Journal

Today for the first time in weeks I feel rested. And suddenly, I have some mental clarity again. I don’t feel quite so scatterbrained as I have over the past couple of months. So maybe I can get a journal entry out. I have written bits and pieces here and there. Here’s what has made it into Word over the past couple of weeks:

Tuesday September 8, 1998 11:30PM

Well, some of the pressures on Jeffrey should have broken today. He's been all antsy about school, and he's been concerned that he's been unable to find a job that fits with his school schedule. He started both school and his new job today. Two things he's been worrying about are now behind him, so that should ease his mind a bit.

It was a strange feeling this morning as he was getting ready for school. I wasn't exactly feeling parental, but I guess I was somewhere between beaming and giddy. I iron a shirt every morning, and today I ironed one for him too.

Of course later while getting dressed, I reopened the wound from a tragic potato-peeling accident Saturday. Having missed laundry this weekend, it meant that I had no clean shirt. Fortunately, the only place I spurted blood was easily covered by my tie.

Anyway, as I headed out the door to catch my bus, I gave him a big hug and kiss and wished him, "Good luck in school today. And play nice with all the other kids!"

His usual luck caught up with him again later. He phoned me at work to say he had a fever and was nauseous. So he didn’t make it to work tonight. You can’t exactly have someone who is sick preparing food in a restaurant. I hope they don’t hold it against him. He’s on the schedule for fours hours a night, six nights a week, which is about all he can fit in. It’s a nice little take-out restaurant/deli a stone’s throw from the hospital, about a mile from his college, and it’s on three different bus routes. So it’s convenient for car and bus-pass sharing. At least he doesn’t have any morning classes tomorrow.

I’ll tell ya, the past few weeks have been absolutely frantic. I can sure use some rest. I’d been hoping to get home a bit earlier tonight to do some serious writing, but I had to run out south of the city to do more work for a client. The same one I blew the motherboard on two or three weeks ago. I don’t think the shit out there is ever going to end.

On Sunday when I got out there, as I took off my backpack, my hard drives flew out and crashed on the floor with such an impact that the casting on one of them broke, which renders the drive useless. Naturally that was the 2GB drive I’d made room on to back up all their shit before reformatting their drives. That left my nearly full 1GB drive to put all their stuff on. (The other 2GB drive is formatted for NTFS, so Windows 95 can’t even see it, let alone put stuff on it.)

They’d been having trouble on the one system for weeks now, which is part of the reason I was down there in the first place. When I reformatted the drive, it came up with a few bad sectors. As I worked on it, more and more sectors went bad. I formatted it again, loaded Windows 95, ran Scandisk again and even more bad sectors popped up. Fortunately, they were all towards the end of the disk, so I partitioned it to about 1.4GB and was able to get things working well enough that I thought they could get payroll out today.

Seven hours on Sunday, nine hours on Monday, and they called this morning to report the payroll program wouldn’t even start…

 

Thursday September 10, 1998 8:00PM

I actually got some sleep last night. High quality too. And boy did I need it. Anyway, I was up at about 4:00AM all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I started picking up around here a bit, (between the two of us the place is a wreck.) I got to enjoy a nice leisurely morning before work.

And it was kinda cute when I met Jeff at the bus stop. He was walking over from Debbie’s. My place is centrally located between the places he needs to be, so most of his stuff is here. But he spends most nights with Debbie. Women (and men) practically fall at his feet, but he loves her. I’ll never know what he sees in her, but he sees it so I have to accept his decision.

 

Tuesday September 15, 1998 6:00PM

Geeze! It’s almost two weeks since I’ve updated, and almost a month since I’ve posted anything "meaty"! It’s not for lack of anything to write, that’s for sure. It’s been a question of time. And I guess it’s also been a question of mind-space too. I just haven’t felt like writing.

 

Wednesday September 16, 1998 At work

The roller-coaster ride continues. Friday night we celebrated my first full-sized paycheck, and Jeff's new job. Last night when he reported for work, Jeff was told by the owner that he couldn't afford the extra help and that he (the owner) would be working the hours he'd hired Jeff for. I'd already picked up the car, so Jeff phoned me at home. I'd not arrived yet so he left a message. When I got home, I went right to bed as it had been a very busy and intense day. I never checked voice-mail until almost three hours later.

On top of everything else, Jeff doesn't need this. This past weekend was really hard on him. He'd gotten his mother and her boyfriend out of the house and settled over at his sister-in-law's. Then the sister-in-law got evicted, so everyone had to move. Our weekend was packed solid already, and we couldn't afford much time to help them. When we were available, there was no truck. Talk about a cluster-fuck!

One thing lead to another and now none of them are speaking to him. Meanwhile, Debbie, also upset because he was spending too much time away from her, disappeared for about 36 hours. And he's having trouble with the math class at school, and the computer class, although he's doing okay in the rest. Then there's the trouble with DSS. All in all, he's got more shit to deal with than anyone deserves.

I'm really worried about him. When he's overwhelmed like this, he's miserable. He gets really depressed, ultra-sensitive, and suicidal. I'm afraid he's going to chuck it all and return to the streets, or worse.

As for me, well over the past couple of weeks, I've backed off a bit. I'd been taking his troubles on as my own and getting myself overwhelmed. It's both easier and harder to stand back and be supportive without getting directly involved. The best I can hope for is to be there when he needs me, and fade back when he doesn't.

