If You Knew Then What I Know Now (22 page)

Besides that night with my mother and my question, no one in my family ever talked about what gay was. And if AIDS came up, it was because of the news, and the stacks of papers and
Time
forever piling on the living room carpet or kitchen table. One Saturday afternoon, when I was a sixth or seventh grader, we met one of my aunts for lunch at Wendy's, and she whispered that we shouldn't touch the knobs of the restroom doors after washing our hands at the sink because of AIDS. I told her that you couldn't catch it that way, and she shook her head. “They don't really know how it's spread.” But this would have been in 1987 or 1988 when they actually did.

Around that time, I remembered that as a six-month old, I'd fallen off the countertop in the kitchen. My head was concussed and my skull was cracked, and the ER doctors kept me in the hospital overnight to track my vital signs. This would have been late December 1975 or early January 1976. Thinking of the other boy with my name, and picturing myself wriggling and screaming on that kitchen floor, I reasoned that I must have received a blood transfusion. It seemed impossible that I hadn't. And I knew that the blood saved in hospitals for such emergencies wasn't tested for HIV in those years because the virus wasn't even around yet. So at the age of thirteen, without any actual evidence, I convinced myself I was HIV positive.

It's difficult to understand why I so easily accepted that fate—why, one might say, I wanted to have AIDS. Because I didn't ever tell anyone about my self-diagnosis—I wasn't looking for sympathy or all the attention the other Ryan got for his disease. But I knew something separated me from the other boys in my class. Ever since fourth grade, the word “gay” and its
harsher synonyms had followed me down school hallways, into locker rooms and school cafeterias. One afternoon in eighth grade, in the after-lunch rush of boys in the restroom trying to beat the fifth-hour bell, I stood at a urinal. Over the hum of hand dryers and swooshes of flushing, one of my classmates shouted. “Hey, Ryan. Do you ride the cotton pony?” It took a couple of years before I figured out his euphemism, but the fact that my neck still changed from pale to red in about two seconds was all the confirmation he and the others in the room needed. I wasn't a boy like they were, and it was in my blood. Maybe deciding that I had AIDS was the proof I wanted for that difference—something real, measurable and best of all, not my fault.

 

It's July 25, 2008, and I'm back in Chicago for the weekend. Two years ago, I left this city for a small town—the one with the lone gay bar—and it was there, almost exactly a year after my eight-year boyfriend left me, that I met the new man I'm dating. Before we met, he'd been planning to move to Chicago, and a few months later he did—settling into the same neighborhood I'd left a few years earlier. We hadn't wanted to stop seeing each other, so now we visit back and forth. It says something when you're willing to drive four hours for a glimpse of somebody and people I know call him my “boyfriend,” but he and I don't use that word. We can't even bring ourselves to say “relationship.” We were both hurt very much the last time.

On this date ten years ago, I came out of the closet, and we've returned to the site of my admission—a gay bar. Coming out of the closet
in a gay bar
seems sort of beside the point, but for years and years before that big night, I could very easily insist I wasn't gay even while dancing under spinning lights to “Disco Inferno.” I used to be a perfect liar.

This new man I'm dating keeps shaking his head, stunned I remember the exact date of my anniversary. This bar is only a few blocks away from his studio apartment, but tonight is the first time he's been inside. The bartender scoots our drinks toward us. He's handsome and tall, probably in his late forties, and he grins at us in the crooked, devilish way of handsome, tall bartenders in gay bars. He was a bartender here ten years ago, though his eyes are gripped a little deeper now with crow's-feet, and the shiny round at the crown of his head has widened. After coming out, I became a regular at this bar and met every man I dated in Chicago here. It's a place full of ghosts. In those days, I wouldn't have needed to order my drink—this bartender would have just seen my empty glass, and fixed me another. I had to actually order tonight, and I'm crestfallen that I wasn't recognized but also relieved. And anyway, my drink has changed.

