Story 3: About that Bullet Hole in the Door

About that Bullet Hole in the Door . . . (January 1970)

The dog had found a home all right – for about a month. My relationship with Danny didn't last that long – about two weeks.

Oh, it started out fine, even passionately. Danny and Charlie shared a rather spacious two-bedroom apartment and I shared Danny's bedroom. And I don’t just mean that Danny and I shared the bed. We did that, of course, but we also shared the bedroom. I worked days at the radio station, basically nine-to-five, and Danny worked the graveyard shift at Dunkin Donuts next door to the apartment complex. He slept days; I slept nights. And between night and day, from just after his arrival home around 6:15 until my departure for work around 8:45, we slept together. We had our evenings and weekends too, but that proved to be too much time together.

What led to our break up? That's never easy to say, but there were at least three factors: astrology, opera and inappropriate laughter. Oh, and a bullet hole in a bedroom door.

Astrology. “Aquarius and Taurus should never fall in love,” observed Danny that first night we shared together. Whatever, I thought to myself. He was Aquarius; I was Taurus. He took star signs seriously; I didn’t. Perhaps I should have. Danny’s birthday was Valentine’s Day. My birthday was once observed in most southern states as Confederate Memorial Day. Lovers or would-be lovers exchanged cards on Danny’s birthday. Southerners put flowers on graves on my birthday. And Hallmark didn’t make cards for Confederate Memorial Day.

Opera. Danny was the first opera queen I'd met and he introduced me to several others. Now, I didn’t hate opera, but I guess the opera “marker” was missing from my gay DNA. (I was later to realize I was also missing the “show tune” marker.) But Danny was passionate about opera. Saturday afternoons meant listening to live Met broadcasts. When we went to the nearby branch library, I checked out books; Danny checked out opera recordings. He knew each work, he knew each performer – he even knew their nicknames, for gosh sakes. Love Danny, love his favorite operas. Love me, love rock and roll.

Inappropriate laughter. One evening one of Danny’s fellow opera queens dropped by. Despite his passion for opera, Danny was a fairly butch boy. Not so his friend, the ultimate overweight screaming queen, manifesting every effeminate gay stereotype imaginable. I’d never been comfortable with gay guys referring to one another as, “she,” but here I made an exception. The conversation was pleasant enough – even fun – for a while, until we began to regale one another with tales of bad tricks we’d had. “What really turns me off,” she said, “is to get some gorgeous stud home and discover he’s wearing silk panties!”

We all laughed. But then I kept laughing, recalling Danny’s attire that first night at the motel. And I kept laughing. I couldn’t stop. Even as Danny glared at me, I couldn’t stop. I don’t really think I was laughing at Danny, more likely at the thought that this outrageous effeminate queen would take offense at a trick wearing female underwear. But the damage was done. Danny was livid. And he never forgave me.

Which brings up the matter of the bullet hole.

During my first day tour of the apartment, as Danny showed me Charlie's bedroom, he pointed to a hole in Charlie’s bedroom door. “That’s from a bullet I fired once – when we had a fight.” For some reason, this chilling revelation didn’t, well, chill me at first. But now that I’d made Danny really angry, I thought again of the bullet hole. Did he still have the gun? I didn’t really want to stay around and find out. The next day I began apartment hunting.