Lord Wessex: How is this to end?
Queen Elizabeth: As stories must when love’s denied: with tears and a journey.—Shakespeare In Love
“Alright Mister, I can’t wait to read the story. Make sure you send it to me.”
“I just need to know,” I said, choking back a torrent of emotion while standing in front of the man who just hours earlier had filled my life with more joy and happiness than I can ever remember experiencing, “and you don’t have to tell me this minute, if it’s the end of the story or the beginning of the next chapter, whatever that may turn out to be.”
He inhaled slowly, his eyes now no longer sparkling as they had for all of that weekend, looked down into mine from their perch above. “Alright,” he said quickly whipping up a faint smile and then added. “I’ll let you know when I get in safely.”
December of 2008 began, for me, what I came to refer to as a fecal tsunami. Following the collapse of the economy, I lost my business, my savings, my twenty year relationship, and I began falling deeply into debt. After being self-employed for more than twenty years and in my early 60s, in the midst of the worst job market since the Great Depression, I could find little employment other than a series of abusive, part-time, jobs with some very iffy employers. None of the jobs came anywhere near meeting my expenses.
Late spring of 2014, the house I owned with my former partner, my last remaining asset, was about to go on the market. I decided to take a low-paying, nevertheless full time job in Palm Springs as a licensed insurance customer service agent for DRB Insurance Services. The job lasted nearly four months. With the two senior partners out of town on vacation, I was fired after being set up to fail by the remaining partner who’d been opposed to my hiring from the very beginning.
By the time of my firing, I had endured so many reversals in my life I’d completely exhausted my ability to feel—anything. I wasn’t even numb, which, in and of itself, is a form of feeling. I couldn’t cry, my once blue eyes had turned grey and the light and sparkle they once had was gone.
In as much as Palm Springs is often referred to as God’s Waiting Room, I decided I was in the right place and made up my mind to live off the remaining proceeds from the sale of the house, after paying off my debts. I could then wait to begin collecting full Social Security benefits, and sit back, follow in my family’s long standing tradition of alcohol abuse, and wait for the inevitable. In short, I gave up on life.
Not quite ready for full retirement I did manage to find a part time licensed insurance customer service agent job with a small one-man firm. It paid enough to cover my rent, thereby minimizing the drain on my funds.
The Little Castro Street block of Arenas Rd in downtown Palm Springs, California.
I was not a recluse during these months. In as much as I had managed to shed nearly 80 lbs. during the preceding five years and lower my daily intake of drugs, prescribed for a laundry list of chronic maladies, I once again had a functioning libido.
My social life consisted of attending Fur Fridays, the late afternoon bear beer bust at Hunters, one of the city’s many gay bars. I began meeting people, making friends, and screwing up the courage to try my hand at dating even though I still lacked any real zest for life. At this point in my life I was more or less a human doing rather than a human being.
The fact that Palm Springs is the worst place for singles, gay or straight, to find someone of their own to spend time with didn’t help matters much either.
There was no shortage of playmates; however, after a few months I came to dread the Coachella Valley’s two most over used words, “open relationship.” It was easy enough to meet and have intimate fun with a man from an open relationship, however, once the fun was over they were up and outta there on their way back to their husbands and I was once again left with a rumpled bed and an empty apartment.
Don’t get me wrong, there are single men in Palm Springs and the surrounding area but as anyone single, gay, straight, male, or female trying to work their way through the Desert Cities dating scene will tell you,“They’re either all off their meds or waiting for them to be prescribed.”
Gay Bear social networking and hookup app, GROWLr
trademark GROWLr ™ Initech, LLC.
About a year after my separation, nerd that I am, I turned to social media and, after a period of trial and error, as well as some really horrendous experiences, settled on GROWLr, an app specifically intended for the gay bear community.
Here, once again, I kept running into my least favorite combination of words in the English language, “open relationship,” not to mention a dearth of reasonably attractive, relatively sane, single men.
In addition to taking advantage of your smartphone’s GPS to show you who’s recently been online locally, GROWLr also features a random sampling of men from around the world, or eye candy as it’s otherwise known.
On a particularly lazy March afternoon—it was 2:38 pm, Pacific Daylight Time, March 18, 2015, I think—while surfing a random sampling of bears, I came across the shirtless thumbnail image for what looked like a particularly attractive, powerfully built man. Well, attractive at least from the shoulders down to the waist. Like many users he’d adopted a screen name and cropped his profile image so as not to reveal his face.
I clicked the thumbnail image to bring up his public profile. In his late thirties, he was big, 6’2” tall and 275 very solidly muscular pounds–definitely a muscle bear–and he had the most remarkably silky covering of chestnut brown body hair. I also learned he was Canadian and that he came from a mid-sized city in southern Ontario just outside of Toronto.
The more I read, the more I discovered things we had in common especially when it came to, shall we say, position preferences. He even had an interest in older men.
This man I had to know more about.
I spent nearly half-an-hour trying to compose the perfect first contact message. I did not want to appear like the lech I was rapidly becoming.
Everyone who creates a GROWLr profile has the option to upload additional pictures of themselves, which remain locked away from public view until you decide, on a case-by-case basis, who to unlock them for. In that first message I offered to unlock my pictures, which I cautioned him were all G rated.
I don’t remember how long it took before I received a response but it didn’t seem very long at all. He’d written a nice long response, his name was Jon, “without the ‘h.’” He thanked me for offering to unlock my photos, told me he thought, from my profile picture, I was very handsome, how much he enjoyed reading my profile, and that he was looking forward to seeing my private pictures.
He had unlocked his private pictures, which he said were all G rated as well.
The time had come. I exited the chat portion of the app and returned to his profile.
The very first unlocked picture was the full version of the cropped profile picture. He had a thick chestnut brown beard as soft and luxurious as his body hair, a smile delightful enough to lift the spirits of the dead, and the most spectacular sparkling brown eyes I’d ever seen.
While I would deny it for weeks to come my heart instantly knew what my brain would not permit me to consider: I was looking into the eyes of the man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.
Next Up: Griselda And The Brain
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