The first
infatuation of my life was this guy named Elijah. He was my first gay friend in San Francisco. The truth was that until then, all I
knew about gay people was that they were supposed to be loud, flamboyant and
wear little hats. I got all my
facts off of ‘In Living
Color.’ I met Elijah before I knew
that I, too, was gay. Gay was as
foreign to me as vagina. I just
thought I would have a wife, some kids and a white-picket fence like on T.V.
cause that’s where I got all my role models. Like all kids I had a plan, gay couldn’t be in those cards
so I just didn’t consider it. There
have always been people who said that they “always knew” when talking about
their own gayness. I was not one
of those people. I knew, but how
could I be sure.
I may have been
gay my entire life, but it wasn’t until I met Elijah that I knew it. The worst part was when I did the whole
coming out thing, which people ask me about all the time. It’s always some girl that has to ask
it about it all loud and uncomfortable, “what was it like coming out?” Coming out doesn’t always have to be
the way the WB shows of the 90s painted it. My life wasn’t an episode of Ellen and coming was no big deal. I made out with Elijah one Halloween and told my friends/family
soon after that I was gay. The
most annoying part was that very few people were surprised. It was like telling them the shy was
blue. They would just smile but
their eyes would say “what did you think I was blind? So what, who cares?” Then it came to being a homo, it would be another couple
years, a flower march, several tons of vodka and 3 seasons of the ‘Real Housewives’ shows, and several bad
dates before I would become good at it.
I hope that this story doesn’t sound like a bad after school special,
please contact me about making one. I would like someone super hot to play me.
It was my second
week of my junior year of college.
I transferred from a community college in San Diego to San Francisco
State. I decided to live on campus
that year. I had no idea that
essentially meant a plan on drinking all year, ignoring my studies and learning
how to drunken surf San Francisco busses like a champ. Drunken surfing on buses is a San
Francisco past-time I perfected in college. This is where you get wasted first or at least on that path
(you don’t have to be drunk, but it doesn’t hurt), stand in the middle of a bus
without holding on to anything and just ride the wave. It’s totally unsafe and stupid, perfect
one’s early 20s. When most people
have heard this story, they have generally been shocked that I went to college
at all. I digress. It was during an impromptu kegger that
my roommates had facilitated, in my apartment, I went outside to see what the
rest of the world was doing. More
so, I was looking to grab a free beer from someone.
There he was on
the patio next to our apartment.
It was a shared courtyard/patio area where students would hang, smoke,
sneak booze, start bad habbits, puke and just be kids. He was just average-looking, skinny,
with buzzed light hair, complimented by a fair complexion, blue eyes that
seemed to glimmer of their own story and angst, while at the same time they
gave off the essence of innocence.
Sitting there by himself with a can in one hand and a box the “Champagne
of beers,” Miller “Highlife.” He
was studying everyone on the patio.
He was very different from everyone. What drew me to him, I don’t know. It’s like how I can’t control myself around ice cream. I even get upset when someone else eats
ice cream, doesn’t finish and lets it melt in front of them. He was my ice cream. Sometimes we just Maybe it was kismet,
fate or down right bad luck? He
was 19. I was 20. He was about my height, actually a
little taller, but I digress. He
was scrawny, in a plaid black and white shirt, a cigarette behind one ear, and
an essence that reeked of apple pie.
He looked like the type of kid that grew up in a household that drank
milk with their meals. Growing up
with Russian/Jewish parents, from the Soviet Union, I had never seen that until
I was a teenager and was horrified the first time I saw it. I have never been a fan of milk, never
understood why people drank it. I
introduced myself, and invited him to our party. As he smiled, he revealed his slightly buck-toothed smile,
while accepting my offer. I knew
that this moment would change my life forever.
Elijah and I were
inseparable from then on. He was
the first gay I had ever met that didn’t act, well, gay. His taste in music didn’t consist of
the usual classics like Kylie Minogue, Madonna, Mariah or Britney. His eyebrows weren’t even plucked. He didn’t even have a feminine voice or
use feminine nouns for men. He was
just a “normal” guy, so I thought then.
Until him, I didn’t even know gays had an option to be like everyone
else. I assumed there was some
disco-balled legacy of ‘flaming’ that had to reach in order to be gay.
My relationship
with Elijah, become a yearlong infatuation rollercoaster ride. I would feel the whiplash for years to
come, but that’s another story. He
became my best friend. Until him,
I never had a real male best friend.
