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“Uh, excuse me? Hello? You remember where we met, right?”
“Yeah.” That was a night I’d never forget.
Adam and I had gone to Tilt-a-Whirl, the gay club where Robert starred every Friday and Saturday night as the drag queen Renée DeShea. The evening had culminated in a series of firsts for me: first orgasm with another person, first blow job, and first time falling head-over-heels in love.
I shook my head. “Tilt-a-Whirl isn’t a place to make friends.”
“Sure it is. I ‘make friends’ there every night.”
I laughed. “Yeah, but I don’t want to be friends with just anyone.” Or to have sex with just anyone. Robert wasn’t known for his discretion in choosing who to have an orgasm with. That was okay for him, but I wanted sex to be special.
“That’s what I like about you. You’re so earnest and young.” Robert slapped my leg and then squeezed my knee playfully. “But seriously now, I’m only talking about making friends.” Smirking he added, “Not that you shouldn’t sample some of the goods if you want. You’re a pretty thing with that curly mop and those mysterious gray eyes.” He reached out to tweak my longish nose.
I batted his hand away.
“How do you know Adam’s dick is the one for you if you’ve never ridden any others?”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “Barry should hear you talk.”
Robert cackled. “Oh, he hears me talk all the time. He likes my mouth. Fora lotof reasons.”
I rolled my eyes. “Between you and my mom, one day I’m going to die from exposure to all the personal things I never wanted to hear about.”
Robert’s eyes grew soft and worried. “Speaking of your mom, how’s it going with her? Any cracks in the ice?”
I grabbed my empty beer bottle again to pick at the label. “It’s better, I guess.”
Heat crept up my neck remembering the new safer-gay-sex pamphlet sitting on my bed when I’d returned from the park last night. Mom had stuck a note on it:
Make sure you understand this! We can arrange for you to talk to a doctor if you need more advice! We love you!
I rubbed a hand over my eyes.
Robert patted my leg. “It’s okay, Sweetie. You can tell me anything. Just imagine me as Moses parting the Red Sea of Parental Rejection.”
I shot him a half-smile. “Mom’s talking to me now, so I think I might already be on the other side.”
Robert’s eyes softened with a mix of happiness and envy. “What a lucky boy you are,” he whispered.
“Am I?”
“Oh, yes. Believe me, so long as your parents aren’t preaching sermons about your eternal damnation to a televised audience, you’re far luckier than me.”
Robert’s dad, Dr. Michaels, worked with my father in the religious studies department at the University of Tennessee, but he was also a popular hellfire-and-damnation Baptist preacher whose sermons were syndicated on cable television throughout the Southeast. While I didn’t think Dr. Michaels ever mentioned his son by name, he definitely went into graphic detail when describing the vile punishments awaiting homosexuals in the pits of hell.
It’d been bad enough when my mother wasn’t talking to me. I couldn’t fathom how much it hurt to be rejected like that.
“I’m sorry your dad sucks.”
“Me too.” Robert ran his fingers along the back of the couch, smiling sadly at me. “But that’s not going to change. So what did your mom have to say for herself?”
I recapped the gist of our conversation.
“Damn, that’s a pretty good apology.”
In hindsight, I could see he was right. “Can’t ask for better. Well, aside from a totally different childhood where she dealt with her trauma before I was born. But I’ll take what I can get.”
Robert clucked his tongue. “You’re a good boy. No one would blame you if you held a grudge.”
