well, back in the eighties it was really dangerous to be a gay man. obviously i refer here to the aids epidemic that swept through the nation, and specifically my hometown of san francisco. it was really, really scary. every couple of weeks, you'd get a phone call -- another one of your buddies got it, he was going to die. he was dead. the funeral was next monday. i've still got the suit that i attended nearly every one of those funerals in -- probably one every three weeks for two or more years. it's hung in the back of my closet, it haunts me, i can't bare to look at it because it brings back to surface all sorts of awful memories.
i remember the worst of the bunch. it was my best friend. we had known each other since grade school, lived next door all of our lives. when he came out to me, i was still in the closet. i was the first person he told, and i spilled my guts to him there as well. we cried and cried for what our families would think (as we lived in the extremely conservative midwest at the time). honestly pondered killing ourselves. it was such an emotional experience, it made me seriously reconsider my life and how i was living it. so as soon as i turned 18, i told my folks to go fuck themselves and moved with my buddy to beautiful san francisco. we were never romantically involved -- there was never even a sexual tension between us. we were just friends, that's how it was, an unspoken contract between us that would forever be upheld. we were inseparable though. we went out to clubs and the like together, hung out, listened to the same music, and were each other's shoulder to cry on. a true best friend like him, there will never be another, because of how beautiful a man he was.
but, yeah, when i got the call from him it hit me like a ton of fucking bricks. he was going to die, and there was nothing i could do about it. i felt so helpless, so tiny and insignificant. the most i could do was make sure his last few months were lived out in comfort. i couldn't kill myself, that would only make his last moments so much worse. i was his only comfort. his friends abandoned him. his family was long since estranged. it was me who would stay up with him alone at night, comforting him through the intense pain he felt. it was me who watched as he slowly withered from his previously strong frame to a bony nothing of a man. it was me who toweled him down with a wet cloth, moved him around so he didn't get bedsores, who made sure to give him water when he was too weak to stand. and yes, it was me who walked into his house one day and found my best friend, my rock, my salvation, dead. and it was me who made the funeral arrangements. it was me who broke down into a sobbing hysteria seeing his emaciated form in front of me, and it was me who tried to hang himself afterwards. it was me who miraculously had the rope snap.
i don't believe in any god, but i suppose i took it as an omen from my dear friend that my life was not yet ready to be ended, that i had some sort of purpose. i have found little direction with my life after that experience, and i find myself almost entirely asexual after. sex does not appeal to me. it only brings to the surface what i tie to a stone and throw into the river.
