Intimacy

Bill

After my mother passed away my family wasn't exactly sure what to do with me.  I left high school and cycled for a year, I seem to remember.  I just stopped going one day.  Of course I had to return and get my diploma and it was odd to go back - older and wiser than when I had left - with most of my friends having graduated out.  I have three certificates and a degree.  I am not trumpeting my achievements, only to say I have found in life that a change in circumstances or ambitions usually denotes a plunge into a new knowledge base.

I suppose I was depressed.  The centre of our family was gone and something in place of the wreckage was slowly forming.  My younger sister (I have two) came to my aid.  We started to go to the movies together.  We travelled to England.  And it was she who paid the tuition for my first post-secondary certificate.

Books and writing have always been an important part of my life.  It was my mother's inspiration, for she read to us at night before bed - truly a lost art in child-rearing these days.  I decided upon Journalism at the local college.  My sister paid and I was duly engaged, wiping away the smear of depression and a year lost to introspection.

In the first few days of classes Bill seemed already to have formed a circle around him and was on good terms with a number of my classmates.  Who was this fellow who seemed to so easily garner friends at the embryonic start of my new beginning?

He looked like a poor man's Errol Flynn.  He had black hair and a small moustache.  He spoke with a slight lisp.  The words came out of his mouth sibilantly.  His hand movements always struck me as queer, and the hands themselves, very fine, closely cropped, just the other side of masculine, almost.  He was polite, soft-spoken, exact in dress.  Very Ralph Lauren collegiate.  Lots of crews necks and button-down shirts.  Dress shoes with only four or six eyes, which seemed very funny to me at the time, being in a perpetual succession of sneakers myself.  But then again it was the 80s.

That moustache of his was a bit of a storm warning for me.  He was hairy.  Very.  If you have read any of my other stories, or even just off-handedly glanced at the blog (spotted a sidebar image?) then you know that for me, hairy men are it.  A bell goes off (not to be too Pavlovian).  I am single-minded in my affiliation.  Maybe I am overstating?  No.  No.

It wasn't long before I sensed an intellectual bent in Bill with which I could identify.  Considering the topic we were all studying, it made perfect sense.  We quickly became friends, almost to the exclusion of others.  That, of course, suited me just fine.

His father was a chemistry teacher at the college, and a graduate of Oxford.  Bill's father was one of the poorer post-war entrants to that elite institution who had to work during his break - instead of being able to summer in Capri.  After graduating he hopped a boat to Canada and made good.  This then, is how I came to understand Bill's easy manner with our classmates at the beginning of the year.  He had taken other programs, the children of instructors able to attend classes for free (and for credit) as part of the collective bargaining agreement.

Bill and I saw a lot of each other, at college of course, but outside of it as well.  I do remember an odd indoor soccer game at the college and the shower we took together after.  It was the first time I saw him completely naked.  He was uncut.  He looked like a wet animal.  I fell more in love with him after that.

We also took our college placement together, working at the local newspaper alongside the staff and responsible, for the first time in my life, for the quality of my own work.  I recall a lunchtime with him at the paper, in the shell-shock first few days of being a proper reporter.  He wasn't very hungry and his eyes told me that he didn't think he was cut out to be a writer.  "I'm not sure," he said to me.  Afterwards I picked up a job as a copywriter and I recall him saying, "You got the plum."  I myself didn't think it was much of one, but I appreciated that he was happy for me.

Throughout much of our friendship and many deep talks, he had never hinted at the fact that there was someone in his life.  When he announced he was shortly getting married I was thrown for a bit of a loop.  They were a very cute couple, she very sweet, almost saccharine, which suited his soft-spoken ways.  Bill and I had a mutual friend, a fellow who had played soccer with us, and it was he and his girlfriend I got a ride with to the wedding.  I did feel somehow very exposed, going alone, knowing not one girl, having no one in my life, except Bill.

His poor wife-to-be had somehow picked up a case of Bell's palsy a week or two before the wedding.  She was as annoyed as her sweet nature could muster, which spoke to me of her character, as she just went ahead, plowed through.  I respected her after that.  All I remember of the wedding is the car ride there and their dance to close out their reception - before they changed into street clothes and disappeared.  Otherwise, nothing of that night has stayed in my memory.

A darkened dance floor, a spotlight.  Then I heard the keys and horns of The 5th Dimension.

I never saw him after that, we never stayed in contact.  He was married and there was no place for the single friend, I felt.  I knew I would have been an awkward third wheel, flipping burgers in the backyard, eyeing him over another beer.

2X2

Lounger

Pencil moustache

Le Boeuf (Cruising, continued - or an Adonis on blades)

He was a hockey player, which perfectly fitted the fact he was also Franco-Ontarien.  My grandfather was just such a type, passing from a backwater called Fort-Coulonge into the mineral rich Northeastern Ontario region in search of work.  This was the origin of the trans-migration of the French.  Unfortunately, I never picked up the quaintly ugly and impossible Franglais spoken by this venerable group of Northern Ontario habitants.  Not that it mattered, for as much as they speak it, many are essentially bilingual.

