QColumn: A Gay In The Life: Taking The Long Way

Taking The Long Way
By Steve Prince
“You’re in LA?” I stammered.
“Yep,” Peter said. “So when are we gonna hang out, brother?”
“Um,” I replied, “how about tomorrow night?” My friend Eric had told me that Peter might be in town, but I didn’t expect his call so soon, nor did I think he would want to see me so quickly. Peter’s and my relationship had been… hmm… different to say the least.
“Sure,” Peter responded like a little boy being asked if he likes chocolate. “See ya then.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“Oh, Steve?” Peter paused.
“Yeah?” I asked. I wanted to get off the phone. Jay Day had me doing a million different things at the office today.
“I love ya brother.” Peter said sentimentally.
I paused. For a second, I took in what he said and let it swirl in my head. I wanted to know he meant. I hushed my inner dialogue with a response, “I love ya too.”
I hung up the phone and took a deep breath… poor Peter. I hoped his life was getting better. It had been a while since I had seen him, but when I told him I loved him, I meant it. We had been friends since high school. In life, we all have those friends we can’t help but love. You look at them and see a part of them that no one else does. Peter was that friend for me.
Peter and I became fast friends; odd considering Peter’s high school status. Peter belonged to the jocks. In fact, he was the main pitcher for the high school baseball team; total star athlete. With a long, lanky six-foot frame, dark chestnut hair, and tenacious hazel eyes, Peter’s popularity could not be denied.
Peter and I met at a party at our friend Eric’s house. Eric loved pussy and his party indicated just that. It began with a group of horny teenage boys barely mingling with a group of teasing high school girls. As the night progressed, I noticed couples slowly forming, separating like oil droplets in a pot of water. Some went into rooms, others just made out in dark corners or couches.
So what did I do? I got really drunk. Really, really drunk. Truthfully, this became my standard mode of operation at high school parties. I loved being with my friends, but I had no desire to be coupled with any girl. This party was different though. For the first time, I wasn’t drunk alone. Enter Peter.

Sitting outside of the house on a truck bed with a Coors Light in my hand, the buzz of my third beer began to set in, I looked up into the trees following the shadow of branches in the moonlight. The trees always seemed so peaceful to me. Grounding. Calming. A cool baritone interrupted my thoughts.
“Got a light?”
I turned. I still remember the dimple in Peter’s left cheek as he smiled. “Sorry, don’t smoke,” I said.
Peter didn’t flinch, he just kept smiling. Between us, the night breeze danced to the chirping of crickets. The strands of brown hair falling over Peter’s forehead swayed. From the cooler, I held up a beer and raised my eyebrows.
“Thanks,” Peter said as he sat on the truck bed.
And so began our friendship. We talked ourselves drunk until three in the morning. Soon Peter and I became the fun guys at the high school parties. We would get drunk, act completely silly to make people laugh, and became known as “The Streakers.” It wasn’t uncommon for us to disrobe at a party and swim naked, play basketball naked, or just run around and sit on other people’s laps and watch them freak out. We were a pair alright—a pair that liked to get naked together.
Soon, our friendship became more one-on-one. Peter stayed over at my house almost every weekend. During summer break, I practically saw him every day. The thing I miss most about our friendships is our talks. Peter’s intelligence always surprised me. He was very book smart, yet his depth of emotion struck me as well. He and I talked about our life dreams&mash;how we both wanted to be fathers, how we loved going to Disneyland and just sitting and people watching, how we both thought of high school as merely a springboard to bigger and better things. Many of our conversations revolved around God. We were both very religious at the time. Peter’s faith was Southern Church of Christ and mine was Catholic. We’d talk for hours about who God really was, if there was a heaven, and often spoke of what sin actually meant to both of us. Funny how we never discussed what actual sins were on our minds.
From the outside, no one noticed a thing, but I knew our friendship was something more.
I realized this one time when Peter and I came home to my father’s house a night after partying. We walked into my bedroom, which only had a twin bed. Tired and drunk, I shucked off my clothes except my boxers and climbed into my bed. Peter usually liked to sleep on the floor. “It’s good for my back,” he’d say.
“Will you get the lights?” I asked drowsily as I pressed the covers to my chest.
He turned of the lights. “Move over,” Peter said.
“What?” I asked, not really hearing him.
“Move over,” he said. “I want to sleep in here tonight.”
I was awake now. “But you usually sleep on the floor.”
“Well, I don’t want to tonight,” Peter said with a smile.
We debated who’d sleep where for the next five minutes. I offered to sleep on the floor. Peter said no. I offered to sleep in the other guest bedroom, which had a queen size bed. Peter said no. I said we could both sleep in the queen size bed. Peter said no. To this day, Peter is one of the most stubborn people I now, hence we both slept in the twin bed that night. No one touched anyone. Nothing happened. Still, I remember turning to my side and staring at the shadow of his body in the night, counting the freckles on his back to lull me to sleep.
Peter was a grade younger than I in high school and my graduating placed a strain on our relationship. While I was a freshman in college, Peter stayed stuck in high school without his best friend. Instead of getting drunk on the weekends, Peter now got drunk during the school week. Soon, he began missing more and more classes. Suddenly, the once bright-eyed athlete became the high school dropout that just smoked pot all the time. I got so busy in college that I began to talk to Peter less and less. It’s not something I feel bad about; it’s just something that happened. Still, Peter and I saw one another every weekend whenever I went home. We’d recount glory days of high school and Peter would always mention how much he missed me. I missed him too.
