The note read, "I've had enough of this." That's all. Hal had left it on the dining room table for me to see. The scrawl was obviously done in anger. I hadn't thought the fights—not rising to the level of fights, I didn't think—we'd had the last couple of nights were enough to push him over the edge.
I know I shouldn't have said that he went for the surface flash rather than the long-haul reliability. I was just talking about the new Cadillac ATS coup he'd bought a couple of weeks ago from at Baltimore dealer and hauled it back here to Havre de Grace, near the top of the Chesapeake Bay at the mouth of the Susquehanna River. But then he shouldn't have asked me if that wasn't what I was: surface flash rather than the long-haul reliability.
I never pretended that I hadn't been looking for a sugar daddy when we first hooked up.
He'd been worked up and went on to say I was impetuous, overly generous, jumped to conclusions, and avoided confronting problems. He'd said, "If only you'd talk to me about—" but I'd cut him off, saying I didn't want to talk about it, I wanted to fuck. That ended on his bed, him muttering something about an early Christmas present, with him on top of me, my legs open to him, and him French kissing me while he did his weekly pushups on me. It was how we ended most of our arguments, with me earning my keep by clutching his buttocks, taking his cock, and telling him how good he was doing. And he was, in fact, doing good. He had a nice long one that could get in deep. And I did have "a thing" for older men. Merry Christmas.
Afterward, I'd said, "You forgot to include that I was a pushover for a man with a big dick."
"I didn't get around to saying half of what you are," he retorted. Then, calmed down, he'd just said that that had been covered in everything else he'd said I was and that it was Christmas. It could wait. The note he'd left me, though, said it couldn't wait.
Just the memory of that brief explosion last night irritated me and I took my cellphone out of my pocket and turned it off. He would call, I was sure, to expound on the note he'd left, and I wasn't in the mood to hear him. He was old enough to be my father, but I didn't want a father telling me all the things that were wrong with me. I had wanted Hal just to be a nice sugar daddy, and usually he was.
He'd apologized and I'd laughed it off. I actually felt a little guilty about that—going to a hotel room with a good-looking, muscled-up soldier from the nearby Aberdeen Proving Grounds. I was bartending for him where I worked at Coakley's pub, on the main waterfront drag, St. John's Street. The soldier had been cute, in a rough-looking way, and had muscles and a smart mouth. So I went with soldiers who came into the pub sometimes. Big frickin' deal.
Hal had been the one who wanted us to move in together. I hadn't promised him total fidelity, and I had myself checked regularly. But I felt bad he'd found out about Corky.
I felt worse that he'd become a martyr about it and had brought it up a couple of times. Good thing I guess that he didn't know about the other soldiers from the proving grounds. Hal gave good fuck, for a guy eighteen years older than I was, but he didn't give it often enough. He was busy, though. Owning a restaurant like Charlotte down on the waterfront took a lot of time. But it brought in a lot of money to float us. So, there was that.
Still, a terse note like this to tell me we were finished. He was a man of few words, but not often this few. I guess I could be glad he didn't add a sentence to tell me to pack up and be out before he got home, which should be by now. He was going to take off from the restaurant and do the grocery shopping. We were seriously out of milk. I'd taken off early myself because it was snowing like hell out there. This was no afternoon to try to find someplace else to live in Havre de Grace. I liked the Concord Pier apartment Hal had gotten overlooking a marina. So, did he decide to buy some milk before deciding to call it quits? I wondered.
I went to the refrigerator, opened it, and said, "Shit." Not only was there no milk, but I saw that he'd mixed up some eggnog. It was just two days before Christmas, but who doesn't replace the milk but does mix up homemade eggnog? A guy who was flash surface and no reliability, I guessed.
I looked out to the marina, where all the boats were white today and seemed to be shivering, a December occurrence when it snowed in Maryland. The snow had stopped, though. We were projected to have more, maybe as much as eight inches. And here I was, all alone in an apartment, without milk. With a sigh, I put my coat back on. It was better schlepping out to the Weis grocery store on the Pulaski Highway in four inches of snow than in eight inches, I decided.
I was coming out of Weis with milk and a few other survival supplies when I heard the bells. I looked around for the Salvation Army kettle, because I always slipped some money into the kettle when I passed one. It was a good luck habit. I'd lived on the edge for a while and had been aware that there wasn't always a lot of distance between me and a guy who was down on his luck and homeless. Who knows, I might be evicted tomorrow in the snow myself. It had started snowing again. There was no Salvation Army bell ringer in sight, but I did see where the ringing was coming from. Across the parking lot, a "sort of" Santa was standing at the edge of a gas station and was shaking a leather strip with lots of little round bells on it. Thanks to atmospherics in the snow, he was getting quite a bit of sound out of them.
He hit me as a "sort of" Santa because he was bedraggled and not making a particularly good stab at the character. He had a red Santa hat with a white fluff ball on the end and he did have wavy white hair, but his beard and mustache, also white, weren't filled out like Santa's would be. He had them, but it was like he was just informed the last week in November he was being brought in as a substitute street Santa and had only started growing the beard and mustache then. He had on a red sweat shirt and he was rotund enough, but his baggy pants were black and looked like he'd been rolled in the dust in them.
