Jed Wolf

Four hundred years ago, indigenous people farmed the vast fertile plains west of the Pequonnock. Other than for shellfish, the Paugussetts had little use for the flood prone lowlands to the east. After Europeans brought disease and stole the rest of their land, what remained of the once great tribe hid out among the forests of useless twisted trees until the area became valuable for development.

Bridgeport, Connecticut was becoming wealthy when PT Barnum settled among its manufacturing tycoons and became mayor. The circus-like atmosphere ignited an extravagant building boom. Tree-lined promenades displayed Queen Anne architecture second to none until the 1950’s when the ill-conceived construction of I95 and route 8 ripped through the city’s heart and nearly demolished its soul. Neighborhoods were leveled and low-income housing sprang up convenient to the drug trade and the throng of travelers gawking at the ugliness from overpasses. The poorest city in the country in its wealthiest county surely had possibilities, but few would take a chance until gay people, used to working with shit, began fixing up Victorians in the 1980’s, but it would take more than tastefully painted gingerbread to break the area’s curse.

I’d just turned thirty-eight in 1993 in an autumn heat wave. My partner Andrew and I bought a dreary Victorian three years earlier in a crime ridden area with a view of a toxic harbor and a landfill but nowhere in that city was much better.

Andrew’s brother who’d had about fifty pot plants drying in our creepy attic cleared them out and the empty space sweltered with potential. Gabled windows surveying all directions had sold me on the place so I dragged my ailing father up three flights of stairs. I showed him where the sun rose over the Sound beyond the trash burning plant and where the taillight trails on I95 looked like lava at sunset. “It’s the throng of the 95 corridor Dad,” I said, “The artery to the heart of New England.” “Shut up Jed. How much do you need?” Even after hearing gunshots, he offered to help because this was how it was between us. He couldn’t listen to Andrew for fifteen seconds without closing his eyes or me for much longer, yet he loaned us money to invest in the cursed property, not because of the view from the attic, but because he cared or didn’t. I’d never know.

As soon as we moved into that house, Andrew and I re-enacted scenes from our early teens until we stopped having sex altogether. We could only play house for so long until we began slamming doors out of boredom. I might have known it wouldn’t last but I’d never actually met anyone on the gay end of the beach who looked that good in a speedo.

Gay men had been discreetly visiting the undesirable left side of the Sherwood Island State Park beach since the 1940’s. Swimming in the murky soup of Long Island Sound was only possible at high tide above barnacle-covered rocks and lethal oysters but most men hung out on blankets. Only an hour from Manhattan, it was easier to get to than Fire Island and a decent refuge from straight world until the Reagan era when cops began patrolling. Afraid to be recognized, locals like me hid on towels in the high dune grass until we couldn’t stand ourselves any longer and left. By the early nineties between the Canadian goose shit, scowling straight people and homophobic cops, only a handful of guys trying to enjoy a beach day sat near each other for security.

Andrew said I looked like a life guard behind my mirrored shades. Maybe I am,” I said, with my eyes straining to take him in while watching a battalion of geese float by. “Do you need saving?” “Hell yeah,” Andrew said, eying a patrol car. Beguiled by his responding to me at all, I leaked out enough of my story to give him an excuse to leave but he stayed, called me crazy then turned on his stomach aroused. “True,” I said wondering if he could see my heart pounding.

Our mutual attraction was obvious and I was fascinated by it. Maybe it was his interest in me that made me feel special. Whatever it was, I didn’t want it to end and said, “What’s your story sexy,” enough like a character on Baywatch to start an actual conversation. “What are you a therapist?” he said, sifting sand through his fingers. “I’m a lifeguard, remember?”

He called me nuts just enough to keep me flattered and I told him he’d make a better gigolo than bank teller and our die was cast. We had enough in common to feel comfortable sharing more intimate details, but it was like talking to a mirror. We’d both been molested, knew nothing about romance and were expert seducers. He gave me his number and his tank top which I breathed myself to sleep with until he left his partner for me.

We had so much in common. We both felt like pedophiles, or more precisely “hebephiles” which are adults drawn to pubescent children between the age of eleven and fifteen. Neither of us found boys that age attractive, but that was the age we’d been when adults began “pleasuring” us. Though a babysitter previously fooled around with me and my sister, Andrew and I hadn’t rejected the attention of adult men when we should’ve known better. We’d been ashamed ever since and were horrified when we couldn’t help but reenact old traumas with each other in our new house. We never made love because we couldn’t look at each other without feeling predatory so we stopped having sex altogether and spooned like brothers for comfort instead. When people called us “Pretty and Prettier,” we acted smug as if we were something more.

I was relieved when he told me he’d attracted a gym buddy but saddened cause the guy seemed so shallow. Andrew had begun injecting steroids and traded the sensitivity I’d been cultivating in him for muscles and a short fuse. Whatever their relationship might become wasn’t yet clear, but I needed to move on. Andrew thought the New Age books I’d been reading like “Emanuel” and “Conversations with God” were hocus pocus. “If Cher didn’t say it, I’m not interested,” he’d say with a wink. Though I was sick of his charm and wanted him gone, the IRS was after me, I was drinking way too much and didn’t have the heart to kick him out, so I moved into the broiling attic like a martyr and tried to pray.