I was standing in a bus shelter.  It had just snowed a pile and heaps of the stuff were deposited in empty spots off the sidewalk.  I was downtown, this corner of the city being a sort of unofficial drop off and pick up point for the public transit.  I heard rowdy voices to my left in the distinct Joual one comes to associate with the French where I am from.  I turned and saw a stream of boys, some in jerseys, with hockey bags and sticks, flow past me.  The last of the boys, tall and solid, stopped.  I looked at him through the filthy shelter window.  He looked at me.  The world could have exploded right then and I'd not have cared.

To arrest a boy in his tracks, immobilise him essentially - stop the world so to speak - was a magical feat seldom left to my short, if curly-haired, presence.  We peered at each other in a beat of time that seemed to encapsulate everything about the man.  I noted his height, his square shoulders, and his letter jacket. Chemistry.

His teammates were now metres ahead of him.  He broke the stare, as if waking from a trance, and without betraying even the slightest annoyance or interruption, continued on as if nothing had happened.  "What the Hell was that all about?" I asked myself.  It was just the beginning.  The first time I saw Le Boeuf was a smack to my face that I desperately held to.  It's too bad that a slap is warm and stings at first, but also fades.

The staring game (see Cruising at University) started up in a small library in one of the colleges haunted by a whole mix of science students.  Again, as the fates would have it, I seemed to be where he was, by no fault or design of my own.  This library was a sort of hidden gem of quiet and civility, many of the others being noisy - and usually peopled by the less studious and rowdier beer drinking university-as-marriage-market types.

On a busy bus one day he happened to be right beside me, a friend of mine on the other side of him.  I got a very good look at him on that occasion.  Some of the French in Canada seem to hold onto a tropical complexion that defies the snow and cold that this race of Gauls emigrated to.  His skin was darkly pigmented, his beard line distinct and dense.  The line of the stubble on his cheek went down past his vocal cords and met his chest hair.  His razor, I'm sure, could have made a continuous line from his bottom lip to his navel.  A square jaw was topped with perfectly chiselled sideburns.  Brown eyes and dark brown hair, cut short.  As we talked with him between us, I couldn't help but look at him, so much so that at one point it was like he was also in the conversation, for he began smiling and nodding.

There is a long corridor that makes up the Arts department of my old university.  It is so long and open and banked by large windows, that it was often used for job fairs, presentations, and product sales.  One day between classes he happened to be ahead of me in that long corridor, knowing I was behind him.  There is something about the gait of a person who knows they're being watched that shows in their steps, as if each foot was planted with a purpose, breaking the natural and unconscious rhythm one takes when unawares.  A friend of mine had a name for it .. Grind Ass.  The observed caboose, unlike the watched kettle, always boils.  His did on that long walk to the Great Hall that day.

I was later either found out by his friends (my bare jaguar gaze) or he said something to them.  One saucy girl in his circle approached me one day and told me to lay off.  "He's not like you," she said loudly for all to hear, "leave him alone."  I didn't have the heart to tell her that he was the one who stopped and stared at me, but felt very ashamed and quite crestfallen anyway.  I half-suspected she had her own designs on him.

I suppose it could have been called a case of casual stalking, but technically I only just saw him from time to time at the university.  If he was in my orbit, I looked at him.  It was hard not to.  He was physically arresting.  An Adonis on blades for Christ's sake.

He had a close male friend who I always saw him with who also played hockey.  If Le Boeuf was my dark fetish, then his friend was of that slice of Québécoise that descended from the Irish.  It is not uncommon in Quebec to come across last names such as McGee, Johnson, Nelligan, or Roy.  A Catholic connection and a wave of emigration to Lower Canada started in earnest around 1815.  It ensured a seam of ginger complexion in the province.  His friend was just such a type, freckled and red-haired.  Shorter than my man on skates, he was what came into my head as the Watch Dog.  Not to denigrate the fellow, but soon whenever I saw Le Boeuf his ginger companion was there, staring me down with just a hint of hatred.

I remember a particularly intense performance by the Watch Dog waiting for another bus in the spring sunshine.  He eyed me with contempt.  What caught my eye, though, was not that ginger stare, but the look of sheepish guilt and half glances from Le Boeuf.  The poor fellow seemed to have mixed feelings, and I sensed he preferred his friends not take his side with the kind of vehemence displayed by the saucy girl or his Watch Dog.  If only we could be happy friends!  Alas my eyes, big and brown, were too hungry and I scared the sheep instead of attracting them.

