I didn't know why David was being such a dick. He'd promised to come walking with me look at the Christmas lights set up on all the houses around the neighbourhood. I had the romantic idea that we could walk together, hand-in-hand, my first Christmas with a boyfriend, my first Christmas being gay.
I know that sounds weird. I can hear you saying:
"Don't you mean; "Your first Christmas OUT as gay?""
Nope. Well maybe. But that's not how I experienced it. I went from a lonely (even though I had and have lot of friends) virgin straight guy with a lot of hangups to a very happy openly gay guy without a hangup in the world (and without the slightest bit of my virginity remaining) in one beautiful spectacular weekend. I have David (and I guess my friends who knew me better than I knew myself) to thank for that.
But now it was Christmas-eve-eve. Christmas-eve night David would join me at my house with my foster-parents and my foster-brothers and sisters for Christmas dinner. They also mostly knew me better than I knew myself when six months earlier I'd told them I'm gay.
"Umm Gladys?" I'd said to my foster mum after the weekend.
"Yes Edward," she'd replied while continuing to unpack the dishwasher.
"Well... I just wanted to let you know... I'm gay and well..."
She looked at me briefly and then said, "Yes, Edward, go on."
"Oh well... that's it actually..."
"Oh okay. Do you want something to eat?"
And then later to Adam, my foster-father,
"Ah Adam... did Gladys tell you about me?"
He actually laughed, "Oh yeah. She said that you'd told her that you're gay."
"I did! What's funny about it?"
"Oh.. Oh, I'm sorry Eddy. I just thought... Somewhere along the line, we've just assumed... Well you've never really tried to hide it so... its just surprising that you felt you had to say it."
Well obviously that wasn't the end of the conversation and I'm sorry that I'm leaving a lot unsaid in this story.
Anyway plenty of straight guys don't like sport, like to dress well, get their hair cut every week, use moisturising sunscreen on a daily basis etc.. And when I said when watching a rugby league game with Adam on TV:
"The cameramen must be gay. They always seem to focus on the guy's thighs, crotches and arses," ... well, I thought that was a pretty objective statement?
I'd dropped out of school when I was a kid. I don't really want to go into all of the reasons why but suffice to say, it's hard to do homework when you don'r have a home. Even though I wasn't really too old to go back to school, my new foster parents got me into an academy for mature students and other people in my situation where I could get my QCE (the Queensland senior school certificate) in only one year of study. At the time of the Christmas lights incident, I'd graduated just a few weeks earlier.
But the Tuesday after I'd turned gay, or discovered that I'm gay, I was so happy that I posted it to the FB page my academy group had set up.
"Oh, I'm so surprised! Who'd have thought you were gay?!?!"
Someone posted a meme of Mike Pence with the caption "I'm Shocked!"
"Oh no! I had dreams of us married with three kids one day!" Said one of the girls.
All of it followed by heaps of likes and laughing face emoji's. Apparently it came as no surprise to any of them either. They did all finally comment or like messages congratulating me though. They're all really cool people.
Anyway I'm going to write other stories about incidents in my weird life but I'm just focussing on this Christmas fiasco. So as I said, Christmas Eve David and I would be at my foster family's house and Christmas Day we would be at his parent's house up the coast.
Then on Boxing Day, it's my birthday. David was going to organise a party for me with our friends but I told him that my foster family would be having one for me. That wasn't the kind of party he had in mind. He did have the idea that he would organise a birthday party at his flat on that Christmas-Eve-Eve but he lost interest in the idea as he often does and said he would take me out for a romantic dinner sometime before New Years instead.
Yes of course people don't turn their lights off immediately after Christmas but going around after Christmas Day isn't the same. Christmas-Eve-Eve was the last chance. David had been promising to go with me for days and now he said he had to work on some university summer school essay that he'd already written but decided that he needed to rewrite.
"Just go by yourself Edward if you're so desperate to see the lights. I'm on a roll here. If I stop now I'll lose my train of thought!"
So I walked out to see the lights alone. I did feel bad about it. He'd just rented the flat a month before. One reason was that he didn't have to do the hour and fifteen minute commute from his parent's house to his uni but he was also constantly asking me to come and live with him.
Yes I'd spent the night there many times and since I'd turned eighteen nearly a year before I wasn't technically under foster care anymore, but after many years of instability, Gladys, Adam and the kids were the first stable loving family I'd had and I hadn't even been with them for three years yet. I wanted it to last. I didn't want to move out at the earliest opportunity. I didn't want to leave the kids who saw me as their older brother and who'd all been through the same kinds of things I had been through growing up.
So I was thinking about all of this as I was walking alone along the street looking at the Christmas light displays people had set up on and in front of their houses. It had been a very hot and humid day (we're in Brisbane, Australia) and there was lots of people around enjoying the cool night air and the lights.
I turned the first corner and came to a house that had a very nice display. No inflatable Santas and Reindeer, just lots of strings of little LED lights in single colours around the fences, topiary bushes in the front yard and most of the front of the house. They faded in and out gradually, no epilepsy inducing flashing, creating quite beautiful and elegant displays of colour combinations.
But there was a guy up on a ladder leaning on the front verandah roof of the house. I did notice that part of the gable of the house was blacked out when I could tear my consciousness away from his thick meaty thighs leading up into his very brief shorts and the muscles of his arms and back visible through his sweat stained dark blue singlet.
"Oh fuck!" He suddenly yelled and looked down to the ground. He turned around and looked at me.
"Hey mate, can you give me a hand? I dropped my bloody screw-driver."
"Yeah, okay."
I walked up his path and looked for the screwdriver. He had a border of Agapanthus along the front and the screwdriver had fallen in there. I had to use the light on my phone to search for it but finally I got it.
"Found it!"
I looked up at him and pretty much looked straight up the leg of his shorts. It was pretty dark, lit only by the shifting coloured lights of his display, but I nearly dropped the screwdriver all over again.
"Thanks mate. Can you climb up and hand it to me? I can't let go of these wires."
Well I'm not usually a great ladder climber and it was a damn long way up. The house was a Queenslander, high on piers before even getting to the verandah floor level. I put the screw-driver in my pocket so that I could hold on better with both hands and began the climb. All I could see were those thick hairy thighs and those solid looking buttocks gradually getting closer.
I got up to the level where my face was near his boots, held on as tight as I could with one hand, reached into my pocket with the other hand to get the screw-driver and then stretched my arm up to hand it to him.
"You'll have to come up a bit higher mate."