A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to My Sexual Orientation Read online

  Let me say something about the Kay-Mart philosophy. Forget all the commercials on TV with happy shoppers going down well-stocked aisles talking to cream-of-the-crop professional assistants. Actually, the workers are called asso-ciates. Notice the word ass hidden at the beginning, which pretty much sums up what corporate thinks of their employees.

  Furthermore, for a while, the commercials boasted that associates were being retrained. It never happened! There was never any retraining, and not much general training to speak of, since they would never pay for it.

  Dustin Hoffman said it best about a similar company in Rainman: “K-Mart sucks."

  * * * *

  Despite the bleak beginning, the summer of 1989 was an eventful one. I'd really hoped to get a second job, one that was five days a week in the morning and paid a hell of a lot more than what I was currently getting, but that wasn't to be. There was just too much going on.

  A friend of mine, Jeremy, was hit by a car while riding his bike across an intersection. The woman driving said the sun was in her eyes and she never saw him. Apparently, she must have missed the red light, too. I visited Jeremy in the hospital once, but it was too depressing to see him hooked up to so many machines, conscious yet unable to recognize who I was. It scared the hell out of me.

  It didn't help that I hated hospitals. For some reason, they reminded me of the way some guys talk about how women with fake breasts feel to the touch. They say there's something ominous and sterile about them, a real strange combination.

  Jeremy once told me a story about how he used to think that women had their boobs filled with helium, and that was why some of them were so large. Where the hell people got these ideas about sex and the opposite gender is beyond me.

  With the exception of a health course, I never had sex education classes when I was in high school. Once in grade school—sixth grade, maybe—we had a slide show presentation that didn't tell us any more than we already knew, which was very little.

  "Your bodies are changing.” Well, no kidding! Tell me how. Show me some Polaroids. Let's see some people involved in one of those Kodak moments. How about letting us in on some of what we can expect to be participating in later on in life.

  No such luck.

  Instead of naughty little revealing shots of nudity and sex, we had a slide show and the only form of legal pornography available in the public school system: National Geographic. If Jeremy thought some of the women he saw had large breasts, he never bothered with this magazine. When not reading the standard Hardy Boys mysteries, the guys’ noses were all buried in National Geographic. Doesn't that paint a pretty picture for sexual awareness in the 70s and early 80s? It's a twisted way to grow up thinking that when a woman is naked she's also holding a blow-gun.

  I sincerely doubt that I made a conscious decision to go the gay route because of that, however. If nothing else, it made me respect women all the more because they were just as capable of beating someone's ass as any man I'd ever seen.

  Despite all the material presented to us, we still didn't know what sex was. Even after the experimentation I did with some of my friends, I never really knew if I was doing things the right way or not.

  My father sat me down one night for “the talk” with “the books.” I think this was in fourth grade. Anyway, I knew what felt good when I was naked with another person—a guy at least—but I had no idea they had instruction manuals for it.

  If I recall correctly, one of the books was titled Where Did I Come From? Let me just say that it told me way more than I ever wanted to know about my mother. There seemed to be a section missing, though, one about sex between two guys. Since Dad didn't mention it to me, I guessed sex was just supposed to be the male/female thing—or had I discovered something the authors hadn't?

  Dad got through that night pretty much unscathed, though I don't know if he expected to encounter problems or questions he couldn't handle. Thinking back to the grading system they had back then in school, I would have given him an O for outstanding.

  Naturally, I did have a question for my father, and it related to that white stuff the book called “sperm.” I'd yet to see anything like that come out of me, and I wondered what it looked like so I would know in the future when it did. Despite his assurances that I would know when the time came, I demanded a description. I guess I can be sadistic that way.

  Then too, so can he. I avoided Oreo cookies and tapioca pudding for months after that.

  * * * *

  Two really cool things did eventually happen to me that summer. First, I got a car, or rather, a battle tank. My first car was an old maroon ‘78 Chevy Malibu. Suffice to state that this thing would have given Stephen King's Christine nightmares, to say nothing of what it must have contributed to the pollution hanging over the suburbs of Detroit. Mom and Dad didn't need to buy me a beeper to know where I was. All they had to do was look outside with a pair of binoculars and scan the distance for the smoke signals I was sending them compliments of the oil I was burning.

  From the moment the damn thing died, I vowed I would never get such an old, ugly car again. No way! I wanted style, something I could show off, something I could drive without other motorists cursing me because they couldn't breathe driving behind me.

  Mom, Dad, and I drove around for a couple of weeks and looked at cars, but they thought I was being too picky or too much of a smartass. Maybe I did set my sights a little high, but I felt they were setting theirs a little low. I wanted something that would take people's breath away. They wanted something affordable that wouldn't take our combined savings away.

  The battle was joined for two weeks. At the end of that time, my input was deemed no longer necessary. There was a car for sale in a Bob Evans Restaurant parking lot that my parents looked over and thought was worth checking into. My part in this adventure was to write down all vital information about the vehicle, including the name and number of the person selling it and also where we saw it. I didn't especially care for the car but decided to take another route other than verbal to display my feelings on the matter.

