Missing the Big Picture (25 page)

Two weeks later, after I told my program director that I had a job offer at the AIDS Council, my supervisor at the workshop suddenly left and her position became vacant. I applied for that position and got it. I was now a program coordinator and a supervisor of three individuals. I got a raise but was only making $27,000 a year. I had a bachelor’s degree and almost three years’ experience working with the disabled. The job always kept me on my feet; the disabled people I worked with were always one step ahead of me.

I had one client who would call off work all the time. Each time, he would always give way too much information. One time he called in stating that he had to go to a biopsy and have an enema. Another time he called in and said he had a back virus. Another time he had diarrhea and gave the consistency of his bowel movements. Once he called in stating that the power went off in his house and he was going to stay home from work to make sure that it stayed on.

There were the times when I had to literally chase clients who went running from the workshop or would interrupt meetings. We also had one client with Asperger’s syndrome who would stay in the bathroom for up to five hours at a time. He, too, enjoyed telling everyone about his bowel movements. I liked my job at the workshop, but I realized that human services work could never pay the bills. I decided to go back to school, and I entered the most demanding, underappreciated, yet most rewarding field in existence: nursing.

I think what I learned most about the workshop was that people with mental retardation are very sexual beings. There were incidents when I would have to investigate two people with Downs syndrome touching genitals and would remind them sternly that their behavior was inappropriate for work. Once I had to call a residential manager and tell her about an inappropriate-touching incident that occurred with one of her residents when the phone cut out. I called her back and asked, “Where was I?” She then said, “You said something about penis.” It was a great job and a terrific program. It was a great opportunity to see people who were labeled as mentally retarded have jobs, earn a paycheck, or scream in pure ecstasy when they were nominated “worker of the month.”

I was now in nursing school. I couldn’t work two jobs and go to nursing school, so in July 2007 I resigned from the adult group home. I definitely enjoyed my time there. It was the only job I ever had that when I walked into work, the clients would tell me that they missed me and that they were excited when they found out I was coming in. I was able to go to amusement parks, concerts, movies, and Lake George as part of my job. I got free food and hugs from the clients, and overall, I became a better person. I almost felt like a parent sometimes, when I would see one of the clients walk out of the house in the fall without his coat and had to fight with him to wear it.

I think the resident who was disappointed with me leaving the most was Anthony. My last day, I picked him up from a visit at his mother’s house. His mother and brother were there, and they were telling Anthony, “Don’t worry—he said he would come back and visit.” Just as I overheard them, I noticed that they were standing near where Carmine’s senior picture hung in his grandmother’s house. I was glad that I was given the opportunity to work with Anthony. Carmine’s family is made up of very nice people, and it’s too bad that all that high school drama made us enemies. I was glad that I was able to rectify something.

When I was in nursing school, I still worked full time as the program coordinator at the workshop. In my free time, as much I tried to stop, I would go online to various gay websites, trying to meet men. There were some situations that I wish I hadn’t gotten myself into, but I was too stupid to avoid them. In 2008, I walked into this man’s house and, upon entering the kitchen, he turned off all the lights. I couldn’t see anything, but I could feel his body rub up against me. I asked him to turn the lights on, but he said he didn’t want to, so I left.

I also turned down a lot of offers, and I often wonder what could have been. There were many guys looking for threesomes with their friends, and there was an older gentleman who wanted to role-play with him being a coach and me being the “bad jock.” I didn’t like sleeping around, but I was lonely and wanted to be with someone. It was really embarrassing that I was worse at dating men than I was at dating women. I did make some platonic friends online, and I would go to the gay bars occasionally. I never told my co-workers, my other straight friends, or my family. I just couldn’t accept myself. Luckily, I did find another hobby that occupied some time.

Even though I didn’t like talking in front of others or being the center of attention, in my early twenties I wanted to start doing standup comedy. Nobody could believe that I went up on stage in front of a crowded audience. The first time I did so was in November 2005 for a contest that the Albany Comedy Works was having for amateurs. I went up first and only did two minutes. Saint John’s, my former high school, had made the news after an English teacher was busted having sex with four of her students. Since it was a Catholic school, the first joke I made was that the only Catholic value that any of the students were practicing was that nobody was using contraceptives.