As I sat in my Chevy Citation on another abnormally hot autumn day, waiting for a thunder storm to subside enough for me to run into the local Wawa store, I noticed a homeless man with a long, raised scar on his forehead crouching in the pouring rain. He held up a sign as I sprinted past as if he was ready for me, but I’d been ignoring people like him for years. I was used to the smell of Wawa’s corndogs and sticky floors and avoiding eye contact but this time after yanking open the door, I froze in my tracks. Standing in line amid the usual collection of characters was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen.

His dark blondish hair glowed amid the drunks and addicts like a golden fleece. I didn’t expect to get his attention but the moment we locked eyes, a cinematic flash of light shot from what I at first assumed was a lingering raindrop on his eyelash. But his hair and the rest of him was dry. Nothing could possibly create such a sparkle under Wawa’s inhuman florescent lights, so I looked away embarrassed for gawking and headed for the beer but when I glanced back, the man was gone. Though I didn’t think he’d been flirting, I went to the window to catch him walking away, but the only one out there was the homeless guy. I’d had out of body experiences. After an earlier painful breakup, I’d become deliriously ill and seen a white light, but no one ever disappeared.

I paid for my beer and went outside. Sitting on the ground soaking wet as the sun peeked from the clouds, the panhandler who was far younger and healthier than I expected said, “Did you see that?” Assuming he was referring to the storm, I said,” Yeah, big one,” but as I scanned his scar, a raindrop like the one I’d seen inside glinted from his eye.

“No not that. Did you see the most beautiful man in the world?” he said smiling, as chills ran down my spine. Was this supernatural? Why would this dude know this? No one had ever said I looked or acted particularly gay. Was he? Had he seen me looking out the store window?

“I’m Seth,” he said, reaching out his hand with an ironic expression that made his scar look like a rite of passage. “Can you spare a smoke?” He held up a laminated news clipping showing he’d survived a hit and run. He said he came from an affluent family who’d “disowned him” and I was hooked. He could’ve been me, I thought, feeling banished to my attic dungeon. I handed him several cigarettes and said, “They’re bad for our health,” which made us both smile.

I had an extra room, two for that matter and Andrew was spending half his time away. “Hey look, I know this might sound weird but your soaking wet,” I said. “I live nearby. You want to dry out have some food and maybe get a good night’s sleep?” A month later I’d given him meals, clothes, both my bikes and work which he couldn’t do because of his accident before I found his his crack pipe. Only after he began asking how much my Russian Wolfhound was worth did I finally lock him out.

Andrew, who’d stormed out several times in steroid rages wanted to move back in and Seth moaned outside my windows every night for me to unlock a door until one afternoon I heard others banging. The gay couple who recently moved in across the street stood on my porch accusing me of being heartless. They’d seen Seth limping around spattered with blood and taken him in. I tried to tell them he was a professional and deliberately stepped in front of moving vehicles, but they left horrified until a month later when they admitted he’d “lost” their ten speeds, took an interest in their Cairn terriers, and offered them sex for money.

As I lay on my bed in my baking garret like I had in my cell-like room as a kid, I began staring with my eyes wide open at nothing. Beyond bored and besieged with shame for being different, I’d made torment into a regular practice so when I finally left my bedroom, the world seemed tolerable. Roasting in that Victorian attic inured me to high temperatures. I could handle the heatwave others suffered and though I felt like tempered steel, I still couldn’t break Andrew’s heart. Stronger and weaker than ever, during the peak of a manic high, I called an old friend I hadn’t spoken to in twenty years.

I assumed since moving to California she’d lead a charmed life. She inherited a bunch of money, bought a homestead in the San Diego foothills, had horses and twin boys but after hearing her devoted husband was a drug addict, we began reminiscing in earnest. After hours on the phone often in tears, she invited me to stay with her and when I told her I hadn’t quite extricated myself from Andrew, she gave me some advice. ” Pretend he’s a squeezable rubber dinosaur,” she said. “Even if he acts like the demon in “The Exorcist,” whatever you do, don’t believe any of his shit.” “He’s the one that’s homeless, not you,” she said, “but you will be too if you don’t get the fuck out of there.” Though never felt at home anywhere in my life, something shifted the moment we hung up.

When I told Andrew I was moving to California he didn’t buy it. After trying in vain to reason with me while watching me pack, he tackled me, grabbed my head and began bouncing it on the attic floor. Rather than resisting, I looked up at him laughing until he released me and ran out of the house screaming.

It wasn’t the first time I’d played the crazy card and it wouldn’t be the last. What had attracted him to me in the first place had finally sent him packing. Bound by mutual needs for absolution, screwed up people make excuses for screwed up people until we fly away but had I known better, I might’ve sought therapy before winging blindly into the future like a sexy bat.

The oldest continually operating gay bar in the United States slumped near the causeway to Sherwood Island State Park for nearly seventy years. During the day you might think the innocuous Brook Cafe was a sagging Elks club but on Wednesdays and weekend nights, the surrounding packed parking lots, throbbing disco, and highest liquor sales in the state had been attending to victims of colonization and Christianity since 1939. It should’ve burned to the ground but the weathered old “refuge for visionaries, medicine people and healers was blessed,” the bar tender said, pouring me another scotch. “So leave your darkness at the door girl.”

Our empty house was finally back on the market. My wolfhound Olive, who lay curled up in the passenger seat was far too big to sit up and greet me when I returned to our carso I leaned over on her silky shoulder and kissed her face before pulling away from everything I knew and headed to California.