking area - a scenic overlook they call it - with a view of Gatlinburg far below.

Trick - let's just call him Trick - apparently thought this was our final destination. He began undressing, although I was so occupied I didn't notice. Until he spoke.

"I am now completely naked," he announced.

I looked to my right. He sure was. Completely.

So let's review. It's a weeknight and I'm parked at an overlook above Gatlinburg in the Great Smoky Mountains after midnight.

With a naked guy in the passenger seat.

A naked guy whose name I did not know. His name? I didn't even know him, much less his name. (Thus I’ll call him Trick.)

So, I wondered, what do I do now?

Option one: get naked as well. Option two: pretend I hadn't heard Trick and visually confirmed his nakedness. Option three: Stay clothed but take sexual advantage of Mr. Naked Trick.

I went with Option Four: Get naked and take sexual advantage of Mr. Naked Trick. Now that might have been easy if we’d been in the back seat of my Camaro, but we were in the front seat! In bucket seats. With a stick shift between us.

That configuration caused a number of problems. First of all, Trick had it easier getting undressed. He didn’t have a steering wheel to contend with. Or three pedals on the floor.
Second, even when I managed to get undressed without putting the car out of gear, I had that Hurst shifter between us. And the parking brake.

So, you say, why not get in the back seat? Let me draw you a picture.

We’re in a Camaro. It has two doors. To get from the front seat to the back seat you have to first, open the door nearest you and, second, step out of the car to move the seat forward in order to get in back.

Would you really want to do that naked?

(And, no, you wouldn't want to - or be able to - climb over the high-back bucket seats - either naked or clothed.)

True, there were no other cars parked on the overlook, probably because of the late hour on a weeknight in the fall. That was one of the reasons I chose the place. I certainly wouldn’t have done it in the heat of summer and the height of the tourist season. And there were likely not going to be any other cars, but how could we be sure?

The Camaro was becoming a much bigger challenge than my bed. Try as we might, there was no comfortable way to do, um, it, whatever “it” might be. The bucket seats, the stick shift, the parking brake, even the location conspired against us. Sure we could reach across the console and grab and grope each other, but what we both wanted was more than that; we wanted sex but we wanted full-body-contact sex. And that was just impossible in the front seat of a Camaro.

I signaled surrender by starting to get dressed. Trick followed my lead but only to the point of pulling up his underwear. We were halfway back to Knoxville before I convinced it might be a good idea - in the glare of city lights - to be a bit more clothed. He agreed.
We got back to my place just over two hours after we’d left it.

The hour was late, we both were tired, so we both made it back into my bed, but not to sleep. At least not right away.

Perhaps it was all that mountain air, but this time the bed didn’t cause us any problems.

How a Cat Led to My Coming Out (1969)

Preface II: How a Cat Led to My Coming Out (1969)

James had a cat. James was cute.

Actually, the cat wasn’t James’ cat. He didn’t know whose cat it was, but he was playing with it the day I met him.

James was a neighbor of Sandra and Rick, a couple I knew through grad school. Neither one was a student, but Sandra liked to hang out at the university and through her I met Rick, who was her boyfriend and, later, husband.

Sandra was a Jewish girl from a small town in eastern Kentucky, where her daddy owned a clothing store. Rick was an East Tennessee gentile. They were a volatile combination, sometimes fighting, sometimes loving, and sometimes doing both at the same time. They were unpredictable and they became my good friends.

They had taken an apartment a few blocks from me, so I dropped by often, especially during the early summer months when neither my class work nor my broadcasting job occupied much of my time. We’d listen to music or talk politics or watch TV, go out to eat on the Cumberland Avenue “strip,” or, on a warm summer evening, sit outside the house their apartment was in and just talk.

James lived in a house across the street, with his aunt as I recall, although it might have been his grandmother. I don’t recall and I don’t believe I was clear about it at the time. When I would visit him later, he seemed to be the only one home.

Sandra was, um, outgoing. No, she was more than that. Spotting a person she didn’t know, she’d go right up to them and just start a conversation. Eventually she’d introduce herself to the often-startled individual. She’d spotted James on his porch and soon she considered him a good friend. There are those of whom it’s said, they’ve never met a stranger. Sandra didn’t know what a stranger was, although some she met probably wished that she had understood the idea better.
One evening as we were sitting on her front steps, she spotted James on his porch and insisted I meet him. We walked over and Sandra introduced me. So maybe it was Sandra, more than James’ cat, that was a proximate cause of my coming out. But I have to give the cat some credit, since, from a distance, it was the cat – and not James – that I noticed.

