The Stuff of Life

I wish there was a bisexual category. The following story is a mix of truth and fantasy. It is in three parts. Enjoy.

I remember watching this movie once called Boys In the Band. If I recall correctly, it’s about a bunch of gays and one straight guy sitting around, drunk, and making these confessions. At one point in the movie, they challenge each other to call the one person whom they had a crush on and tell him what that person meant to him.

Can you imagine the poor bastard on the other end of the line? It’s 4 a.m. and some fag from high school calls you out of the blue to tell you that for the last 30 years you’ve been appearing nightly in his wet dreams?

The movie sets you up to think that the straight guy will call some other guy, revealing that even this paragon of heterosexuality had sported a woody for some other guy (the underlying premise being, I suppose, that deep down, everyone is homosexual.) In the end, he calls his wife or girlfriend and tells her he loves her.

If I were part of that cast, I would be the conflicted straight guy. But the person I would call wouldn’t be my wife, or ex-wife, rather – it would be Nathan Keith. Not that I secretly loved him. I loved him as a friend, I guess, but there was nothing romantic about what I felt for him. More than anything, what I felt for him was lust -- a deep desire to taste him again.

Nathan and I had an odd relationship. For about three years, we were best friends. But we were more than that. A lot of teenage boys experiment with homosexual sex. But what Nathan and I shared was, I think, something more than that. It was intense. It was, in fact, the most intense and memorable sex I have ever had – and I have been fortunate to have a lot of good sex in my life – mostly with women, but occasionally with men as well.

What Nathan and I shared was special. I never forgot him. I tried to, but he kept coming back in my fantasies. So, when a mutual buddy of ours died in a car accident, I decided to go home for the funeral.

That’s why Boys In the Band comes to mind, I guess. There we were – a bunch of guys in their late-30s, sitting around getting drunk, talking about Danny, and trying to say nice things about him – making shit up, if we had to. Truth? I fucking hated Danny’s guts. In fact, we were rivals. But he was a good friend of Nathan’s. That’s why I went: I knew Nathan would be there.

He had contacted me, out of the blue. Two decades had passed since I had last heard from him. I didn’t even know what part of the country he lived in. Google is a wonderful thing. He managed to track me down by Googling my name and sent me an email about Danny. I wrote back saying I would try to make it to the funeral. I needed to get away anyway. After nine years of marriage, my wife and I were on the rocks. We had split up and were working through a divorce.

More and more I found myself fantasizing about sex with guys. I would masturbate as I remembered those blissful hours Nathan and I once spent pleasing each other with our mouths.

I consider myself something of a non-practising bisexual, if there is such a beast. I put away the homosexual sex years ago, and thought I’d grow out of it. I didn’t. For years, it just stayed there in the background. As long as sex with women was satisfying, I didn’t think about it much. But after a while, sex with women begins to bore me, and I begin to crave the warm meaty taste of cock – not just any cock, but Nathan’s cock.

On a couple of occasions, in my late 20s, I would get drunk and pick up gay guys – or let them pick me up, rather. I would let them suck me off, and sometimes I would return the favour. But it was never very enjoyable. I always felt low and depraved afterwards.

When I saw Nathan, I was slightly disappointed. What had I expected? That he would have stayed forever a teenager? He was still handsome, but had put on a little weight, and there were crowsfeet around his laughing, brown eyes.

His face lit up when he saw me, and he gave me a big smile when I walked into the living room of Danny’s house. I gave him a hug, and was relieved that there appeared to be no undercurrent of unease, no weirdness there about what we used to do. After all, the last time we were together, we had filled each other’s mouths with sperm.

“Good to see ya,” I said.

“It’s been too long,” he said. “Looking good, man.”

I had worked hard at looking good. I had been dieting and hitting the gym five days a week and, now that I was single again, I was working hard on my appearance. I was looking and feeling good. My stomach was hard and flat, and my arms and pecs were nicely cut.

Danny, on the other hand, did not look so good. As he lay there in his coffin, he looked bloated. He had let himself go. All that extra weight, the sedentary life and the bad diet had killed him. Heart attack.

When everyone else had left the graveside, the “gang” hung back. We waited until everyone had left, then Gene lit a huge blunt in Danny’s honour, and passed it around. Then he cracked a bottle of Jack Daniels, poured a couple of ounces down into the grave onto Danny’s coffin.

“Cheers, buddy,” Gene said, stifling a sob, his lower lip quivering. “One last drink for the road.”

Then he passed the bottle around. Even I took a drink. I have been sober for 10 years. But it would have been disrespectful to have refused to take a drink at Danny’s graveside.

“Let’s get drunk,” Gene said.

“I second that motion,” Kenny said.

