What's-His-Name

So My Therapist Says, "He molested you." He didn't, though...molest me, that is. He was only 2 years older than me. He was 10. His family moved to town when I was 8.

He knew things I didn't. I remember showing up to school around 3rd grade and feeling like all the other boys had been to a Boys Only Seminar that I'd missed. They could suddenly point out makes and models of cars, knew the competitive differences between KU and K-State, and understood why a '67 Chevy was an important part of male history. They had inside jokes. I was very suddenly even more an outsider than I'd ever been. And worse...I was the smartest kid in the class. That'll set you apart - and not in a good way - in a hurry. But he liked me, as Sally Field once gushed. He really liked me.

He wasn't bright. But he didn't mind that I was. He was a guy's guy. And he liked me. He was always there. We began in childhood a secret connection that would continue until he married a childhood friend and fathered two children. He was injured shortly after the second was born, began drinking, couldn't keep a job, divorced and abandoned his family to move back from whence he'd come. And to drink. He's 43. I imagine he looks much older.

I had an invitation to see him this summer when I was in that neck of the woods. I was startled and stunned and uncharacteristically speechless. I wanted to see him. I couldn't bear to see him. I wondered if he remembered. I was sure he had to. I wondered if he attributed his self-destruction to our secret. I wondered if he could even think that honestly about it...or himself. I have AIDS and he has a disease of his own. Maybe I thought that there would be enough shame and recrimination to cause spontaneous combustion if we met. I wondered if he ever thought about it...me. I wondered if he ever thought about me.

I know enough to understand that connections you make in pre-pubescence and through adolescence are what they are: born more of need, ignorance and innocence than anything. But it would be dishonest to say that he wasn't, in his way, the first one to walk away and leave me wondering what I did wrong. The whole situation was wrong to begin with. But still...25 years later, I'd like to know why. I think I know that it was convenient and available and perhaps not his primary orientation. I think. But due to my youth, it left a mark. I wonder if he has a mark.

Maybe every time I'm drawn to Mr. Wrong who is "emotionally unavailable", as The Good Doctor put it so nicely, or "narcissistic" as he put it less nicely, I'm hoping that I'll get the explanation I didn't get at 17 when I was shell-shocked by the announcement that he was going to be a father and, soon, a husband. I stood at the wedding in a living room and shrunk back against a wall, acutely aware that I shared too much in common with the girl in the dress. I loved him. And I'd loved him first. And longer. But there he was in a bad suit getting married. I remember feeling ill and exposed and dirty and transparent during the whole congratulatory period that followed.

I remember when I held the baby that caused the wedding and knew that she represented the end of any mention of our past. He would start drinking soon. I would go off to college and date girls - never assuming the obvious about my own orientation. It had been all about him. I didn't stop and consider that it might have been a signpost to my own identity. I figured that out 5 years later. That was my "coming out". I didn't ever let on that there was a sexual identity - let alone activity - that preceded the big milestone. Who would understand? And 20 years later a whole vocabulary had grown up around that sort of thing. None of it was nice or affirming. None of it fit what I felt. And then there was the whole cliche about molestation resulting in homosexuality. I didn't ever want to be summarized so easily. I wasn't looking for an explanation for my orientation. It didn't need one. It doesn't need one.

That baby of his that I held...all those years ago....had a baby today. I got the pictures this evening. He was hardly ever a father, I understand, and now he's a grandfather. I wonder if he knows. His daughters were - are - beautiful. His granddaughter is....well...whatever newborns are, I suppose. She's pink and small and wrinkly and squishy. And she had a name before she was born.

I wish I knew what to call him.