The Joy of the Journey

Bathetic thoughts freely slipping this morning from a memory that rarely demands some little intentional concentration to draw it out; thoughts, images flowing as water a river. Have we, David and I, really trudged together through twenty-five years of this and that? A life? A push-pull of sorts against (or alongside?) the dishing out of one thing or another that has come our way or stood stolid–as nature is want to do–as a corpulence, unmoving, passionless, fronting us with, as Frost described, the divergence of roads?

A life. Yes. That is what it has been. That is what it is.

David and I met one late summer night in 1982, in a bar in downtown Denver; a place where I’d found my niche, my comfortable corner. It, the bar: bare wood, leather/Levis, strong drinks, smoke, dimly lit, cowboy boots, combat boots, chaps, black vests over bare torsos, military garb, hardhats.

1982 was the ominous end of that time of our time (the end-times of the Big Party that had begun in the summer of 1969 in Greenwich Village, New York at a little bar called the “Stonewall”), when we were being told by America’s medical establishment (Yes, believe it, this was the only advice the good doctors had for us at the time) that we should not have sex with men who were obviously ill; feverish, coughing, purple lesions on the skin. We had been reading in the gay press for almost a year about a hellish exotic pneumonia and a rare skin cancer that had appeared, proliferated and infested the coasts and was moving inward toward the center, toward Denver where, on that night in 1982, I first saw David: blond, boyish, blue eyes, smiling. David projected a bright and endearing gaze into the crowd of us. It was not the usual hungry, hard, brazen straight-to-the-bone glare–a jaded lot, those of us who’d come of age in the ’70s–that we were so accustomed to receiving and, indeed, projecting. No, David–only twenty-two at the time–still beamed with the wonder of us all, there, together in that dark, but unarguably sensually electric space.

By 1982 the bogeyman had begun stealing the magic from the night. It was then we began to understand the new words and, oh sweet jesus, our lexicon, our gayspeak became clinical: Pneumocystis, Kaposi’s, neuropathy, cytomegalovirus, T-cells, crystosporidiosis, lymphadenopathy, retrovirus, candidiasis, cryptococcus and on and on; the litany of the boogeyman’s ferocious baggage; a vernacular that beautiful young men should not have had to assume as their own. But, it had been assumed. Necessarily. Yes, by 1982 many of us were teetering on the cusp of that stark and insidious epiphany that would soon be revealed to the world; a gut feeling that we just simply had not reckoned much with the consequences of the time or our time; that the Big Party could not just simply go on forever.

At this point, long stories become short. David and I began our conjoined life in November, 1982.

As some of our friends and acquaintances–young men, beautiful men–commenced their dying in 1982, David and I dug in hard to what I had once thought were absurdly stupid (what was the point, after all?) core principles that provide the basis for solid relationships: monogamy, eating at least one meal a day together, sharing what David called chores (washing clothes, mowing the lawn, feeding the dogs, dusting, etc. etc. etc.). It was easier, I believe, for David because that–the relationship–was what he truly wanted in his life. But I, oh, I had been a performer in the Big Party for so long–I had turned thirty-four by that time–and had accepted, oh, even reveled in what was then the acceptable transitory nature of love, that the job for me, then, with David, was never to forget that first non-sexual embrace we shared when the truth of the words we spoke to one another–”I love you”–had, somehow, for the first time, made sense; a revelation that life could actually be shared for longer than just one night; that life begged commitment. My job then was also to remember that young men were dying and that, most likely, David and I had saved each other’s lives then, in 1982; then amongst the detritus the bogeyman had made of the Big Party; then, in the face of the bogeyman’s insidious snicker, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet, baby.”

So, now, knowing that the divergence of roads–and the choice of direction implicit in that divergence–has provided David and me with a journey, now twenty-five years long, contentedly warm, joyfully accompanied by the precious lives (and the memory of those lives lost along the way) of our friends and our children (our four-legged ones–Heidi, Pepi, Jessica, Nikolai, Melissa, Calvin, Sarah); knowing where that road has taken us begs only for the inevitable wish, the prayer of another twenty-five years of travel…together.

P.S. Don’t even think that was my sofa!