Then in 2006 and 2007, I took some comedy classes with an area comedian named Mike Irwin. I was still nervous on stage, but I liked doing it and received some laughs. I always looked innocent and very nice, but when I got on stage, I made some risqué jokes. I asked Mike once for advice because I felt awkward talking about sex with an older audience. Mike told me, “Don’t worry. Old people have fucked.” Mike passed away in 2008. I wrote on the funeral’s guestbook page that I went from somebody who nobody could imagine doing comedy to making people laugh in a stand-up comedy show.

Then, in December 2008, Albany-based comedian Greg Aidala started an open-mic comedy series every Sunday at the Lark Tavern. I would open every set I did by saying, “Yeah, so has anybody ever tried to pick somebody up and you know you’re not getting anywhere? Like, they say, ‘Luke stop; Luke, leave me alone,’ or ‘Luke, if you talk about feeling my boobs again I’m going to have to tell Mom.’” It usually went over well. I loved doing comedy because I was an outsider all of my life, and I loved to see people in the audience smiling and laughing. Stand-up comedy shows were a great way for people to forget all their problems and just laugh. I was only heckled a few times. I got called Charlie Brown by a woman who thought I looked like the
Peanuts
character, and when I did a set about the slang term
tea bagging
, one gay man was offended and said, “No balls in my face.”

I graduated from nursing school in May 2010. While most college graduates who graduated in 2010 struggled to find a job, in March 2010, two months before I finished my degree, I already had a job offer. In May 2010, I began working as a registered nurse at a hospital on a floor that handled all sorts of medical issues, including some HIV patients.

In October, I noticed that one HIV-positive patient had visitors I recognized from the gay dating/hookup sites. I had seen these people online, but I’d never talked to any of them. When I saw the patient getting discharged, I recognized the guy picking him up—he was somebody I’d had sex with twice.

I was nervous. But since I’d never come out to anybody, I just kept it to myself. Somebody I had a random hookup with was very close to somebody who had full-blown AIDS. I always used protection but was still afraid. Luckily, I got tested for HIV soon after, and it came back negative.

There still wasn’t much that could keep me from looking for hookups. I was a virgin until I was twenty-four, and now there was so much opportunity to get with other men, thanks mainly to the Internet. Only a month after my scare, I was again on the gay site
Adam4Adam.com
. I started chatting with somebody who was muscular and tall. Pat said he was looking to hook up and wanted me to come over. He said his roommate was going to be there, but that he would be sleeping on the couch.

When I got out of my car, I noticed that Pat was very good-looking—even better than his pictures promised. Most people I met online weren’t as good-looking as their pictures. I was excited as I walked into his house, and he had me wait in the kitchen for a few minutes. Then I heard a voice from the other room. “Hey Luke, what’s going on?” I couldn’t see who it was at first, but then I saw that it was Jake, an HIV-positive man I’d met through another friend a few years earlier. Jake was nice, but he was careless and had HIV and past histories of syphilis and IV drug abuse. I went over and talked to him for a few minutes.

Jake ended up being a big cockblock—even bigger than if I’d seen Chris Hansen from
Dateline NBC.
In the back of my mind, I kept thinking to myself,
What am I doing here? I’m not going to hook up with somebody who I know could be HIV positive, and if he’s good friends with Jake, he probably made some bad choices like Jake did along the way.

Pat then brought me into the bedroom. I didn’t tell him that I knew Jake was HIV positive. I always respected people’s boundaries and didn’t tell anybody anyone had HIV. Preventing STDs and the transmission of HIV is everyone’s responsibility and cannot be blamed on just one person. Pat still wanted to have sex, and I told him that I was clean, got tested routinely, and wouldn’t have sex without a condom. Then I turned the tables and asked him if he got tested or was clean. He wasn’t going to ask me about any type of disease; he just was going to have unprotected sex with an anonymous partner. He really wouldn’t give me an answer. Finally he hesitated and said, “Yeah, that’s fine if you want to use condoms.” Then he left the room. While he was outside the room, I noticed some prescription medications near the bed. I never thought I’d be the type to snoop around someone’s personal belongings, but I never thought I would have random sex with strangers. I’d already broken one belief, so why not break another? From the medications and my work as a nurse, I strongly suspected that he was HIV positive.