Most of my close friends until college were girls. I was that guy. I was always that little boy playing
with girls that everyone was speculating could have been “playing” with the
girls, but obviously wasn’t. I
could barely stomach oysters. We would always start off playing house and end
in me braiding one of the little girl’s hair.
I learned from
Elijah how to let go and worked to be much less uptight. Prior to him I was much more
conservative and less free, so I later realized then. I didn’t realize just how anal retentive I was until I met
him. It was almost like I was
afraid to live. I was also a
virgin to most definitions of sex. Being a virgin half way through college was
not cool. It deemed me as
“uptight” by some and sad by others.
Being a virgin at that age seemed to be as cool as cancer. Maybe cancer wasn’t the best choice of
that example, but you get it.
We also
experimented with various drugs together.
I would never suggest this to anyone because the idea that one would
need drugs to become inspired has never been one that I have wanted to
prescribe to or advertise. I would
though admit it was not an experience I would later regret, nor ever want to
repeat. He would stay over pretty
often even though we lived on the same block. Through our mutual loneliness it seemed that we connected. It would take me years to realize that
even in loneliness one could still feel happiness.
He was a little
rich kid, the baby of the family.
When he came out of the closet, he burned it down, as he had been openly
gay to since he was 16-years old.
He was one of those that had a same-sex prom date. I had never met anyone like that and
didn’t understand how he knew so young.
I was convinced that he would be the love of my life, but I also was in
love and engaged to food for a short time so not sure if that mattered. I felt for him in a way that I still
couldn’t put into words. It was
love the way I knew it then, young, pure and stupid.
We never did
consummate our relationship, although we had gotten close to it a few
times. It was like on “Friends” waiting for Rachel and Ross to
get back together. I could happen any moment or make it another season without. Although we never really talked about
it, I actually, was secretly crushed by the fact that we never had. Oh how young love could be. We never called each other boyfriends
or held hands in public. Something
that was shockingly accepted in San Francisco in a way I had never in my life
seen before. It was an unsaid
thing that everyone else saw and knew better than we did at the time. He truly was my first love, when I
thought that I knew what love was.
After that year of
college, Elijah and I moved into an apartment together. This, of course was the dumbest idea
ever. Ironically this was after we
had broken up for the third or fourth time, even though we never really
dated. For some reason he kept
crawling back into my life like herpes with a drug problem (not that I’ve had
that. I’ve never even had a cold sore…).
After 3 months, and about 15 major arguments, we parted ways after I
found chemicals and methamphetamines under our sink for the third time. I yelled at him as I threw them out. It had been a while since I had been
that kid who experimented with hallucinogenic and whatever else we did at the
time. Now I had a job and was
working to build a productive life in the city, aside from the occasional bowl
now and again, I was moving on.
Besides, In San Francisco, smoking pot seemed like it was equivalent to
having a drink there. I was a new
man who was responsible.
I was still living
with him when I first started working at the bar. I would come home often at around 3 am and get to sleep around
4am. One morning, around 8 am,
Elijah came home and woke me up. We
weren’t really talking at this time because I was finding him super annoying to
live with, messy, inconsiderate and always leaving whip-its chargers all over
the apartment (the most stupid substance ever). I was over him and didn’t want to be a part of the
drugs. He was sweaty, frantic and
talking faster than the micro-machines guy. I couldn’t understand him at first. He told me that “people” were after him
and trying to kill him. He told a
long, farfetched story to me that I couldn’t grasp and then told me about how
he had some big drug dealer in our apartment the night before. My first reaction was slamming the door
in his face to go to bed until he busted it open. He was freaking out and now so was I, on many accounts. I called the cops as Elijah spaced back
and forth. They came in
minutes. Within one minute of
talking to Elijah, they asked him what he was on. After he admitted to GHB and METH the night before, they
turned away from him and talked to me.
They told me that they couldn’t take anything he was saying into account
or as record since he was “under the influence” and they left. I didn’t know what to do.
The next day I
found some chemicals under the sink.
I didn’t know what they were for, but knew that they didn’t belong
there. I later found out that they
were chemicals to make various drugs.
It was like living in an episode of “intervention,” less fun when you’re
in it.
The new me
realized that Elijah both had a problem and I couldn’t deal with it anymore. My love for him couldn’t handle being a
parent to him anymore. Eventually,
I severed all ties and called his father.
