I made a new friend right around the time I quit high school. This was back in the mid-1970s. He was a few years older than me and was the host of many parties that I attended in those days. He was born in the States and so was I. We liked much of the same music. He wrote poetry and so did I. He read several books a week and so did I. He drank, smoked and cussed and so did I. He wore long hair and so did I.
The more we compared notes, the more we found in common. I was in need of a place to stay due to a chaotic situation that was festering around my mother’s failing third marriage. My new buddy’s parents had turned over their basement to him and there was ample room for me to stay for days on end. We listened to music, read and had lengthy discussions on almost every conceivable topic.
This fellow had two brothers. His younger brother lived at home and his elder brother came over almost every night to have dinner with the family. I nick-named my friend, L. A., after his hometown. His folks were warm, generous prairie folk from Saskatchewan and suffered me to sit at dinner with the family until my epic appetite put dents in their grocery bill.
L. A.'s father had once been a reporter in Hollywood. He had interviewed every movie star I had ever heard of. The dinners were fascinating due to his remembered stories of those interesting days. As a story lover, I was in heaven. L. A.'s father was in heaven because his family had tired of his stories long before I showed up.
After many crazy adventures, I secured my own rented basement suite. I soon kicked out my first room-mate on account of his being too messy and my next room-mate was L. A. I had never before experienced the perfect harmony of that bachelor household, nor did I afterwards, until I married my third wife, Nisa. It was a peaceful, happy, harmonious space.
L. A. and I never ran out of things to talk about and we saw eye to eye on most of the topics we discussed. We existed like that until I hit the road travelling. I just couldn't keep still and boomeranged between Texas and North Vancouver. Sometimes L. A. accompanied me. Down in Texas we were called the Gold Dust Twins, such was our obvious bond.
I was too busy to have a steady girlfriend and I had no skill at flirting. L. A. had friends galore and more than half of them were girls. I was not one to discuss sexual topics from a conviction that it was a highly personal and very private aspect of one’s life. That conviction, coupled with a big dose of osmotic shame transferred by my Catholic raised father, made me painfully shy in regards to the subject, in spite of having read extensively on the biology, psychology, cultural aspects, history and mythology of human sexuality. All my book learning was lacking any practical experience and a virgin I steadfastly remained. In a million hours of conversation, L. A. and I never discussed sexuality. I had the impression that he knew far more about it than I ever would.
One day, after cashing in my chips from a cooking job at a truck stop, I found L. A. hard at work at a bookstore in North Vancouver on Upper Lonsdale. He let me borrow his employer's typewriter to type up some prose I had written while the woman was away for a few hours. She returned early and I was routed forthwith from the premises in a highly dramatic fashion.
Out on the sidewalk, as L. A. was apologizing to me for her behaviour, I suggested that he quit that lousy job then and there and that the two of us start for Mexico at first light. He looked at me the way a dog looks at you when you are throwing sticks and the creature is expecting a feint. I wasn't kidding and I waited outside while he performed an Al Pacino scene in the bookstore and quit his job. Ten minutes later we were at his parent's basement packing his rucksack.
His dear mother insisted that I bring him back alive and that we stay for supper. While he was upstairs trying to explain the sudden turn of his events, I had a smoke and began reading my friend's latest writings. I got much more than I had expected.
I didn't have time to read all of it, but I did read enough to learn that my friend was gay and that he was still and had been deeply enamoured with me. I had always imagined that I knew him better than any living person, due to the time we had spent together and the near complete sharing of our minds and hearts. The shock rocked my virginal heterosexual boat to the tipping point.
We set off for Mexico the very next morning and had a long and eventful trip. I couldn't speak to him about what I had learned in his basement because I was processing a plethora of thoughts, feelings and emotions. I did this work silently and on my surface, everything appeared as cool as it had ever been.
On our return trip North, we stopped into Beaumont, Texas at my grandmother's house for fattening up. I got up to about 180 lbs. within in a week and L. A. wasn't far behind. My normal weight was closer to 160 lbs. Southern cooking can do that to a man. We rested up and got ready for our final jaunt back to North Vancouver.
One sultry afternoon, as we sat under a big oak tree at a Beaumont schoolyard, I was finally able to speak my mind. Now it was L. A.'s turn to be rocked back on his boots. We had everything sorted out before heading back for our supper of seafood gumbo and we both learned a mighty lot in a short time of truth telling.
I learned of his terrible burden of having lived a secret life of unexpressed emotions. L. A. learned of my feelings of betrayal as a consequence of having shared everything with him and having him reciprocate by editing himself to share with me. I was righteously pissed off and I was now sure that he understood why. He had been much too frightened to be open with me and now I understood why that was, although I was grieved at having been prejudged by him.
I made it clear that his sexual preference made no difference to me, I just needed to know who I was running with when I shared myself to the degree in which we had conducted our friendship. Our return trip to North Vancouver was wonderful and I could feel that a huge, ugly burden had been left to moulder under that gnarled old oak down in the Texas bayou.
We discussed the pros and cons of him coming out of his closet. I told him that it had to be his decision and that I would support him either way. My vote was for him to come out, let the chips fall and know that any person or family member that dropped out of his life as a result was of no real consequence to his future. My reasoning was that if they liked him only for what they thought he was, he really wouldn’t know who his actual friends and allies were. That is not a safe or prudent way to conduct the battle of life.
He thought long and hard about these things after we got to town and one day he made up his mind. He discovered that he was many times braver than he had ever guessed. He told the news to all his friends, co-workers and to his employer. I was invited to attend on the evening he planned to break the news to his family. It was to be a momentous occasion and none of his family had any inkling of what was coming.
We gathered at the dinner table for a tremendous meal of pork chops marinated in his mother’s famous Diablo Sauce. All those present expected to be entertained with our ales of the Mexican road. In that vein, they were indulged for awhile before L. A.'s father took up our slack with anecdotes from his Hollywood reporter days. Sooner than was comfortable, supper was over and we all gathered in the living room for coffee and tobacco. It was only a few seconds later that L. A. dropped his bomb.
His tone was different enough from usual, that it garnered just the right amount of attention from all listeners present. His father was lighting his briar pipe, his mother was stirring her coffee, his elder brother was sipping his coffee and I was kung fu breathing, slowly and deeply.
There was a pregnant pause when he said in a clear voice, “Mom, Dad, everybody, I have an announcement to make.”
All hands looked up.
“I'm gay.”
No explosions went off. His mother didn't faint. His brother didn't spew coffee. Rather, his father began an immediate, lengthy discourse on all the gay movie stars he had ever interviewed. Afterwards, his elder brother began to enumerate all the famous scientists, writers and military generals in whose company L. A. was now a declared member.
L. A.’s younger brother shouted from his bedroom down the hall, “Hey, you guys. So am I!”
It was a magical evening, to be sure. Reality is what it is. In the ensuing weeks, there was a small percentage of friends who dropped out of L. A.'s life like full ticks off a cow's ear. The entourage at his famous parties got noticeably smaller. There were also new friends whom he made by being himself. He encouraged many people who had been in his former predicament to follow his example and I was damned proud of him.
Some people shunned me afterwards because of my association with L. A. That I happily bore although L. A. and I drifted apart over the years. It took me a long time to understand why. Decades later, a gay man I worked with at the Post Office framed it up in a way that I could understand. He told me that for L. A., to hang around me would be like me hanging around a girl I was madly in love with while she conducted her marriage and family-building with someone else. Now, that ain't exactly rocket science.
fin