Pat came back into the room, and we made a mutual decision that I would leave. The next day I saw Pat again on Craigslist, posting an ad. In the ad he said he was HIV negative. Then somebody posted another personal directly near it that said Pat had been HIV positive for years and was lying about it.

I didn’t tell anybody about that story. I had a lot of gay friends, but I wouldn’t tell them that story because I thought they would be more judgmental than my straight friends.

Despite my hookup horror stories, I would still sometimes find myself online. One of the main reasons why I was so ashamed that I was gay was because I was Catholic. As a child, I read the Albany Catholic Diocese newspaper,
The Evangelist
, and I’m pretty sure I was one of the few people under the age of seventy-five to do so. There are many people who don’t believe you can be gay and religious at the same time. Since I’ve been on the gay scene, going to gay bars and meeting people from the Internet, I’ve become more empathetic to people and their issues. In college, I often followed who was dating who and used the terms
whore, slut
, and
douchebag
loosely. I think that if I had been heterosexual, I might have continued to be judgmental. But I feel empathetic to people who sleep around with multiple sex partners. Life is difficult, and there are too many judgmental people out there just making it harder for everyone. I still love God and Jesus, and I believe that they would rather have me be empathetic than judgmental.

I can say that after all of these experiences, I’m content and happy with my life now. I went from being only an inch away from killing myself when I was eighteen to graduating college, working as a registered nurse, and doing stand-up comedy. I met a lot of people during my life, and some people I wish I hadn’t met at all. I didn’t write this book out of anger; I wrote it to help make people more aware of mental health issues, bullying, abusive and controlling adolescent relationships, and the health risks of casual sex. I wrote it to help make the world a safer place for those people who, like me, hear voices in their minds, get bullied and don’t see a way out, or feel trapped by labels or stereotypes that doesn’t fit them.

Comedian Mike Irwin had a line in his act making fun of people who think the world is coming to an end because it’s so corrupt. He would joke, “I don’t think women showing some muffin tops and some Internet porn is enough to damn the world to hell.” In fact, if Jesus was around today, I think he would think we’re too hard on one another, and that the lack of compassion and disregard that people have for one another is the world’s greatest sin.

E
PILOGUE

S
o what is my life like today? My mother married Jeremy in 2011 after eight years of co-habitation. I now have a stepbrother, a stepsister, their spouses, two wonderful nephews, and an adorable niece. I try to do stand-up comedy on a weekly basis, whether it’s a small paid gig or at an open mic. In 2011, I beat out close to forty Albany, New York, comics to win the first ever Capital District Last Comic Standing competition. I’ve done comedy in front of a small crowd of ten people to a crowd of over five hundred people. I’m Facebook friends with a lot of my old friends/enemies from high school and now encourage them to attend my shows. Some of my former classmates have seen my shows, and they were shocked that I could change from being the quietest kid in the school to doing perverted stand-up comedy. I did see Eric a few months ago at a local bar. He is now a great father to a little boy. He doesn’t remember throwing me in a box when I was thirteen or any of the other times he was mean to me. Unfortunately, I still do. I actually had a great time talking to him, as he’s a good person and still one of the funniest people I know. I was lucky this time that I wasn’t the butt of his jokes.

My grandmother lives alone in an assisted-living apartment building, and I see her once a week. I still love my grandmother. My mother and aunt still attend to all of her needs, and I help them out when I can. Although she is still very anxious and obsessive at times, it was nice to see her on Christmas be able to watch her great-grandchildren open up toys that say “Fisher-Price” and she was calm and not agitated at all.