Defining Us: The Calvin & Eric Story (69 Bottles) (4 page)

Despite all that, the tone in his voice has my whole body humming with a need to reach out for him, to comfort him. Instead, I settle deeper into the bed I’m lying on. “I just want you to tell me what’s going on, but despite what I want from you, I’m not going to push you, Calvin, but you also need to be aware of the fact that no matter what, I’m here to listen, always. If it’s not me you want to talk to, let me find someone you can talk to, like Jess.”

He snorts a humorless laugh. “She’ll just turn around and tell you.”
 

I sigh. “No, we don’t work that way. We’re not a couple of gossip mongers, Cal, we don’t talk about stuff unless it affects one of us.”
 

“Well, this might affect you, more than you know…” He leaves the thought hanging in the air before he walks out of my line of sight. What the hell is that supposed to mean? I don’t ask the question out loud. It feels like prying and the opposite of what I just said I wouldn’t do.
 

I hear the bathroom door click shut.
 

There is a newfound hope that wells inside me at his words… a hope I have no business feeling, a hope that I know will shatter me and keep me hanging and stop me from moving on. Jess is right, maybe I need to find it somewhere within myself to let it go, move on, attempt to move on at least. Once this tour is over and we’re not cooped up together, it might be easier.
 

It’s with that thought that I drift off to sleep to the soothing sounds of the shower. The thought of him naked on the other side of a rather flimsy door brings back the loneliness as sleep takes me.

AFTER my shower, before crawling into bed, I couldn’t stop myself from watching Eric sleep. The soft snores, the steady rhythm of his breathing, the warmth and comfort found in watching him sleep. Loving Eric from afar, that’s the way this has to go. It won’t be easy, but in the end it’s going to be much better, for him.

I crawl into my bed facing him and click off the light. Plunging the room into darkness means I can no longer see him, but I can still hear him breathing softly. I shiver though I’m not cold. Loneliness creeps inside and I drift off to sleep.

“What now?” I ask Dr. V. as I call him.
 

“You’ve got to decide that for yourself, Calvin, no one else can do that for you. If he’s opening the door to listen to what you have to say, let him.”
 

“That’s easier said than done, Doc,” I say as I switch ears with my phone.
 

“Yes it is, it took you nearly three years to tell me everything and even then, I’m not entirely convinced I know it all.” I can hear his determination.

At one point in all of this, he cracked a joke, saying that maybe my revulsion to women was because I was really meant to be with men. That sent all kinds of wild thoughts and impulses through me that sent me running to the bathroom. Needless to say, he dropped that subject and while I was pleased he’d tried to sway me the other way, he felt guilty for igniting a reaction from me. Thereby allowing me to open up to him about everything. Since then, Dr. V, Vincent, has been working with me on my issues, helping me to overcome the fear of intimacy and helping to reverse the impulse of revulsion when it comes to orgasms in general and sex with women.
 

He was finally able to put a name to what they’d done to me. Conversion Therapy, they successfully converted my homosexual tendencies in an attempt to make me straight. But I still have an aversion to women or maybe it’s just orgasms in general, that was the crux of the joke at the time.
 

He thought that they’d turned me against sex period, but only to realize that homosexual thoughts and actions had more impact on me than women did, period.
 

I sigh, “You know more than enough and the stuff you haven’t been told is irrelevant to any form of treatment plan you can concoct.”
 

“Well, you need to decide what is more important to you. You can decide if being with him is most important or if you want to be with someone else. Women no longer seem to be an issue for you, but I also know that you struggle emotionally with them, so ultimately, is he what you really want?”
 

“I like to think so. But I can’t say for certain. I can’t allow myself to think about it too much without triggering a reaction. Something I’ve worked very hard to control.”
 

“You just don’t want people to know,” he counters, and he’s right, I don’t. It’s not so much that I don’t want them to know that I’m pretty confident that I’m gay - well okay, there is that aspect of it too, but that’s beside the point. I don’t need to try and answer a million and one questions about why I seize up, why I throw up or why I freak out.
 

I continue, “Eric and I have known each other for so long, I’m pretty sure, at some point in this journey, we’ve crossed the friendship lines and I no longer know where those boundaries are with us. Not to mention the fact that I’ve been around him for ten years. I know a lot about him, but I don’t know intimate things about him. Neither one of us has ever dated anyone while the other is around. I never became that friend he confided in when shit hit the fan with whoever he was dating, therefore leaving me a very small window of knowledge on how he’d be intimate with someone. Let alone the fact that intimacy, on any level, scares the hell out of me. It’s nearly impossible to be sexually attracted to someone when you can’t get it up at the mere thought of them.” Dr. V and I have no secrets, he knows everything about the issues I have whenever I fight my converted nature, when I tamp it down long enough to attempt to feel anything. While mentally I can process a lot of it, the physical side of things is nearly impossible for me to achieve. In other words, my dick stays limp.
 

