Reminiscences of 1970s D.C.
Hello, Past? This Is Me Calling Michael
I want to hear his voice once again. I want to explain
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Author’s note: This story is in response to Joe Luca’s Writer’s Challenge “Hello, your past is calling .…”
He wasn’t in the kitchen or the living room. But I knew he was in the apartment. I called out his name. No answer.
I found him in the back, in the second bedroom with the two twin beds that no one ever used. He was sitting on the sill of the ceiling-to-floor window with his back propped against the right vertical edge. His knees were drawn up. His heels almost touched his butt. His hands rested on his knees, palms up. His head bent forward, cradled in his hands.
“Michael, what’s wrong?”
He lifted his head and turned to look at me. There were tears on his cheeks.
“Oh, … nothing.”
Well, that obviously was not true. But, the look in his eyes said, “I do not want to talk about it.” I walked over to stand beside him. I rested my hand on his shoulder. The tears had stopped flowing. With my thumb, I wiped away the remaining ones, but I was silent. He looked at me a brief moment, then stood up. He hugged me, then, without a word, walked away toward the door and the hall.
I put it down to the fact that I would be leaving tomorrow for an academic year at Cornell, the first of the four it would take me to earn the Ph. D. I coveted. I didn’t realize that wasn’t the whole of it.
His name was Michael. He was the older of my two first lovers, Tommy being the younger. They were 31 and 30, and I was 22 the night I first met them at Raj and Ulf’s apartment across the hall. It was the occasion of their seventh anniversary. Raj and Ulf were hosting an intimate dinner — just the four of them until I inadvertently crashed it.
I was living in isolation in a non-distinct, multi-building, high-rise complex in Alexandria. It was the kind of place where the unit occupants lived in relative anonymity and isolation from and disinterest in the other occupants. Michael and Tommy lived on the eighth floor of a cozy little nine-story apartment building just north on 6th St. from the intersection with M St. in SW D.C. Arena Stage, a repertoire theater company, sat directly across 6th St. Catercorner across the intersection at the Potomac’s edge was the Warf Marina. In contrast to my cold complex, that SW D.C. neighborhood was intimate, warm, and welcoming.
On their building’s grounds, there was a large swimming pool about 40–50 feet wide running the building’s length. On warm, sunny, late afternoons and weekends, most of the occupants were scattered around in reclining chairs and on beach towels. It was the kind of place where most people knew most everyone else and had warm, connected friendships.
It was two months after I came out. In those two months, I had met and slept with any number of men (I was making up for lost time) until two weeks earlier when I met Mike Z. He lived on the ninth floor. We had been sort of dating.
A week earlier, Mike had introduced me to Raj and Ulf on the eighth floor. They were friendly and gracious. They invited me to drop by anytime.
That Sunday night, the night of the dinner party, I was to pick up Mike at nine at his apartment. We were going out to dinner and the bar. But when I knocked, there was no answer. I was disappointed, but not annoyed. There had to be a good reason for him not to be there. I didn’t feel like going out alone, but I didn’t feel like going back to my empty apartment either. I remembered Raj and Ulf’s invitation, walked down the one flight, and knocked on their door. Ulf answered.
He was pleased to see me but explained about the dinner party. I said, “Oh,” but before I could get out the next word, he said to come in and meet Michael and Tommy, and that there was more than enough food for five.
Within an hour of sitting at the table, I was hopelessly lost, deeply and irretrievably in love with each of them and with the entity that was the two of them together.
You may wonder whether there is such a thing as love at first sight, whether it is more likely infatuation or lust at first sight, or some other manifestation of magnified desire. I tell you, though, there is. There is indeed, and this was it.
We finished dinner and adjourned to the living room. I sat cross-legged on the floor with Ulf’s German Shepard Anya’s head in my lap. Michael and Tommy sat on the sofa, Raj and Ulf in their easy-chairs. Drinking wine and brandy, we talked for hours about a range of topics — art, politics (Nixon was president, so there was much to discuss), the D.C. gay scene, and our backgrounds and interests. We all were remarkably simpatico in both definitions of the word.
Shortly before midnight, Ulf pleaded work.
We stood to leave. Michael looked at Tommy, who nodded imperceptibly, then, looking back at me, said, “Why don’t you come over for a drink?” The last thing I needed was another drink, but I readily consented. “Lovely.”
I spent that night with them in the California-king bed in the first bedroom, the second being the one with the two twin beds that no one ever used. We all called in sick the next morning and spent the day in bed until about four. I spent the second night with them, and the next, and the next, for the four years 1970-’73. I was the first person to sleep with either of them since they had met at Harvard Law School seven years earlier. They had brought each other out and had been a devoted and monogamous couple for those entire seven years.
We lived in complete harmony, each loving the other two equally and intensely. Many evenings, Michael would prepare a gourmet meal. Tommy made the salad and set the table. I sat on the kitchen windowsill reading a book to them, the first of which was Mary Renault’s The Last of the Wine. We became so familiar with each other, so congruent in thought and interests that we could finish each other’s sentences. Apart from work, we did everything together, each loving each completely and equally. I lost all interest in the pursuit of other men.
We were an inseparable triad. That is, until Tommy left in late ’73 for another man. Michael and I spent the rest of ’73 and up till August ’74 together when I was slated to leave for the Ph.D. program at Cornell in upstate New York.
The arrangement was that I would spend the first semester there. Michael would drive up to visit several times. I would be home for Christmas, semester break, and the summer.
He came, once. I drove back on December 23rd, arriving in the early evening. On opening the door, I found the apartment empty, dark, and cold. Turning on the lights, I saw a note from Michael on the dining-room table. He had met another man. He would spend the holidays with him. I should use the apartment as long as I needed. He would not be back before I left to return to Cornell.
Hello? Past? This is me calling Michael. I want to hear his voice once again. I want to explain why I applied to Cornell and why I left him alone when he needed me most. There was a reason, a reason that seemed momentous to me at the time. But it wasn’t as crucial to me as was he. It was a mistake, the worst I’ve ever made. I’ve had quite enough time in the 46 years since to make more, but that one was the most devastating. I should know; I was there.
In the time since, in seven cities across four states and Canada, I’ve had so many men. So many have had me. Several fell in love with me. I broke all their hearts. I fell in love with two. They broke my heart. Until I met Loy. We spent nine years together until he died in 1995 of AIDS, only one of the 50,877 American gay men to die of it that year. I’ve been pretty much alone since. That’s been kind of sad. I’m convinced that had he lived, we’d still be together today.
But never, in all that time, with all those men, even with Loy, have I forgotten Michael. I’m not forlornly lost. It’s just that I think of him from time to time. Whenever life challenged me, whenever a life-altering decision confronted me, I asked myself, “What would Michael do?” That answer has invariably been the correct one.
So, if someone were to hand me a telephone with a direct line to the past, the number I would dial would be his. I would ask how he is, how he’s been. I would ask whether he is still with ‘that man.’ I would be happy to learn of the tall, precipitous mountain peaks he’s stood upon and the grand vistas he’s seen from them. I would hurt along with him at the vast valleys of challenge and grief he must have slogged through to get from one peak to the next. I would remind him of what he once said to me, of what I thought at the time that I understood, but know now that I didn’t, really. “Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in depth and breadth.”
Finally, I would let him know that despite the cleaving pain I felt in my chest when I read his note, despite the numbness of that second semester, despite all the times since I’ve thought of him and missed him, and despite even the several times on which I’ve truly and woundingly felt the magnitude of the loss I occasioned, I would have missed not a single second of the five years he loved me.