Then we got closer and I noticed James.

Did I mention James was cute?

Actually, I doubt that I thought of him that way at the time. I wasn’t really out to myself, and I’d grown up being told that boys didn’t refer to other boys as, “cute.” Handsome, maybe. But never cute.

Fear of coming out isn’t just fear of what friends and family will think of you. It’s also about what you will think of you. And it’s not just trying to imagine yourself having sex with another guy. Before coming out, most gay guys aren’t at all sure what gay sex might involve.

Society raises all males, gay or straight, to have a certain discomfort with intimacy and even with gentleness. Even straight boys don’t refer to attractive girls as cute, but maybe “nice,” or maybe “hot.” Somehow they have to keep a rougher edge about it, so as not to seem “girlish.”

So when a not-yet-out gay boy finds himself attracted to another boy, he knows the other boy looks good, looks appealing, but he can’t quite bring himself to say – even to himself – that the boy is “cute.”

But James was cute. I guess I’ve already mentioned that.

Somehow, I also knew James was gay.

Somehow, James also knew I was gay.

Somehow, I also knew that James knew that I knew that he knew.

How? I can’t explain that anymore than I can explain gaydar. It’s really a sensation in a moment of time – or perhaps out of time – an almost instant recognition. Most gay people have it. Some straight people even claim to have it. At the time, I would have claimed I was straight and that I’d never heard of gaydar. That didn’t matter; I knew James was gay and James knew I was gay. And I knew that he knew that I knew.

And though I would have said I was straight, I knew that I wasn’t. But I had no clue of what being gay really meant. No clue? Yes, no clue. There were no gay role models. Gay characters in movies committed suicide or were killed. Even the most sympathetic psychologists called gay people “inverts” or “deviates.” Was being gay just about furtive sex acts, likely performed in some dangerous place? Was being gay being effeminate, wanting to be female rather than male? So it would seem from all the information one could gather from books or from teachers or from friends. And if I didn't find myself in those books, then I must not be gay.

It was the early summer of 1969. Stonewall had already happened in New York City, but we knew nothing about that event in East Tennessee. (I first learned of the June event in December, while job hunting in Atlanta.) All I knew was that James was cute, James was obviously (to me, at least) gay, and I wanted to get to know him better. What that meant, I didn’t really know.
The way to some men’s hearts may be through their stomachs, but the way to James’ heart, I suspected, was through his (or whoever’s) cat. But I wasn’t even sure I wanted to get to James’ heart, just to his body. What I would do with it once I got to it, I also didn’t know. First things first, though, which meant focusing first upon the cat.

Since I hadn’t come out yet, not even fully to myself, Sandra had no idea what thoughts James was putting in my mind. And I thought it best that first night on James’ porch not to put any thoughts in her mind. So the three of us just talked about this and that and I asked James about the cat.

The cat in question, as I said, wasn’t actually James’ cat. It had shown up on his porch recently and essentially adopted James. Apparently the cat found something attractive about James as well.

It being early summer, my only school work involved thesis hours I registered for while (supposedly) working on a master’s thesis in philosophy. I had already been accepted to Ohio University in communications for the fall and I was working five days a week at an AM/FM radio operation in the Smokies. So I had evenings (and a lot of other time) free.

I began to spend some of that free time visiting James on his porch – without Sandra. We did quite a bit of verbal dancing, deftly stepping around the subject both of us wanted to bring up. It was a behavior not uncommon for not-yet-out gay guys who wanted to let the other guy know about themselves but not risk too much self-disclosure. We would use a kind of code and a lot of body language.

The code could be cultural, involving mention of supposedly gay-identifiable personalities, writers or musicians. Urban gay-guys-in-waiting might find references to Judy Garland or Broadway show tunes to be good for testing the waters. That didn’t work well this far from the Great White Way. All I knew about Judy Garland was that her daughter, Liza Minelli, had starred in a movie that was filmed at my undergraduate alma mater. The film’s story involved a very straight college romance. And I only liked Broadway musicals if there was no singing. Elton John not only was not yet out as gay, he wasn’t even known outside of his own family in England, and they knew him as Reginald Dwight. Trying to find gay cultural references in a part of the country known best for Elvis and the Grand Ol’ Opry was rather difficult.