The first summer that I came home from college, Peter and I spent every waking minute together. I wanted to be around Peter because I missed him, but also because Peter wouldn’t smoke pot around me. I felt like I could get him back on the straight and narrow.
And then something happened. I went away to a music festival for school and in those two weeks, I came out. I came back to Oklahoma for three weeks before school began and I didn’t say a word about what had happened to anyone. That summer ended as it began, in a lazy and uneventful way. And Peter never knew about my coming out. For me, school started up; for Peter, joints lighted up. And that’s when Peter and I truly began to lose touch. As I look back on it now, I think I needed to be away from him. Being around Peter brought up feelings in me that I couldn’t express to him, and this reminded me of my days in the closet. At that time in my life, these feelings were too painful to remember. I also was falling in love with my first boyfriend and being with Peter almost felt like a betrayal.
But it wasn’t just me. I tried to call Peter a couple of times, but he never called me back. After a while, I just thought he was done with me. At first, the thought hurt my feelings, but when I happened to see Peter a few months later, things made sense.
I came in town that weekend for my nephew’s birthday and that night I went out with Eric and some other friends to the lake. Out of coincidence, Peter was there partying with some other friends. I still remember the look he gave me when he saw me—so happy and so sad at the same time—bittersweet.
Later on, we both ended up away from the other group. We sat on a rock ledge extending over the lake, a place called Sutter’s Landing, and I knew it well. As teenagers, Peter and I would run full speed and jump into the murky brown lake. But tonight we sat, thoughtfully sipping our bottles of beer.
“It’s good to see you, Pete,” I said. “It’s been too long. I missed ya.”
Peter seemed to weigh my words. I looked out across the shadowed water to a shaft of moonlight peering through the clouds. Somewhere I could hear a fish jumping up out of the water. The edge of the lake lapped the shore like a heartbeat.
“Why didn’t ya tell me?” Peter asked, his voice quiet and restrained.
“What?” I turned. He gazed into the water.
He looked at me in a blazed look of hurt. “We were brothers, and you couldn’t tell me you were gay?”
I couldn’t say anything. I had wanted to tell him.
“Steve,” he continued, “You know I love you and I hate that you had to carry that around. I mean, I still think it’s a sin and I worry about your soul, but you’re my brother.”
And that’s why I hadn’t told him. I felt like I had been punched in the gut. The trouble with getting older is that you grow a certain way while your friends grow another—but you don’t grow together. I had no use for religion anymore. I made my peace with spirituality and myself. For me there’s too much hurt in organized religion, so much that I doubt I’ll ever go back. However, Peter still lived by his faith; he clinged to it as a shield guarding him from himself. I looked out over the water, imagining a huge oak tree huge with large limbs. I envisioned two individual branches on separate sides of the tree. Once connected by only a short trunk, these branches now stretched out from one another as if gripping distinct parts of the air. Together, but still on different sides of the tree. I realized now, Peter had not contacted me for the same reasons I avoided him; it was too painful for him to see me.
For the next couple of years, any information about Peter came from friends. I heard he was partying more and more. He had been arrested twice for Driving While Intoxicated. He also had left Oklahoma several times with his friend Will. Ironically, no one had ever met Will. They only knew that he and Peter would go off and live in Montana or Colorado for a year, and then several months later Peter would come back madder than a wet hen saying something about he and Will having a falling out.
I heard Peter also had a habit of getting drunk and “handsy” with some of my other friends. My friend Eric told me that twice Peter had gotten super drunk and had tried to suck off two different male friends.
“Can you believe he told Kevin that ‘He didn’t have to tell anyone’?” Eric asked. “I don’t get it. We all know you’re gay and were fine with. Why won’t he tell us? It’s weird. We just want him to be happy.”
I told Eric that it might not be him Peter is worried about coming out to.
As I drove to meet Peter in Los Angeles, a town I’d lived in, felt comfortable in, and felt completely gay in—these memories of our history flooded my mind. I didn’t even know what I wanted from this meeting. I just hoped he was happy.
I pulled down a narrow street in Beverly Hills. I looked at the piece of paper on my dashboard.
“2116 Birch,” I said aloud, as if to confirm what I was about to do. “This is it.”
I parked my car and got out, not before doing a final check in the mirror. I walked up the wet cobblestone walkway. On the large mission-style door hung a wrought iron knocker. Above it was a small, pained, etched window. The light shimmered behind it in excitement. I knocked and took a deep breath…
What’s in store for Steve? Find out next week what actually happened with Peter.
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Years after moving from Oklahoma, Steve Prince is still acclimating to the gay scene in Los Angeles—he’s a slow learner. By trial and error and a lot of sex, his mission is to make the uncomfortable, comfortable. Also it should be known that he is gayer than butt sex.
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Previously, on A Gay In The Life:
The Birds and The Birds
Lyin’, & Twinks, & Bears—Oh My!
Going Public
Christmas in July
Luck Be A Lady Tonight
I Left My Heart In Oklahoma
As Luck Would Have It
Shock & Awe
Blame It On Britney
The Unending Journey
Makin’ Copies
Bullets and Bracelets… and Lube
To Tell The Truth…
Stars Aren’t Blind
The Dark Knight
Come As You Are
A Date?
A Happy Ending
Better Than Nothing
A Man With A Slow Hand