Here’s the thing about Christian: I was pretty much in love with him—horribly, obsessively, unrequitedly in love with him in the way that you tend to be when you’re 21—for a solid eight months. But we didn’t fuck until I was so over him the very sight of him made me sick.
This was a first for me, the way this all-consuming crush resolved itself with the simple realization that the guy was a moron. Up till then I would have said that I’d never really gotten over any guy that I’d been into. Some part of me held onto those feelings—the longing, the heartbreak, the lingering attraction—because…well, just because. But not with this dude. Christian and I became friends. And then I realized what a spectacular tool he was.
You’d think this would be one of those proverbial “What was I thinking?” scenarios. But no. I know exactly what I was thinking.
* * * *
He was in a tank top the first time I saw him. Blond hair down to his shoulders. Lean muscles and aviator sunglasses. It was August and I spotted him on campus at Guilford College. I was there signing up for a queer film class, arranging for credit to be transferred to my school.
Cute guy, I thought, and got in my car and drove away.
Turned out he was the TA in that queer film class.
* * * *
Queer Cinema 101, or whatever it was called, was an evening class. Once a week I drove across town to the Guilford campus and sat in an auditorium watching and discussing gay films for three hours.
The first couple weeks I didn’t talk to him. I sat by myself and didn’t really talk to any of my classmates. But I did talk a lot in class. I raised my hand a lot. I had a lot to say about identity and the cinematic gaze and all that stuff. But during breaks in class I just kinda hung around, hoping that Christian would talk to me. Which he didn’t. At this point I wasn’t even sure if he was into guys or not. Though I had a feeling.
Then I ran into him at Sky Bar, this club in downtown Greensboro that had a gay party on Sunday nights. It was my 21st birthday. So I said hi. I invited him to the epic party I was planning for the following weekend and then my roommate got the bartender to pour all of us some kind of flaming shot for my birthday and Christian sort of got absorbed back into the crowd and I probably kept an eye out for him the rest of the night. I don’t remember whether he showed up to my party the next weekend. But communication was established.
* * * *
I was probably two months into the semester before I finally asked him out on a date. Every week I’d look forward to Queer Cinema 101. Every week I’d drive across town listening to Fleetwood Mac and telling myself that I was gonna do it, I was gonna ask Christian out to dinner or something. And then I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it the week we watched Hedwig. I didn’t do it the week we watched Boys Don’t Cry. I didn’t do it the week we watched Chasing Amy. Maybe it was the week we watched The Celluloid Closet, I don’t know. But after weeks of making chit-chat during smoking breaks and talking bullshit about subjectivity and objectivity and trying really fucking hard to seem all smart and shiny and amazing, I finally just kinda asked him to go to dinner with me.
He got this really creepy twinkle in his eyes and smiled really slowly, like he’d just figured something out about me that was in some way valuable, the way villains in movies look when they realize how they can finally take the hero down.
“Yeah. Ok,” he said.
Since the date was my idea, it seemed like it was up to me to decide what we would do. I picked him up at his apartment and we drove all the way back to my side of town to hang out at my favorite bar. We sat at a table in the front window and talked about the things we were both preoccupied with: Queer Theory, post-structuralism, gender identity. He talked about his ideas about his own sexuality and gender, in a way that only Gender Studies majors do. He told me he was wearing women’s underwear and it didn’t freak me out at all. I wanted someone challenging. I wanted a freak.
When I dropped him off at his apartment later kissed me, playfully, off-handedly as he got out of the car.
* * * *
The first time we almost did it was at his birthday party. Late in night, his bedroom turned into a half-hearted mini orgy, with he and I sort of at the center of it all in his bed. At one point he looked at me and asked, “What do you think of my dick?”
It didn’t seem like boastful or dirty, like he was trying to turn me on. It seemed like he was asking for something like reassurance.
I looked at him and smiled.
“Have you ever seen one like mine?”
It wasn’t especially remarkable. It was a perfectly normal looking penis. It wasn’t hard.