“So where would you have been ten years ago?” I ask my new guy. It had been a Saturday night. I was twenty-three at the time and here with my best friend who was visiting for the weekend. She was the first person I had wanted to tell. In fact, the week before she arrived, as I drove home each evening from
my office, I practiced. With the radio turned down, I said aloud, “I am gay. I am gay. I am gay.” I wanted to run any quiver out of my voice. In the end, I'd need a couple of drinks to even get started, and we'd have to lock ourselves in the women's restroom so we could cry.

His eyes point to the ceiling and while he thinks, I study his marvelous chin. He's ten years younger than me so he would have been in sixth grade. I squint, picturing his thirteen-year-old self—long limbs, giant feet and his face bare without his beard. This slouching imaginary kid isn't very far in front of his first dates with men and then a bit later, his first real boyfriend—all of it adding up to more experience at twenty-three than I have now in my thirties because I dragged my feet for so many years, then lived with the same man for most of a decade.

After my breakup, I hated seeing gay male couples, particularly if they looked happy, and especially in the wedding announcement portraits of the Sunday
New York Times
. I was jealous, of course, and angry, and I silently cursed them for having what I was missing.
One of you will leave soon and the other one is too stupid to see it.
I often wondered if I'd ever again believe any man's promises. In my worst moments, I doubted it was possible for two men to ever successfully commit to each other, thinking the bad rap we get for being shallow and promiscuous was true. Naïve as it was, I felt like the solitary romantic, even if couples of all kinds have been messing around with tradition and commitment for decades. The best we could hope for, it seemed
in those days, and sometimes still does, was sex every once in a while with mostly bearable periods of loneliness in between.

My new guy scratches his whiskers. “Probably I was at one of my dad's basketball games, so the high school gym.” He shrugs, and I smile because he's just not old enough to be this sentimental. “You ready for the historic tour?” I ask, hopping off my stool. “Grab your beer. I'll show you the
actual
spot.” How strange to share this place with a man as old now as I was then, and to realize I never thought about love until I was out of it.

 

The boa constrictor needs the light on every minute of his life, and he curls around it to squeeze the heat with his scales. It's two in the morning, and my boyfriend and I are in the basement bedroom of his nephew, the second of his older brother's three sons; it's the last night of our weekend visit to Ohio. I'm across the room from the boa constrictor's aquarium, stretched out on a threadbare sofa that smells suspiciously like dogs. My boyfriend sleeps on a mattress between the desk holding the boa's aquarium and a wall full of shelves with the other snake, a ball python, the lizard, and the scorpion.

Of course at home in Chicago, we sleep together in the bed we've shared for years. I have rules about being touched when I'm trying to fall asleep, so we rest sort of shoved against each other with an extra pillow between us that we've named “Brown” for the color of the pillowcase, as in, “Stop hogging ‘Brown,' and put him back in the middle, please.” Before I have the chance
to think that it's odd to sleep in a basement with three reptiles and a murderous insect—whatever scorpions are—I realize it probably can't be any stranger than two men sleeping every night with a pillow that has a name.

Under me, the sofa is lumpy but comfortable and covered in worn bed sheets. Despite the light, I'm turned toward the boa, watching him because I can't sleep. The cylindrical bulb hangs over the tangled driftwood inside the aquarium. The snake unfurls his head and slender neck from the tighter mass of himself and pokes around the light, one way and then the other, as though he can't find a good sleeping spot. My boyfriend does the same thing on his borrowed mattress. He shifts under his blanket, wiggles his butt, and by the pace of his breathing, I know he's awake.

“Hey,” I whisper across the darkness. He replies with more wiggling and a deep short groan—the sound he makes in the middle of the night when one of us rolls out of a dream and bumps the other or he wakes up freezing because I've stolen the quilt. It means he isn't fully asleep but neither is he awake. As soon as I hear that little grunt in this basement, and away from the privacy of our bedroom, it feels wrong.