In an attempt to try and curb the problem I have, turning things strictly sexual, I watched porn once with two bisexual men who had no issues touching one another. I was great, it was hot, I was turned on until the two guys in the video kissed each other. I immediately went soft and ran for the bathroom. Which, even if it is straight sex, it comes up, but I rarely get off.
 

“What do you think stops you from ‘getting it up’?” Dr. V asks, interrupting my disappointing trip down memory lane.
 

I can picture Dr. V’s sheepish look on his face as he asks me that question. For being a psychologist, he’s quite the prude. It makes me smile. His clinical talk gets old fast, and I imagine he spends most of his night at home either updating patient notes or playing some random computer game. He’s older, but the eternal bachelor. I would imagine it’s not easy dating a doctor of his caliber and he seems like the type that would have given up on it for the sake of his own sanity. In short, he’s a pretty big geek.

“The pit that forms in my stomach the moment I let my mind wander in that direction. Sometimes the nausea isn’t so bad, but it’s usually enough to kill an erection.”
 

“Have you ever tried to imagine him as a woman?”
 

“Uh…” I raise an eyebrow at myself in the mirror hanging on the wall across from me.
 

He chuckles, “Not literally, but when you look at a woman and you become attracted or aroused by her, what is it that turns you on?”
 

“I’m not sure I know how to answer that.”
 

He chuckles again. “Well, next time you look at him, put him into the context of which you would apprise a woman. See if you can get or keep that erection. If you can, then it is a step in the right direction.”
 

“Baby steps,” I mutter. “I’m tired of baby steps.”
 

“Calvin, so much of what you’re feeling is truly 'mind over matter'. Yes, your repulsion is a conditioned response, but much like you did with women, you can overcome this too,” he says confidently.
 

“I wish it were that easy.”
 

“It wasn’t easy with women, was it?”
 

“In a way, yes.” I don’t elaborate.
 

“How so?”
 

I sigh into the phone and fall back onto the bed. Eric left to run an errand, giving me the chance to call Dr. V without interruption from him. I hate having to run away just to make these phone calls, but when you’re only hearing half of it, they can sound pretty fucked up. “Because a woman is a natural partner.”
 

“Ahh, but is a woman a natural partner to you?”
 

I take a deep breath and let it out slowly, “No.”

“Then what’s natural about it? Because society tells you that you should be with a woman?” I nod, realizing where he is going with this. “Because your father thinks that you shouldn’t be with a man?” That question is followed by a pregnant pause, one filled with a promise of more to come. “Who cares?” Dr. V says softly, he knows he’s breaking down that boundary, that barrier within me. “Your father certainly doesn’t and society is a bitch you can’t tame on your own. Society is what it is, Calvin. Just because they may not agree with it, doesn’t mean it should stop you from finding happiness. It doesn’t mean that you can’t be with who you want to be with.”
 

I screw my eyes closed. I can feel the wetness pooling. I don’t need to cry over this, fuck, why do I have to feel this knot in my heart, this gaping hole. I rub at my chest, hoping to soothe the ache.
 

“I think you need to decide, for you, who it is important to. Who will care? When you’ve done that, once you’ve decided that the people who matter to you aren’t going to care about who you’re with, then and only then, can you start to let go. You were told that being gay is the ultimate taboo. You were shown some of the most unimaginable things in order to program your brain into liking and loving women. You were shown things that truly do not exist, not in today’s society. Not in today’s world.” He takes a deep breath and continues, “Calvin, there will always be haters, there will always be right-wing nut jobs, religious groups, and people in society who disagree with being gay and I agree that once out, it won’t be easy for you, but that is a bridge you burn when you have to. Not before you’ve even cleared the water from the river to start building it.”
 

I can’t respond to him, my mind is running a million miles a minute. I know deep down, in my heart of hearts, that he is right. Because I’ve been conditioned to believe that being gay is bad - that’s putting it mildly - it’s hard for me to let go of all the pressures of what I think society would tell me to do. But just because my mind agrees with the right-wing conservatives, my heart certainly does not.
 

After some time passes without saying anything, Dr. V breaks our silence. “You have to tell him. Telling him will put him in his place, either beside you or behind you. If he’s beside you, he will help you, support you, and he will be there to stand with you. Hell, he may even stick up for you, but he needs to understand where you stand, what you feel, how you feel and where it is you want to go from there. If he doesn’t know and he crosses the line, crosses into the place you cannot go, he needs to understand why.”
 

“He has to know it isn’t him,” I interrupt.
 

“Yes, but he won’t know that if you don’t tell him. He’s going to think it is him and that you don’t want him.”
 

I sit back up on the end of the bed. “Yeah, I know. I just…fuck, I don’t know how to tell him.”
 

“When the moment is right, you will. I can’t tell you when to do it or how to do it, just that you need to do it. What about talking to someone else, someone you trust?”
 

“That’s a mighty small list, Doc,” I tell him with a humorless laugh.
 

“Try that first. Try it on for size, see if it fits, then decide.”
 

“Yeah, alright. Thanks, Doc.”
 

“Anytime. You still coming in during the break?”
 

“Yeah.”
 

“Think about this, don’t reject the idea so quickly, actually think about it…”