“It doesn’t really work for me all the time,” he said.
The orgy didn’t really go anywhere, aside from a couple Guil-Co girls getting naked and straddling some naked straight guy who seemed to be passed out. After everyone left, I tried to pick up where he and I had left off, but he wanted to get breakfast instead.
This became a sort of pattern in our relationship. We’d brush up against the act and then he’d pull away. We made out every now and then, and sometimes he’d sleep in my bed. But it never went further than that. And I just kept obsessing over him, more in love, for some reason, than I thought I would ever be with anyone ever again.
Then came the night he told me he’d started seeing a girl. Megan. A dowdy, fag hag kind of girl at Guilford College who didn’t mind that her boyfriend wore panties and liked to get fucked and wasn’t sure if he was transgendered or not. I went home and took a shower and cried and cried and cried.
But we stayed friends. And the strangely almost-sexual aspect of our relationship remained. We fancied ourselves libertines. In my mind we were Louis and Lestat—I had long dark hair, he had long blond hair—amorally roaming the night, looking for trouble. We went to strip clubs together the night before Christmas Eve. We ended up in bed with a group of my girlfriends.
One night I ended up at a party at his apartment on mushrooms. I sat watching Smashing Pumpkins videos and he put the dildo that Megan fucked him with in my hand. I wandered into his bedroom and couldn’t tell if I was looking at his girlfriend asleep in his bed or if I was just hallucinating. I tried to explain this to my friend A and ended up saying that I thought there was a body in his bed. She laughed and charged in there and came out giggle a little more skittishly and apologized because it really was his girlfriend asleep in his bed.
* * * *
It must have been my idea of us as vampire soul-mates that made me suggest we go to New Orleans together for Spring Break. That and the fact that I knew he’d be up for it. And that he’d be up for anything I would want to do in New Orleans. We’d explore the seedy bars and strip clubs together. We’d get lost in that decadent city full of voodoo and frat boys, and we’d both want to see the same things.
The day we left, I was already irritated with him. He was late waking up and we almost missed our flight. By midday we were wandering the French Quarter, exhausted from the trip and unsure what to do until nightfall. We napped and dressed and roamed Bourbon Street, popping into co-ed strip clubs and gay bars, the day’s tension gone in a haze of tequila and cheap plastic beads.
That night, drunk and far from home in our four-star hotel room, we tumbled into his bed together, naked and I fucked him.
* * * *
By the end of our week in New Orleans, I couldn’t stand the sight of him.
I can’t say exactly what it was. Suddenly he wasn’t the magical animal I’d thought he was, and I don’t know what caused this…transformation? Revelation? He was lazy and narcissistic and hopelessly pretentious, but I’d known that already. In New Orleans he seemed somehow helpless. The ballsy, shamelessness was gone. Maybe it had never been there. While I made friends at the bars we went to—something that I probably wouldn’t have been able to do at home—he seemed neutered, unable to hold his own in this environment. I started to see his swagger for the fraud that it was. And everything he said sounded like pseudo-intellectual schlock. It was like watching something I’d created out of clay crumble in front of me.
I found myself being actively cruel to him, snapping at him at dinner, ditching him for cute boys I met on Bourbon Street. I saw that he was hurt, but I just couldn’t bring myself to care.
Driving home from the airport back in North Carolina we barely said a word to each other. When I finally dropped him off at his apartment, I’d never been so happy to have someone out of my sight before.
* * * *
I didn’t see much of Christian after New Orleans. We’d run into each other at bars around town, and when we did I was friendly. I didn’t hold any resentment. He hadn’t done anything other than not be the guy I’d convinced myself he was.
He on the other hand seemed irreversibly wounded by the trip. I’d been a jerk, I knew that, and he had every right to hold a grudge.
The last I heard of him, he’d been living in a house with some people I knew from UNCG and he’d accidentally burned the house down.
0 Responses to “Christian, August 2003-March 2004”