The code could also be rather Freudian, with humorous but barely subtle references to “fruit,” to “sucking” on something, something innocent like a popsicle, of course, but the accompanying body language added a bit of salaciousness to the phrase. Sometimes more than a bit.
We continued to mutually choreograph this little dance of identity over our first three or four visits together, all of them on James’ front porch. Whether the cat, who was always there, picked up on what we were doing is uncertain, but apparently we were entertaining enough to sustain a feline’s interest. That was probably because, whenever one of us seemed to be getting too close to self-disclosure, we would change the subject to something about the cat. Good cat. Pretty cat. Nice kitty. Anything about the cat, anything to avoid saying, “Hey, I’m gay and you are too and I think you’re really cute!”

Of course that’s not all either of us probably wanted to say. That sentence might end, “I think you’re really cute and I’d like to …” But that would present another problem even if one of us said it. When two guys are trying to determine if the other is gay – if their own gaydar is working – there are other questions involved. If the other guy is gay, is he out of the closet? Does anyone else know he’s gay? Is he, um, experienced? What kind of experience has he had? What does he like to “do?” Am I even his type?

Such questions really never go away even when the sexual orientation of both parties is known. If you haven’t tricked with someone before, you have no idea what this other person likes to do in bed. Or even before getting to the bed. And even before the conversation gets underway, you don’t have any way of knowing if your interest in him is reciprocated. The cutest looking preppy boy in khakis and polo shirt may be looking for a strapping, hairy older guy in leather. And vice-versa.

So here’s the dilemma: I think I’m gay. I’m pretty sure he’s gay. I’m pretty sure he knows I’m gay.

But I can’t read his mind.

In the two or three weeks since Sandra had introduced me to James (and his cat), I had spent several evenings on James’ porch. Some of these meetings were random, some were planned. And some that may have seemed random to James were really planned. I would drive near James’ house, never getting closer than a block or two away. Then, if I spotted him on the porch I would take the car back home and walk over to his place. I would act as if I were heading to Sandra and Rick’s and seem surprised that he was at home on his porch. And to think I hadn’t yet heard the term, “drama queen!”

Wow, I sound like a stalker. Actually I think I put on a pretty good act. After all, I had done my share of theater over the years. At least I think I was convincing to James. And I never resorted to such tired lines as, “Oh, hi! I was just out for a walk and saw you on the porch.” Or, “Gee, I didn’t think you’d be home! Mind if I stop and chat a while?“ I was a much better drama queen than that.

For whatever reason, James never invited anyone into the house. We were always on the porch. That was fine for informal chats on warm East Tennessee summer evenings. But it was a bit too, um, public for anything more than chat and iced tea.

Finally I determined that if James weren’t going to invite me into his house, I would invite him into mine. I had a small two-room apartment in an old house about four blocks from James. It was actually two rented rooms, one of which happened to have a kitchen.

It seemed a perfect idea. I had a color TV. I had a stereo system. I had a cat.

We’d maybe watch some TV. We’d listen to some music. He’d play with my cat.

But then what?

As it turned out, we never did watch TV, we never did listen to the stereo. But James and my cat did get along famously.

So did James and I. After a fashion.

It turned out that James was as inexperienced as I in what to do next. He had “messed around” with a few other guys, but he wasn’t “out” in the gay scene of Knoxville, such scene as there was. His gay sexual experience was little more than that of any number of adolescent straight boys who “messed around” with their buddies.

So did we have sex? Well, yes and no. We were both horny and naïve. Our bodies (hormones) reacted but our minds didn’t know what to next. So we spent a lot of time hugging, groping, fondling, and even giggling as we ended up on the hard, cold floor of my apartment in our underwear. While maybe we didn’t “have” sex, the mechanics of which neither of us was clear about, we both got, um, sexual release. Then we got dressed and it was time for James to go.
It wasn’t until I looked at my desk calendar the next morning I realized that I’d had my first gay experience – my coming out event – on July 4th. Independence Day. Somehow that made me smile.

I had finally come out, at least to myself and one other guy.

Thanks to James.

And James’ cat.

Time to go back in time

So far, for you following this blog, I've been posting the collected and completed stories chronologically.
I don't write them that way. At the moment I'm working on two that will go in different places in the three-part timeline of the 1970s. One is from 1971, the other several years later.

But my very next post will be a story completed a few years back that takes place in 1969. In the collection I'm assembling it appears as a Preface. It's my coming-out story.

Enjoy. And please comment.

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.