  It was embarked on shortly after we got home when Mom called the seller up.

  "Hello, I'm calling regarding the car you have for sale up at Robert Evans’ parking lot. No, Robert Evans. Oh, wait a second. My son wrote the infor-mation down. It should read ‘Bob Evans.’ Yes, I'm sorry. He's a little strange that way. Yes, I know. Children. What? Oh, no, he just turned nineteen, not nine. It surprises us, too.

  "Now, I do have the information written down, and I would just like to make sure it's accurate. Would that be okay? Great. So, you have an eighteen-seventy-seven ... It's nineteen-seventy-seven? He was trying to write quickly, and it probably just looked like an eight to me instead of a nine. Okay, a nineteen-seventy-seven queer brown dookie-mobile?’ Yes, I agree the description does sound a bit unusual. It's dark brown? And a Turismo? I'm writing this down. Now, does it have heat and air? Heat, no air. Wait a moment, my son has a question. You want to know how you're supposed to breathe in a car with no air? I am not asking that! Sorry, it wasn't relevant. I do see there are some extras here. There's a ‘working radio?’ Good. ‘Cassette deck?’ Excellent. And the ‘two rotting corpses in the trunk?'

  "You know what? Can I call you right back? Thank you."

  Mom just didn't see the humor in the approach I was taking to tell them I wasn't overly thrilled with their find. She immediately called a conference with her co-war chief and declared that I was to be eliminated from the selection process. On one hand, maybe I lost that war, but on the other, I didn't get that car.

  I was working in the Patio department of Kay-Mart about a week later when a car pulled up to the loading area. Mom was waving to me from the window.

  "Oh, Holy Mary, Mother of God,” I mumbled while smiling at the same time and waving back.

  It was large, old, affordable, maroon and soon to be mine.

  Despite how I make the 1979 Ford LTD sound, it was a solid choice, and I did go up a year from
the Malibu. Mom and Dad just wanted me to be protected in case I ever got into an accident, and a tank like an LTD was a pretty strong guarantee that I had a good chance of surviving.

  It wasn't like those little aluminum foil cars that crunch like a beer can during a simple fender-bender. It had heat and air, but no radio. I was told that would be taken care of at Christmas, though, when I could go and pick one out as my gift. There was quite a bit of room in the trunk and backseat, which was going to be nice when transporting all my crap back up to school in the fall.

  "It's a nice car,” one of the sixteen-year-old stockboys who happened to be out there teased.

  "Piss off.” I really wasn't ready to have to defend it to my friends, let alone some little shit who would never attain any position above stockboy. “A Matchbox car would look nice to someone like you."

  "At least I'm in high school and working here, not college,” he called back out over his shoulder while walking away.

  "Oh, yeah? Great future for you, too! You'll be the only person I know going through life pushing doors marked pull."

  The little SOB did have a point. He was only in high school, and ignorance wasn't so much bliss for kids his age as it was a way of life. It had only been in the last six months that I'd become seriously interested in a career, but even so it was a bit vague. What kind of life could a writer have? What was it, exactly, that I wanted to write? Each decision I made in life only brought up more questions. That was hardly fair.

  Despite all the possibilities I might one day have going for me, if I ever bothered to narrow down my interests, I felt as if something was missing. No, perhaps not something, but someone. What good was life if one couldn't share it with another? I saw people walking around campus with a significant other while I walked alone. I missed that closeness, and began to resent others for having what I was missing. Why should they be happy when I wasn't?

  A friend of mine told me once to look at any situation that seemed unhappy to me in an optimistic way—as a glass that was half-full as opposed to half-empty, that things would get better. All I wondered was who the son of a bitch was who drank out of my glass without my noticing!

  My friend said I missed the point.

  Why couldn't people see that I was in need of some human compassion, and that I was as starved for love as the next person? Was I that good at hiding my feelings, or was I expressing them to the wrong people? I didn't know how to relate to others, and it seemed they were in no hurry to find a way to relate to me, so what the hell was I supposed to do? I was obviously trying to relate to people in terms they didn't understand and needed to find some common ground. I could do that, couldn't I?

  * * * *

  I needed a vacation from my vacation. The car was a pleasant addition to my life, but I doubted it would take me far enough away from work or reality. Calgon, take me away...

  Oh, fuck Calgon! How far away was far enough, anyway? Far enough for me would be on some desert island where other people weren't.

  But then, if I was alone, I'd never have sex, and that would mean I'd never achieve the next stage of enlightenment. Could sharing an orgasm really be that powerful? I wondered if it would be as life-changing as when I saw my first picture of Samantha Fox in the buff. Was it absolutely necessary for people to have sex to understand one another or, at least, understand themselves? If I had sex once, would everything I was missing in life suddenly come into focus? Was that what the destruction of childhood innocence really was?

  I wanted to have sex, just not with anyone I knew.

  A relationship wouldn't be such a bad thing to have, either, before having sex. But who would I have this relationship with? Good question, and there wasn't a forthcoming answer. It had to be some woman I'd never laid eyes on yet.