I whisper, “No,” but now he's gone, fallen into real sleep, simply and unnoticed, as usual. He needs to lie still for only about a minute in order to sleep soundly for eight hours. My slumber is more conditional and involves complete darkness and silence, and the following items: a glass of water, tissues, my cell
phone, and ChapStick. Right now, it's all balanced on a weight bench next to the sofa.

My boyfriend's brother knows about us. His wife also knows because he told her after my boyfriend came out to him. We don't know if the boys know, and my boyfriend hasn't found the right moment this weekend to ask. They're all teenagers, so it seems that they probably figured it out on their own. Why else would their uncle keep bringing his roommate to family barbecues, graduations, and anniversary parties?

One of the boys is watching a movie upstairs on the big TV next to the tank with the piranhas. It's something loud about robots; mechanical voices and machine squeaks drift down the stairs. Tomorrow morning, we're getting up early to drive the six hours of barns and trees back home. I shove my shoulder down into the cushion and knead the pillow with my cheek, still facing the snake light. I thought the sofa was keeping me awake, but hearing the soft, familiar snore across the room, I think I'm not used to sleeping like this—in the same room with him but not
with
him. Even if I usually can't fall asleep with him touching me, there's something so lonely about the room, this sofa, that snake.

I could sleep with him. Just get up and in that bed and no one would ever know, and it could be as easy as tiptoeing across the carpet, sliding under the blanket and into my place on his left side. But what if his nephew needs something in the morning, tries to sneak in for a T-shirt, or to feed his zoo, and
sees us, in
his
bed? Then I remember my boyfriend's brother—the kid's dad—never said we had to sleep separately. When he showed us his son's room where we'd sleep for the weekend, he first demonstrated how to keep out the dogs by wedging a dumbbell against the door, and then he nodded to the far corner of the room, at the aquarium on the desk.

“The only thing is,” he said. “You can't turn off that light.”

“The light for that snake has to stay on all night?” I asked, too loudly.

“Yeah, you can't turn off the snake light,” he said, shrugging.

My boyfriend and I had separated ourselves automatically, without a word between us or for any good reason.

 

So how do we learn to be in love? My friend Michael has no answer except to say that's some heavy thinking. My friend Brian isn't sure he wants to answer because he's afraid of sounding like a cliché, or worse, an old, old man. But when he does, he remembers his first boyfriend, both of them eighteen, both of them stepping out of their closets and into each other's lives. And he cringes at what he considered romantic back then—cheesy poems, piano serenades, feeding each other. But think about hetero kids, he says. They get to start dating when they're twelve, so we shouldn't feel bad about being corny because we were making up for lost time. Andrew says old movies. Jordan doesn't think he ever learned how to be in love with a man. I treat my boyfriends like buddies, he says, because friendship
with guys is the only model there is. And how does that usually work out? He laughs, and says one word: disappointing. Paul says watching his parents. He learned about commitment and fidelity from how his mom stuck with his dad no matter what. Kevin doesn't have any idea but thinks it's ironic that pretty much the only time we get to see two gay men doing anything together is in porn, and those construction crews and corrals of cowboys aren't very affectionate. About my question, Landon just says that it's interesting.

My ex-boyfriend, the one who left me after eight years, who lives now with his new boyfriend says my question is hard. “I know,” I say, and I'm not sure if he means it's a difficult one, or it's difficult because I'm the one asking. “I think for me learning to fall in love with a man came from instinct,” he says. I don't want him to think that I'm asking about us, so I make my voice sound like a newscaster's—the steady tone, whether they're delivering good or bad news. “What instinct?” “For completeness,” he says. “After coming out it was easier because the secrecy was gone.” Before that, it could have been anyone, it didn't matter who, it was always only fooling around. “Has that instinct been revised?” I ask before I think enough about it. I'm not sure I should hear his answer, and then I wonder if his new relationship is more likely to last because he learned from our failure. “Yes,” he says. “It's less about emotions now,” and he smiles quietly. “And more about commitment.” Does that answer the question?