Shortly after receiving my degree I fell in love with a Sicilian fellow and moved away to the big city.  And here we are, thirty years hence.  The year is pearl.  About five years after I moved away I was visiting the farmhouse and made a trip to a shopping centre across town.  It is situated in what was, and still is, a predominantly french-speaking area.  How should I find myself, but to see him again, and for the last time.  There he was, across from the tacky food court, coming my way.  He was pushing a stroller.  She had a baby in her arms.  Mère et père followed behind.

He is frozen in amber for me. It is hard to believe he is probably in his fifties now, his dark brown hair turned grey and his children grown up. But like someone who has died and never grows old, his face in my head reigns supreme. It's not every day that you can stop a man in his tracks.

Cruising at university

I started seeing him around, walking down the steps of the old library tower usually, in cotton pants and a pastel golf shirt.  I noticed him before he took note of me.  We must have had some sort of symmetry in our class schedules that my memory of him involves this man descending steps in a pair of white runners.  And at the time I guessed correctly, I was lamentably to find out later, that he was straight.  Such is my luck, but as I have written before, the availability of a limp-wristed sure thing up north was as rare as spotting a bird of paradise in a boreal forest.  

Nonetheless, as I have elaborated on more than one occasion in these memoirs, I am that classic breed of homosexual manqué.  But in the desperation of isolation, I was always and ever hopeful.

It was his eyes that gave me hope.  I started to notice him.  He saw me.  I looked at him.  This seeming endless loop of staircase encounters between classes started to resemble the repeated scenes from Last Year at Marienbad.  I looked at him one day and held my glance.  He started to do the same.  He had green eyes, I remember, which dominated his face.  It started now to resemble a match, which was fitting, because I found out later that he was a wrestler.  We played chicken with our glances.  Some days I would win and some days he would win, but not a word was spoken between us.

Sandy-haired on top, he had a wide muscled chest, with a pelt of dark curly hair peaking out of his unbuttoned golf shirt.  Those green eyes I mentioned, like a deer's, sat above a stubbly dimpled chin.  The guy was totally adorable.  For once we were equal in height. He had the extremities that suited a wrestler.  He was compact, thick-limbed, stubby-fingered.  The crème de la crème, a gorgeous rounded ass, fixed on a pair of legs pressing the form of his ever-constant rotation of cotton pants.

The Marienbad stairs continued for some weeks it seemed.  We played with our glances.  Some days I was bold and he, coy.  Some days, the tables turned and I felt like the bottom, he the top.  Breakdown or pin, neither of us was winning and I was tiring of the game.

One day on the steps, I gathered up my courage.  I had to break this deadlock.  I did it disastrously, with a naivete only a farm boy could confabulate in his head. On one of his endless descents after our eyes met, I said, "What's going on?"  Unfortunately, this was said in an accusatory, not in a breezy "What's up?" fashion.  "Fuck off," he said to me.  A friend later laughed at me, "Oh my God, why didn't you just say hi?!"

Then something happened which I didn't expect and had not even been aware of.  Taking literature, I did have to rack up at least one science credit, Biology 101.  It was in a large auditorium that easily sat over 200 students and was often almost full.  One of my classes was close by so I usually got there before time and had the choice of seats.  He must have come from a bit further off and sat above me more often than not, because lo and behold, one day, there he was in that sea of faces.

Changed venue, but the game continued, and he seemed to be enjoying it more than I did.  Biology started to resemble more a classic experiment in psychology than the study of taxonomic rank.  Like a sadist he seemed to take pleasure in knowing that I would look around for him, and as I did, there he was looking at me. Always. Boldly.  He was asserting dominance.  I let him win, for I did like to look at him.

Then one day he came early and sat down right beside me in the almost empty auditorium.  This completely unnerved me.  All I could do was nod to him, I had lost my voice.  I think I was literally shaking.  I could feel my pen in my hand, quivering.  He nodded back, the Bro Code of an even playing field.  All was forgiven, we could rest.

Things moved quickly after that.  Carrying himself as he did (that is, handsomely), he was able to insinuate himself into the small group of friends that I knew.  Who of them he knew, or how he did it, I don't know.  I shortly found myself sitting across from him, he having lunch with my girls.

Then one day we were sitting alone together, the girls pairing to study, or absent, or hungover.  So there we sat.

"I know you like me that way," he said.  Headlock. Take down.
"Yes, I said, It's true."
"I like girls, " he said.
"I know that, " I said.
"I was playing with you," he said.

I can't remember his name.  For the life of me I wish I could.  There are a handful of men who I've stumbled across in my life, having not paid enough heed to recall their names.

We chatted after that and I explained myself, how I had seen him, how I found him so attractive that my eye contact turned into a sort of obsession - which only increased a tension that ended with him insulting me on those stairs.  He was ok with it, he said, but re-affirmed his preference in girls.

Emboldened, I let him know how I really felt.  "If I had my chance, I told him basso profundo, I'd eat you alive."

Those sweet green doe eyes widened into a sort of heterosexual fear.  I was pleased with myself.  I had won the match.