  I certainly didn't want to have sex or a relationship with any guy I knew. That wasn't even a consideration, especially since the only gay men I ever heard described—in jokes—were ugly, in their thirties and forties and had long hair, mustaches and tattoos. I didn't look like they did, I didn't talk with a major lisp and I sure as hell wasn't attracted to anyone with those qualities. If I ever did start to fall under the influence of some person like that, I hoped one of my friends would have the decency to shoot me and put me out of my misery before word ever got out.

  Was I even ready for a relationship? Could I handle one maturely and sincerely enough? Did I even deserve one? It wasn't like I would have opportunities to cheat on a girlfriend, as women weren't exactly beating down my door; and it wasn't like sex had ever been an issue with me, as far as me wanting it more than she did. In many ways, maybe I was a nice guy after all.

  On the other hand, nice guys were said to finish last, and I was certainly living that cliche.

  Todd would have told me to just rent a porno film and work my frustrations out that way. That really wasn't my style, but I did go to the video store. While there, I ran into one of the jerks I graduated high school with. I had Spacehunter—Adventures In The Forbidden Zone in my hand, and he had Big Busty Women Vol. 2. It made me wonder which one of us was going to have a better time watching our movie. I'd seen Spacehunter about fifteen times, but he'd probably seen Big Busty Women Vol. 1 and then moved on to the sequel.

  I wondered if that made him more in touch with reality and sexuality because he could move on to T&A while I was still stuck in SF.

  The whole pornography issue is a funny thing with people. In straight guys’ minds, or at least the ones I knew, a woman and a man, two women and a man, one woman and two men or just two women having sex is perfectly acceptable. However, two guys having sex on camera is completely deviant. Two women making out and/or having sex with each other at a private bachelor party is hot and a real turn-on. Yet, two guys having sex in the privacy of their own home is a crime, and two guys showing any kind of public display of affection could get them a street justice death penalty. Gee, that's not the least bit hypocritical.

  Yet another thought to keep to myself.

  A great many thoughts and emotions were building up inside me. One moment I was dissing gays in my mind and in another I was actually defending them. By dissing them, I was in touch with the male part of me that popular society wanted to emphasize. Since popular society never held much regard for me, I refused to hold much regard for it.

  This, in turn, allowed me to explore other areas of deep thought. If there is or ever could be such a thing as a bottomless cup of coffee. Why people called it rush hour when nothing moved. Just how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop. Women still counted as a mystery, and probably would in any century. They were still a mystery to me, at least.

  What did they think about me? That I was a geek? A few maybe thought I was a gay geek. Why did they think I was ... that way? That really pissed me off! Just because I didn't go out every weekend and pick up some woman to have sex with or hit on someone at work during the week and use her to warm up for the weekend, suddenly I'm gay? I don't think so.

  I was trying to be a nice guy and do things with the best of intentions, but something was inevitably going wrong.

  Everything, however, was about to change.

  * * * *

  I'm quite sure whoever coined the phrase “all things happen for a reason” was brutally murdered in cold blood by someone he or she told that to. Religious crusades, world wars, famine, poverty, disease, hate crimes, Superman IV—why? I never understood the reasons behind things like those.

  My mother was, unfortunately, one of the followers of this phrase; she couldn't answer any of my questions, but she found wisdom in it, nonetheless. Most of the time I wanted to throttle her when she brought it up.

  There were, however, rare instances when something happened that didn't seem particularly important at the time but that led to something else, which led to something else, and so on. In the end, something good happened.

  "Andy!” Mom's voice broke me out of a stupor. “Come let the dog out!"

 
; I was in my room with the door closed, bored out of my mind and doing absolutely nothing about it. At least boredom was something, and it beat letting the dog out. Furthermore, my room was on the far side of the house, and it sounded like Mom was in the kitchen. The back door was about five feet from her and a good forty feet from me, so naturally it made sense for me to have to go and do it. What was she doing that she couldn't open a screen door and let the arrogant furry bitch out?

  "Andy, now!"

  I sighed, stretched, opened my door and started down the hall. On the way to the kitchen, I passed the living room and Dad sitting in his recliner. That put him about twenty feet from the back door to my forty. He was twice as close and doing exactly the same thing I was doing. This couldn't be the reason my parents had me.

  I was never good for lawn care and vehicle maintenance, but I'd be damned if I was going to be the dog's servant!

  Actually, I wasn't good at a great many things I didn't like. Watering the flowers? Forget it. I put the spray on hard enough to kill the damn things because I wanted to get it done faster. Any parent in their right mind would have caught on after the first few incidents, but not mine. No, they continued to torture me with that task and yell when the ground and flowers looked as though they'd been through an asteroid storm.

  "Andy!"

  Dad flashed me a wicked grin before I continued on into the kitchen.

  Mom was cutting something up in the sink while Kira, our Siberian husky, barked from the back door. She probably didn't even have to go out. The bitch played games like that. She would see that one of us was doing something then get it in her head she wanted to do something, too. At that point, we would have to stop what we were doing so she could do what she wanted. The back door game was one of her primary sources of canine amusement. As soon as she got outside and saw that we had gone back upstairs to do whatever it was she had interrupted us from doing in the first place, she would bang against the door to be let back in.