The Meanest Season

The meanest season

Michael was beautiful. Blond, tall, lean like the surfer he was. That’s where we met, surfing. He lived in Seagate, a neighborhood I walked through on my way to the beach to surf. I guess my board caught his eye. While I had seen him often on the break we had never talked – I was too afraid – he was too beautiful. But he yelled out to me one day as I was heading towards the beach. This dark tan kid in flip-flops and a white puka-shell necklace; how glad I was that he did, asking me my name and automatically friending me. We were 15 then. He went to Naples high and me, just two blocks away went to Barron. But walking to the beach together with our boards in hand seemed like my biggest dream come true, because in my closeted existence he was the object of my crush. The water was flat that day, like many in Naples. We really only got good waves when a hurricane blew past or maybe in the winter when a front would pass through the area but that never stopped us from walking to the beach every day in hopes of something ridable.

That summer we ended up fishing more than surfing, an unusually quiet hurricane season. But a season for cementing friendships; a mean season perhaps. That friendship wasn’t an everyday friendship, the different schools we went to insured that. And we weren’t connected like we are now; cell phones, IM, email, Myspace, the Internet in general. But for the few times the winter waves were up and for those next two summers we were inseparable.

Looking back across those years the attraction, the love we had for each other was overwhelming. But it was a different time, and I was so frightened of this person I was, the real person inside.

Eventually that attraction won over; it was a shared fear, a shared secret we had both had for those few years. I think I may have broken Michaels’ heart, like I seem to do with those I love, when I turned away and hid in my ready-made family.

I can’t help but feel that I caused Mike to (my God I haven’t called him that since we were last together, or actually since the night I cried when I heard he had died)… to turn down the path he did. He oft told me about it, wanted me to give it a try.

Michael’s death in 1985 was one of those “fork stuck in the road” moments. The path I had taken was for sure different than his back in 83, and his death a few years later allowed me to look at myself and make other choices, turn down the road I’m on. It sounds odd but I thank Michael for that. And Michael (Mike), I am so sorry. Things could have been so different.

I wish I had told him just one last time that I loved him. I wish he knew right now.

You never know when the last time you’ll see someone, talk to some, say you love them is.

The summer of 1980 was the meanest season –

The Journey

Listening to Sean Kagalis at 37 Main tonight. He's covering some throaty ballad - hauntingly – and through the music I'm eerily drawn to the places I've yet to go. Dark lonely places shuffling along among people on their last ride, loud night clubs listening to a Bauhaus clone - moving to the music with the other Lost Souls, the Gothic youth with their died black hair, their eye liner outlining sunken, sullen eyes. To be on the beach at Monterey watching the sea take shape with the dawn rising behind me, or by a solitary fire looking deep inside myself in the quiet solitude of my soul.

It all comes down to the trip we are all on; the journey to death's friendly embrace oh so many, many years from now, or perhaps on our way home from our jobs/classes today.

Sharing those roads with someone is ultimately the goal for most of us. Whether it's the professor-to-be among us, the poet, the actor, the meteorologist, or the musician. As humans we seek to belong, to know that we are loved and that we have someone to love.

I've belonged and I've been loved, and still do to some extent with my ex-wife although daily I see that evolving into a more distant existence. But to love, or truly be loved - not the love of friends or family but the love of poets, of sunny spring days in the south of France, of gentle walks and waterfalls in the mountains, and of tears at the bedside of a lost partner when you're 80 – that deep place in ones soul that can't ever be replaced once lost - Its that love that we seek. That I am hopeful of -

I care little for what others think – I'm a gay man - raised in a family of tough men straight out of the Maine woods, the roadhouses of the depression - men whose masculinity was defined by the other men they've bested - and now I'm just like them - constantly out to prove my manhood to myself - yet I'm the paradox.

So my journey - now and in the days ahead will be of my own making - without preconception or concern for the expectations of others. I love who I love - regardless of what others may think. I am who I am, walk the paths I walk, and dare any man to take from me my freedom to be, to love, to live as I will. Be it in the dark places where those on their last journey congregate, in a sandy beach watching the ship float by - or with someone special in all of those places or wherever else that may be.