Whether it be friends or family, partings are always difficult things. Saying goodbye to the first person in your life whose outpouring of feeling was not merely a projection of your own desperate desire to love as well as to be loved was an experience unlike any other I had ever had.
I took Jonny to the Palm Springs airport early Tuesday morning. This time we hugged and kissed goodbye right in front of the terminal building. Even though I was parked in an area strictly reserved for passenger loading and unloading, I stood silently by the car and watched as he entered the main terminal and disappeared through the security check point.
I had plenty of time to make it back to work that morning, although I’m quite certain my boss, Bradley, didn’t expect me to be fully back in the game after spending a weekend with the man he’d heard me do nothing but talk about for weeks on end.
To my surprise Bradley was in a pretty foul mood and while I was quickly able to determine it had nothing to do with either me or my recent absence nevertheless it didn’t stop him from sharing his cheesed-off state of mind with me.
This went on for two days. By the third day I’d had about all I could take of being the house flogging boy. We had a serious row followed a short time later by an open and frank conversation.
As I had feared, the pressure of decreasing revenues in the light of on-going expenses was taking a toll on Bradley’s ability to get through the day without feeling the need to vent his frustrations.
The first three months I worked for Bradley things had been good. I even began earning commissions for the walk in business I closed. Unlike DRB Insurance, my previous employer, Bradley’s agency was a preferred provider. He represented only the insurance company that co-sponsored his agency.
Around the third month of working for Bradley I began to notice an increase in the number of failure to renew notices we were receiving. Additionally, sales began declining, both in terms of walk in business and Bradley’s own sales.
Bradley told me our provider had raised rates across the board. Unlike the rest of the insurance industry, which was vigorously low-balling perspective buyers with ridiculously low come-on pricing for entry level policies, our provider was emphasizing customer service over savings.
Not the smartest way in the world to retain, much less drum up, business in a highly competitive market during a relatively lax economy.
The handwriting was on the wall.
With revenues down and expenses on-going, something had to be cut, and despite the fact that I occasionally sold a policy or two, I was nevertheless a large ongoing expense. I had to be laid off.
After he’d broken the bad news, Bradley and I chatted for a while, and as we did something became quite clear.
Unlike the folks at Dirty Rotten Bastard Insurance who couldn’t tolerate the slightest disruption—that would be me—in their comfortable little existence, Bradley, having seen how profoundly happy I was, had kept me on the payroll well after he knew my position had to be eliminated, even going so far as to pay me for the days I took off to be with Jonny, just so that I could enjoy those five days with nary a care.
Even though we had our differences, I’d be hard-pressed to recall anyone I’ve ever worked for whose compassion and humanity I’d come to respect more.
This termination was much less dramatic than the last one. Instead of the total lack of feeling I experienced previously, I was at peace with myself. I knew given the time I’d spent working at these two agencies, I qualified for unemployment insurance and would still have some income. Later I would discover that unemployment would pay just a dollar a week less than the base salary I had been receiving while working for Bradley.
Now less than six months away from my 65th birthday I decided that I’d had enough of working for other people. I would finally do what I had wanted to do ever since publishing my first college newspaper article: write.
No gay camping trip is complete without a live stage show.
Even as I continued to search for employment—none of the Big Box retailers wanted to avail themselves of my services—I could now for the first time in my life say I was finally doing what I had wanted to do since striking out on my own nearly 45 years earlier.
Griselda, still chastened from her earlier Esther Williams inspired emotional outburst, had been uncharacteristically quiet since Jonny’s departure, even as he and I returned to messaging and video chatting. Next up on his summer of fun list of things to do was a Bear weekend camping trip with Brodie at a gay campground on Lake Erie.
Saturday afternoon of the camping trip, the battle between my heart and mind over the status of my relationship with Jonny erupted once again.
I was puttering about the apartment wondering what to do with all those damn LED candles and threatening to do my laundry when the notification “ping” from the message app on my iPhone went off.
“Disco napping,” said the first message, “between today’s outdoor fun and tonight’s, dinner and show.”
No gay camping trip is complete without a live stage show.
I asked about the camping trip, he asked what I was up to, he sent several more pictures of himself bare as a babe on a bear rug, stretched out on his sleeping bag and in each he was looking straight into the camera lens as if looking directly at me with that same loving gaze he had that last night we shared in the pool at my apartment complex.
“Now,” asserted Griselda, “do you believe me? Look at those pictures, his eyes. Can’t you see he’s in the same place we are?
“That man… that wonderful, soul… feels every bit as much for us as we do for him.”
The evidence did appear to be compelling. I’d told him I loved and was in love with him and just like everything else I’d shared about myself not only did it not scare him away he seemed to come back as attentively endearing as ever.
“It doesn’t matter,” Brain said calmly.
“Why! Why doesn’t it matter?” Griselda demanded. “Just because he’s a Canadian who knows how to stare into a camera lens?”
Disco napping.
Before Brain could respond and without looking directly at her I said quietly “Plausible deniability.”
Turing toward her mimicking as best I could a teenage boy, “I never said that, man! That’s all you.”
Then in my own voice, “It’s the first trick every teenage boy learns to escape taking responsibility for their actions and which all to many carry well into their adult years.”
Griselda appeared confused. I pressed on.
“So that when confronted for either taking advantage of or just simply losing interest in another person they can shift the blame for any uncomfortably hard feelings to the other person. Gaslighting them. Accusing them of making the whole thing up and thereby escaping culpability,” at which point Brain began replaying a scene of a particularly painful breakup I’d had in my twenties with a guy Griselda and I were convinced was the love of my life, only to be told in front of a crowd how the whole idea of the two of us being a couple was, “all in your head.”
“Jonny’s never uttered a word about what you believe is so obviously going on between us or his feelings about me.
“No, no matter how wonderful all this is, and trust me I’ve never felt this blissfully ecstatic with another human being in my life, it’s not real and true until he makes it so by saying so.”
And with all the anguish her teenage persona could muster Griselda said frustratedly, “You two will never get it.”
Edited by
Kenneth Larsen
Next Up: Where The Bears Are… P-Town
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