The May sweeps period of television used to be when the shows put out their best rating-grabbers, often ending with a dramatic cliffhanger to keep people talking and guessing for the rest of the summer, hopefully enough to insist that they return in the fall. I loved the drama of it all, and I have no shame in aging myself to say that I was just coming into childhood cognizance when the big cliffhanger of the 80’s left everyone wondering ‘Who killed J.R.?’ on ‘Dallas’. In fact, that whole scenario informed a substantial part of what I would later do in life in that I would do my damndest to be the person who was on everyone’s lips, the guy who, if knocked off, would inspire a frenzy of suspects too numerous to narrow down because he’d created such a stir his entire life. It’s not easy to cull that kind of broad and sustained hatred, not the kind that makes people actively want to kill you – but that didn’t stop me from trying, whether intentionally or subconsciously. All these years later, I remember J.R., but not the would-be killer, because sometimes that’s how life works. The villains get all the glory, even when they become the victims; I learned that dangerous lesson and ran with it the wrong way.
The cliffhanger from this previous post found my much-younger self having just procured the phone number of a gentleman who was the first person to show any interest one following the fallout from the first man who kissed me. That fallout was more damaging than originally understood, and if there is any excuse to offer for my bratty behavior, it’s that. And it still won’t exonerate my guilt at how I treated another human being. Back then, I simply didn’t care. Not about him, and certainly not about myself.
Once upon there was light in my life
Now there’s only love in the dark
Nothing I can say
A total eclipse of the heart…
Back to that train platform on a glorious spring afternoon, where I stared down at the name and phone number written by a man I’d not even exchanged a word with on the train. In neat block figures, it was such a simple and seemingly-insignificant thing, but at that pre-internet time it was the only way I would have of finding out who he might be, the only way of making a tenuous connection. Fate and destiny and luck and coincidence informed so much of our lives before it was all so readily available online. It made things more difficult in many ways, but oh so much richer and more meaningful. It was as if the stars guided us rather than manipulated keystrokes to research and become who we thought someone might want us to be. All I had to go on was his smile, already fading in my mind’s memory, a name and a phone number. And somehow it was enough.
Never one to indulge in playing the hard-to-get games (as later suitors would unfortunately discover) I only waited a few hours to call him, because there was never any question on whether I would call. (Cliffhanger my ass.) The question was what I would say or do when I did call.
Without deliberately intending to do so, I kept my aloofness and distance, mainly from habit but also from the recent wounds that part of me realized hadn’t even started to heal. When I dialed the number from my dorm room, it was more of a dare to myself, a challenge to get back into the dating pool, and a gauntlet to see how bad I might be.
That spring and summer I was completely channeling Linda Fiorentino’s ferocious character in ‘The Last Seduction’ (not at all a worthy romantic aspiration by any stretch of the imagination) – my heart was on guard and safely barricaded from the previous fall’s romantic fiasco, and this gentleman, sweet as he might be, would pay the price of stumbling into such wayward behavior.
I don’t remember much about that first phone call. He had a deep voice and sounded slightly nervous. He still lived at home with his parents and was in Boston for an interview I think. He was also apparently not out yet, and in the debilitating way I had back then of comparing anything and everything, I realized that I had the upper hand there. I would give him his first book of gay literature, bring him to his first Broadway play, and introduce him to a world of pants entirely bereft of pleats. More than that, I would rain down emotional hell-fire, mental manipulation, and just plain meanness and cruelty. It would amaze me how much a young man could get away with when someone was taken with his beauty, especially when he never felt beautiful.
With just a few scant weeks before the end of that spring semester, it seemed futile to me to start a new relationship, especially when I’d be away for the entire summer, but somehow we managed to meet at least once or twice, taking a couple of steamy car-rides and pausing for parking-lot make-out sessions where I felt keenly that he was way more into me than I would ever be into him. That was good though, in the warped way my mind was processing romance at the time. Better to be the object of desire and have some say in the way things went. At the end of it all, I gave him my home phone number, and throughout the ensuing spring and summer we’d share sporadic phone calls. I remember visiting friends in Rochester and sneaking out to the car on a rainy May night to call him. It was raining and ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ came on the radio and I wondered at what I was doing. Every call was a dangled promise, a dare to keep thinking of me – of us, if we could fathom such a term at sun an early point – and he held on, seemingly as lonely as I would never admit myself to be.
I’d told him about a gay novel I’d just read and he sought it out and read it, and the idea that I might have such influence on another person made him suddenly repellant to me. His pronouncement that he might be falling in love, pulled forcefully from his lips with the blunt lack of precision by my immature guile, only emboldened me to be cold and dismissive. Not seeing myself as worthy of being loved, I derided anyone else who saw the opposite. Yes, I was that far lost, that fucked-up. And the more I pushed him away, the crueler I could be, the more we both inadvertently played into ‘The Rules’. By the time I returned in the fall, torturing him by phone felt like a cozy habit, and when he presented me with a poster of the cover of the book I’d suggested to him, his earnest hope of pleasing me carried the whiff of everything repulsive to me. I hated myself instantly for feeling that, but knew no other way around it, or any way to hide it.
When met with such disdain, he didn’t fight or flee, but rather tried to wrap his head around it. I could see him sometimes trying to work it out in his head, and feel even more contemptuous annoyance toward him for that. Far from my finest moment, this wasn’t helping me heal, or helping me move on, and rather than be honest and cut it all off, I kept it going, trying to be sweet and kind when I saw his hurt, trying to temper and reconcile the lack of respect I had for him with the genuine kindness he tried to show me. To my detriment and shame, I strung him along as a plaything rather than anyone serious, discarding his feelings in a way strikingly similar to how I’d been treated a year or so before. It was so obvious I made myself sick seeing it all play out, and so I treated him even worse, seeing what horrendous things I could say and get away with, defiling and degrading him in and out of the bedroom. There was nothing precious about such a power play, and something in me knew it would harden my heart in ways that might not be undoable, but I didn’t care.
I’ll write about the rest some other night, later in spring, when the dander is up again – when I don’t need to sleep for the start of another week…
Once upon a time I was falling in love
Now I’m only falling apart
Nothing I can do
a total eclipse of the heart…
