I put in another 260 daffodil bulbs this fall. A hundred last week and another 160 today. Two varieties, Juanita and King Alfred, the bulbs of which are as big as a Cuban’s balls. I have a hillside sloping down from the house and I figure if I put in about 200 or so every fall, one day, I’ll have a whole mountain of spring flowers leading up to the house.
Here’s a story for you:
I grew up in a small town in Pa…real blue collar…coal town, railroads…like that. I didn’t know WHAT I was going to do with myself. I knew, as best I could have known at the time, that I was queer, but what to do?
There was a program at the time that got kids out of high school early so they could go to college. This was during the Reagan years, and those of us that could get out of high school and enroll in college by the start of the next year, could maintain their social security benefits (my father was a veteran and killed so me and my brother received a check). Any way, I applied, and then next thing I knew, I got to spend my senior year of high school as a freshman at Penn State University.
What fun! I was young, hot, full of cum and off I went. Still I didn’t really know anything about the gay world and I was intensely ashamed of being a homo. Aside from a couple of hot dalliances, I floundered.
Not in school though. Free of the tight scrutiny of high school, my GPA soared. I was on the dean’s list every semester. During exams, in all the huge 101 courses, me and my friend Leah were surrounded by 6 or so students desperate to cheat off our papers.
Leah and I made a pact. We were going to take this new found momentum and apply to Ivy League schools, get out of the Pa sticks, and find ourselves the Brave New World everyone talks about… Actually, I wanted to find a place far enough from home that I could get laid and not feel like I was going to get caught. I didn’t give a fuck about attending a University (since I already thought I knew it all), I just wanted to be free.
I never made it into an Ivy League (and Leah got pregnant so that put the cabash on her college goals) but I DID make it into William and Mary. The day I opened that envelope was one of the happiest days of my life. I had that hot summer to think about moving to Virginia and everything I was going to do. By August, I packed up my car and drove south to Williamsburg. I remember a big fight with my family a day or so before I left. Nothing extraordinary, more of the usual bullshit and now of course when I look back on it I think to myself, could I have been any more of an asshole? Anyway, the departure was one of those ripping-up-the-gravel-driveway departures. Me and my four cylinder Ford EXP…a real tough guy all right (!)
Once at William and Mary, I made a lot of friends. I was cocky and loved to party. I could hit the bars with the best of them (the legal age to drink was 18) and since my floor thumped with one weekend frat party after the next, there was no shortage of mischief I could get into. That’s where I met Joe.
Joe was like an alien from another world. On my floor, I roomed with an Ambassador’s son, a nephew to the President of Chrysler Corporation and any number of Washington big wigs, but there were none that stood out like Joe. He had been raised in Budapest, extensively traveled Europe, smoked Gitane cigarettes and had a mind like a cracking whip. The boy completely swept me off my feet.
Now I don’t know if you know this about William and Mary, but it is a HUGE dyke school. Christ, step outside and all you smell is boxwood and progesterone. Oh and clear off the sidewalk too, lest you’re overrun by a pack of brawny girls on their way to field hockey or softball or a game of cutthroat tennis. But as far as faggots go, the only way you’re going to find a boy to sleep with is if you attend the closing night party for the theatre majors or get some poor fratboy drunk enough for him to pretend it all never happened. So when I met Joe, it was like someone had slipped me the long lost brother I never had. He took my hillbilly style and rocketed me up to speed on fashion, discourse, behavior oh and the best part, he introduced me to the gay night life in Norfolk, Va.
Ever hear of it? It’s a big US port. Sailors and shipyards. And if you dig deep enough into the dirtiest part of the wrong side of the tracks, you’ll find a couple of queer bars. You know, I don’t think I can even remember their names, but that’s where Joe would take me and Jesus God did we have fun.
There were actual sailors in the joint. Dressed up, yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum, sailors. I think the first time he took me in the place, I must have practically passed out from the anticipation of just being in the same room as them. Now don’t get me wrong, at some of the bar tables it would have taken four men to make a full set of teeth. I mean, most of these guys were not going to win a beauty contest anytime soon, but peppered throughout the crowd, you’d find a handful of eyes-out-of-your-head, slobber-down-your-chin studs and it was fantastic.
Dancing at that place, seeing Joe across the floor working some trick, me working one that I found… God that was fun. I met this one black guy there. Six something, built like a superhero with two big ass cheeks. Looked like the back of his acid washed jeans were stuffed with two loafs of pizza dough. Anyway, we started dancing together, then making out. The next thing I know, I was driving down regularly to fuck him. Those were my very first truly gay encounters. Everything up to that point had been boyscout stuff. But this was full on, cock up his sweet ass, gay sex. We would cum four or five times a night. No joke. And I was so high on the experience, I felt as though my feet were no longer touching the ground. In class, driving, at work, where ever, my head was not where it should have been, but back with that boy in his crappy apartment, lying on that mattress he kept on the floor, fucking and making out.
Then I got so sick. I could barely walk. Took me two weeks to get over the illness and ontop of that, I discovered I had a raging case of crabs. Turns out that black guy wasn’t just giving me booty, he threw in the cooty as well. Well with enough chicken soup and RID, I recovered, but it wasn’t long after that Joe pulled me aside on the Duke of Gloucester Street, the main drag in the town, to ask me if I had read about the new ‘gay cancer’.
I had. I remember the article buried deep in the Washington Post and I remember a growing anxiety in me that I had already become infected, an anxiety that would last me over 25 years.
One year later, nearly to the day that Joe had told me about the ‘gay cancer’, he was dead. It was the same hot, stifling day; the same still air; the same sound of cicadas sawing in the trees. My dearest friend, a man to this day, I still see as a laser light of energy and ideas, dead of AIDS at 20. His mother flew in from Budapest, an imperial woman, cold and emotionless. I mentioned to her that Joe and I were very good friends. She sized me up and dismissed me…maybe as a hick, maybe as a fag, I don’t know. I don’t even know what became of Joe's remains, if he was buried or cremated. I don’t know.
Anyway, I don’t want to end on a downer. I just remembered Joe for whatever reason and how much fun he was and all the Joes that all of us meet in our formulative gay years. Those that extend that hand to us and pull us in and crack us up and make us feel as though we are finally a part of something.
And don’t ask me to tell you WHAT on earth this has to do with a hillside of daffodils. I’d try to tie it all together for you, but you’d just vomit because it would sound so forced...but how about this:
Last night we had a full moon the size of Hooker’s Hole. It was the ‘blue moon’ you’ve heard tell about. The odd ball moon that turns a cycle of three full moons per season on it’s end and slips one more in for good measure. So maybe that’s why I’m thinking of Joe. He was the one that the world needed to make room for. The one that barged into the order of things, shoved them aside and made his way forth. My friend Joe, a Blue Moon, and only that once.
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