He was on Elijah’s portion of the lease. I told him that his son needed help, had a drug problem, was
making drugs in our apartment, and couldn’t live with him anymore.
I always presumed
his parents sent him immediately to rehab as a result. I don’t know really what happened
after. I heard that years later he
had been in and out of rehab several times. Not sure really if he made any major progress though. I heard that he had been caught with
alcohol at the first one, but after 3 times friends said that they heard he was
doing much better. I moved out of
our apartment within 2 days, like a criminal breaking out of prison. I left him to clean up his own messes,
while he left me shattered. I
spent the next month listening to Fiona Apple and TLC “Red Light Special” on
repeat.
Ideally, I wanted
to think that time healed wounds.
After 9 months of not talking to Elijah, I had been at the bar nearly a
year then. In my mind, he was
dead. I assumed that if he wasn’t,
it was about time. This made it
easier for me to not miss the person I loved, who had helped me understand
myself. I went to get tested as
every responsible adult should.
Having never had unprotected sex, I was sure that I would pass with
flying colors. I took this HIV
test, where they swabbed the back of my throat and within minutes the volunteer
nurse came back and told me that I was preliminary positive. This meant that I would have to come
back in two weeks to find out what that meant.
I forgot to
mention that Elijah had gotten very sick with what we had thought to be the
flu. This was right before we had
moved in together. It turned out
that this flu was actually the beginning of acute HIV, he then told me that I
should get tested a little more regularly as a result, just in case. As he put it, since he would regularly
black out and we had experimented with drinking and other substances together,
there could have been something we had forgotten.
For
the next two weeks I lived life like a zombie, thinking that I was probably HIV
positive and would have to begin planning to live my life as another happy,
healthy HIV positive, gay man. All
I could think of was Magic Johnson for some reason. I had remembered as a kid when he was diagnosed, how that
sounded then and how much better science had become since then.
At work, while I
would try to look happy, I was horrified on the inside, and a ticking time bomb
with every step. All I wanted to
do was smoke pot and be doped up so I wouldn’t have to think about life and its
many problems. Nick, the
“chocolate doctor in training,” as he so poignantly nicknamed himself, patted
my shoulder to say hi about twenty minutes into that shift. I had a handful of glass beer bottles
in my hands that I was putting into a drop-in cooler. Being in a daydream-moment I dropped the beers all over the
ground. I guess he startled
me. I kept dropping beers, and did
little talking, because I didn’t want anyone to know. I tried to hide my hurt and uncertain nervousness from those
around me. After 2 days in, I had
chattered a pint glass in my hand, in turn cutting my ring finger right on the
bend and deep enough to almost see the bone. All I could think of was how I would never be able to wear a
wedding ring. Silly, right? Gays
couldn’t get married anyways. At
that second, I realized that if could still feel. I was still alive.
While I was in the emergency room getting my finger stitched up, I
realized that this was not the end of the world.
Seven
days after my finger was stitched up, I went to get the results of my second
blood test. They asked me what I
would do if this second test too came out positive. I smiled and said, I would live and still plan on a
future. I also said that I would
smoke enough pot until I couldn’t see.
The advisor didn’t find that funny and just stared at me with judging
eyes. It was the same way one
stares at the fat kid’s plat at Sizzler. This all may sound silly now because in
the end, that test and the one after would in fact come out negative. At the time it blew harder than Jenna
Jameson (I assume). After though,
I realized that I was letting Elijah hold me back from meeting new people and
really growing up. I never wanted
to bring people to our apartment cause well I didn’t want to look like a crack
head. I was too pre-occupied tying
to take care of him that I couldn’t take good care of myself. I loved him for who he was to me and
even how he hurt me. As a result
of him I grew fast. It was the
kick in the pants I wouldn’t wish to anyone, but it changed my life. Dating would never be the same. It took me years to trust anyone. I went through a phase where I assumed
all the men I met had HIV. Not
true. If I could walk around in a
full body condom at that time I would have. It would take me several years to learn that not everyone
else was like him and that gay men came in every shape, size and type. Some were honest and afraid like
me. That was okay. Elijah showed me that being gay didn’t
have to fit any one stereotype. I
learned that HIV while scary wasn’t the end and that rather than fear it, I
should be come educated in it. Until
him, I had never been that close to another guy. He introduced me to a world that I had never known,
including the one that every gay man becomes acquainted with in their lives,
either first hand or via their found family, HIV.
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