Our gang had been pretty heavy drinkers in our youth, so it was natural for us to send Danny off with a major piss-up. We all went to Gene’s house, where we listed to 80s music, drank heavily and smoked pot.

As I said, I don’t drink anymore, but I allowed myself a few tokes. This only served to make me feel weird and out of place. By the end of the evening, I ended up hiding out in Gene’s back yard, admiring his fruit trees. That’s where Nathan found me – among the apple trees.

He was getting pretty drunk and maudlin. He was still with his wife, Angie, and they had three kids. He had been with her for 15 years. Mutual friends told me that Angie had turned into a whale.

“She’s a good mother,” he said. “We’re very good fiends. Soul mates.” His eyes were a little glassy.

“I wish I could say the same,” I said.

I looked at him, as he stared wistfully into a glass of beer.

“We haven’t had sex in years,” he said.

“I’m in the same boat,” I said. “It happens, man. You’re with someone that long, it gets stale. You ever cheat on her?”

“Once,” he admitted. He seemed surprised at the question.

“Did she find out?”

“No. You’re the only person I’ve ever told.”

“I’ll keep it to myself, then. Was it worth it?”

“No,” he laughed. “I just had to find out…something.”

“Was she hot at least?”

“No,” he said, paused, and looked in his glass of beer. “Actually, it wasn’t…”

He fiddled with his glass, then looked up. “It wasn’t a woman.”

It took a minute for the light to go on, and when it did, my heart leapt with anticipation.

“Gotcha.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. My mind was racing and my heart had started to pound. Where was this leading? Would this long-held fantasy really going to unfold just like that? Sexual encounters almost never unravel the way I fantasize that they will.

There was a long, uneasy silence. Finally, awkwardly, perhaps too bluntly, I said: “Do you want to go somewhere and talk?”

“We’re talking now,” he said.

“Yeah but…since we’re being candid – I have some things I’d like to tell you, too”

“Like?”

“I wanted to apologize.”

“For what?” he said, surprised.

“Our experimentations.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I always kind of wondered about it. I always wondered if it had, you know, scarred you or anything. And if it did, I’m sorry.”

“What are you apologizing for? If anyone should apologize it should be me. And Justin. We started it all.”

That was true. It was Nathan’s older brother who had been the instigator. But once he got us started, I never wanted to stop, and eventually Nathan did.

“I was pretty aggressive about it,” I said. “I was often the one who initiated it, I mean after that first time. I sometimes felt that you weren’t really into it, towards the end there. I felt like I was forcing you, and I have always felt bad about it. That kind of stuff, it can leave you with a lot of guilt, you know? Shame.”

“Is that the way you felt?”

“No. Not with you. With other guys, yes. Never with you. It felt right at the time. It felt good. But I just always wondered how you felt about it.”

“I did feel felt guilty about it,” he said, after a long pause. “Even then I was starting to get religion, I guess. And, yeah, there was some shame. Still is, I guess.”

“Which is why I’m glad you brought it up. I’m sorry if what we did caused you any problems, you know. Any bad feelings.”

He was silent a long time.

“To be honest, the only thing that I felt guilty about was that I enjoyed it so much. According to my faith, to lie with another man is a sin. That’s what I used to believe, anyway. I’m 38 years old, and I’m just beginning to understand how totally disabling and counter-productive shame is. For years, my religion told me to deny who I am and feel bad about feelings I have no control over. Fuck that. I am who I am.”

“I couldn’t believe it when I heard you had become a minister,” I said.

“Lay minister,” he corrected me. “Anyway, I quit the church. I realized that they weren’t really my friends. If they knew the truth about me, what I’ve done, the feelings I sometimes have for other guys – for you – they’d disown me. Or try to get me to sign up for some homo rehab program.”

“Do you think you’re gay?” I asked.

“Who knows? Maybe. What about you?”

“No. Definitely not gay. Bisexual.”

“Is there such a thing?”

“Sex for me is a coin toss, and I win whichever way it lands: head or tail, I like them both.”

Nathan laughed, then fell silent. There was another long pause. I was trying to figure out whether this was simply a confession, something he needed off his chest, or whether he was getting hard, like I was, with the anticipation of where this line of talk might lead.

“I still think about it sometimes,” he said. “About what you and I used to do.”

“Me too,” I said, in a strained voice, almost a whisper. I cleared my throat. “All the time, in fact.”

“Really?”

“Really. I miss it. Honestly? It was some of the best sex I ever had.”

“Wow,” he shook his head. “All these years, I thought it was just me.”

“So what are we going to do about it?” I asked.

He stepped up to me, and I thought he might kiss me. He didn’t. He just leaned in and whispered: “My hotel room has pay-per-view porn channels.”

“What are we waiting for?” I said.