He had a poster-board sign in front of him on which was scrawled, "Need Help Getting to Florida." The sign was curling up at the corners. It wouldn't last another hour in this wet snow. Maybe this poor excuse for a Santa wouldn't last too many more hours standing out here in the falling snow either. Poor guy. He obviously was homeless, living out of his car, and had been trying to get to somewhere warm when his car ran out of gas. Havre de Grace was more of a "my car ran out of gas when I was driving from New York to Florida" place than a winter wonderland destination.
I started to get into my car when it hit me that I would have tossed money in a Salvation Army kettle out of superstition about "that could be me," but I was just going to pass this guy by when he needed some gas money to get out of the snow. He could be me too.
I put the bag with the milk and survival supplies on the floor of the backseat of the car, closed the door, and walked over to the gas station. When he saw me approaching he moved a hand to his crotch and adjusted his package. He was smiling at me. In some instances I would have taken that as gay signaling, but he was just a homeless guy. He probably was just naturally crude. I took the option of smiling back at him.
"Hi. Saw your sign," I said. "So, you're trying to get to somewhere warm and got stranded here in the snow?"
"Something like that," the homeless guy said, "Anything you could spare would be a help."
Up closer, the guy looked younger than he did from afar and a lot less like a Santa. He was on his way toward having the bulky torso and a belly for it, but up close his face looked pinched and malnourished. He was pretty good looking, though, if you discounted the likelihood he'd been dragged through the dirt.
"Sure, I can give you a twenty," I said and handed him a twenty-dollar-bill. I'd been a big spender of Hal's money since we'd hooked up. "But that's not enough to get you below the snowline. I've seen on TV that it goes all the way down into the Carolinas. How close are you to being able to get on the road?"
"I've got a twenty now, thanks to you." He smiled at me again. That got to me. In such straits and still able to look on bright side of things. He was quaking and I though he must be chilled to the bone. It was a wet snow that was falling. He'd be soaked as well as chilled even before we'd stopped jawing with each other.
"I tell you what," I said, on impulse. "You look like you need a meal and dry, clean clothes. How about you come back to my place for a couple of hours and you can have dinner with me, have a shower, and we'll get your clothes cleaned and dry? Then I'll bring you back here and you can continue your Florida quest. Your car should be OK here. There aren't too many car thefts from gas stations in snow falling this heavy, I don't think."
"Well, I don't know—"
"And I think I have something at the apartment that would make a sturdier sign than this one is. The snow has pretty much done it in, I think." While he was hesitating, I held out my hand and said, "My name is Ryan, by the way. Ryan Jamison. And you are?"
"Nick," he said, smiling and taking my hand in his. He had a good, strong grip.
"Of course it is," I said. "Short for Nicholas. I've heard you were a saint too."
He laughed. "Not always, I'm afraid. I'm sure I've made the naughty list a time or two."
He didn't balk as I guided him over to my car.
* * * *
I could hardly believe how high the stack of clothes was by the master bedroom door when I heard Nick go into the shower and turn it on. They hardly fit in the washer, but if he was going to be out of here after a bite to eat, one washer load would have to do it. I wasn't domesticated anyway, much to Hal's annoyance. Sometimes I thought he wanted a maid as much as a bed partner whenever he was in the mood—which wasn't enough. I had to have it more, and I, in fact, got it more. He looked the other way, but he had no idea the extent of it.
It was almost Christmas and I wanted to be in the mood, so, before I started burning a pizza for Nick and me, I went around the living room, turning down the lights, turning the lights on the Christmas tree, and put a CD on of shmaltzy Christmas oldies. It was still snowing outside. The bluish cast to the snow-covered boats in the marina below was Christmassy as well. I opened the refrigerator, saw the eggnog, took it out, filled two mugs, took a swig, turned toward the master bedroom door upon hearing a sound there, and went WOW. I probably would have done that anyway at finding that the eggnog was heavily spiked, but what really brought the "wow" up was the view of Nick standing in the bedroom door.
"Sorry for the towel, but you took all of my clothes," he said, "and what's in the closet in here is too flamboyant—and a little too small—for me. It's not your size, though. It was easy to see that."
It wouldn't be, I thought. I was a small guy. So, he was curious about what was what here. Might as well give it to him straight. "That's Hal's room—my roommate." I had a slight start at the thought that Hal had left his clothes here. That was the closer that I was the one who was supposed to leave. I'd have thought that that was pushy of Hal, except that he was paying for this apartment. It was his name that was on the lease. What took my thoughts away from that, though, was that Nick wasn't at all what I had been expecting.
Yes, he was heavy, but more in the husky vein than the Santa category. I smiled, the great pile of clothes I'd put into the washer now explaining itself. He wasn't roly-poly in a Santa vein. He'd been wearing every stitch of clothing he owned in an attempt to keep warm. It had made him appear much (Much!) heavier than he really was. I'd really have to say he was husky and stocky, starting with a well-muscled barrel of a chest and tapering down a tad at the waist, which was thick, but not obese. He actually had very good muscle tone for a mature hobo—not that I knew that the homeless should be flabby or scrawny.
Nick wasn't either flabby or scrawny. He looked good to me in just the towel hooked around his waist. I liked older men. The wavy gray hair had to be early onset. He couldn't be fifty yet in what the rest of his body revealed. The gray, in fact, became salt and pepper on his chest and in the line down his belly and into the low-rise of the towel. It, of course, made me wonder what color his pubes were. I was wired that way, always thinking of sex and dicks and whether they were going to be inside me. I wouldn't throw this Santa out of bed.
"I look silly like this?" he asked.
"Excuse me?"