He's initiated several conversations lately exploring philosophy and the nature of our relationship. Last night he confessed he sees me as a father figure.

 

So if you throw in fatigue and the scatterbrainedness of the ADD, maybe you can see why I haven’t written much lately. I guess I want to pick up where I left off Wednesday at work.

Recently we’ve been wondering why it seems we’ve known each other forever. It’s only been four months but it seems like a lifetime. Part of it is because we’re so much alike. We’ve traveled down different paths in life, had different experiences and made different choices and mistakes, but our core characters are remarkably similar.

We’re also extremely open and honest with each other. We’ve spent hours at a time telling our stories, fears, fantasies, secrets, goals, hopes and dreams to each other. He knows more about me than anyone else I know. And I have the feeling I know him better than anyone else I’ve ever met, or that he’s ever met. Try as we might, neither of us can keep a secret from the other for very long. It doesn’t even have to come out. We just know.

I can’t seem to find a word other than relationship to describe our interactions. And as I’ve discussed before, the "r word" carries connotations that aren’t present between us. We’re much more than friends, so friendship doesn’t cut it, we have very deep and profound feelings of love, yet we’re not lovers. My family has never been very close so I don’t have a solid frame of reference, and although I have two of them biologically, I see Jeff as the brother I never had.

Naturally you can see why I felt bowled over when said he sees me as a father figure. Frankly, it’s a responsibility I never felt, and don’t really want. That one statement has had me rethinking not only our past, but every subsequent interaction we’ve had. I’ve found myself putting everything through the "dad filter" before doing or saying anything.

I’ve had some time to give it some thought, and I think I understand it now. Right from the get-go, I’ve accepted him unconditionally. And I’ve seen something in him he doesn’t, can’t or won't see in himself. We he does see, is that he’s not happy with where he is now, but he doesn’t know how to change.

From that foundation, I’ve been trying to show him how to change, and how to realize his potential. I haven’t pushed him in any direction, I’ve lead him. Now there are two ways you can lead people. You can grab them and pull them along, or you can map a course, strike out, and make them want to follow you. I’ve unconsciously taken the latter approach, and he’s responded to that.

We haven’t gotten back to the discussion yet, but I hope that by "father figure" he means he wants to follow in my footsteps. It’s the only way that I can carry that mantle of responsibility. But I’d still rather be seen as an equal.

Anyway, things for Jeff have gone from bad to worse in the past few days. Thursday night after I dropped him off at Debbie’s, he went over to the bar near there for a nightcap and either picked-up, or got picked-up by, a woman who introduced herself as Gertrude. (I started calling him Heathcliff.) After a while, Debbie went over to the bar wondering why he’d been gone for so long. And she caught them sucking face in Gertrude’s car. They took off to avoid Debbie’s wrath, and when he showed up here the following morning, he had tremendous rug burns on his knees and the tops of his feet.

This set Debbie off on another two-day disappearing act. On Friday night he kept me up all night depressed, despondent and suicidal. He finally let me sleep at about 5:30 Saturday morning, and I slept clear through to about 7:00 last night. During the day, they did the make-up thing and I went over there last night until about 2:30. When I came home I went directly to bed for another ten hours.

In any event, that’s why I feel so rested.

I can fit a bit more writing in before I get started on my weekend. I’ve been threatening to make my world famous beef stew for weeks now. I actually went to the Public Market last Saturday morning to get everything for it. So before all the veggies go bad, I’ve got to make it today, even if it is muggy and in the 80s. It takes me about two or three hours of prep work, then I can let it cook for three or four hours. So the dinner bell should ring around 10:00 tonight.

One of the things Jeff said to me the other night I found quite gratifying. Remember how I was worried that he’d return to life on the streets or worse? Well I’m still very concerned about him taking the ultimate cop-out, but I don’t have to worry about him going back to hustling.

I’ve been with at least my fair share, if not more than my fair share, of rentboys. And as you may recall, that’s basically how Jeff and I met. I’ve made an informal sociological study rentboys over the past few years. (Hey, although my dick leads me there, my brain has to follow and have something to do while it’s there.) Over the course of the summer I’ve shared with him some of my observations and conclusions. He’s thought about what I shared with him and decided that he’s not going back to hustling, even though he’s broke, DSS isn’t helping and he’s lost his job. I know it pains him greatly to look to me for continuing financial support, but he’s run out of alternatives until he finds another job.

I’ve gotta get on with the stew so I'll skip all the observations and get right to the conclusions. Without exception, every rentboy I’ve been with has claimed to be straight, and has a girlfriend. This of course begs the question, "Then why do you have sex with guys?" I don’t have the answer for that question, but I’ve come to believe that they’re telling the truth about being straight.

There’s a vicious circle of drug abuse and money in hustling. Most people see it as using sex to get money to buy drugs. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s just the opposite. Using drugs to get money from sex. For whatever reason, these guys can’t seem to get money through the usual methods. The one way they can get money, is for sex. But the money isn’t so that they can buy more drugs, although a great deal goes for that purpose. It’s the drugs that help them get past their true sexuality and inhibitions, so they can get money through sex.

What I’ve told Jeff is this. I don’t like to see him hustling, not because of the threat of AIDS, the physical danger (how many serial killers prey on the sex trade?) the legal issues, or even the social issues, (how many times have you said, "Oh he’s just a hustler"?) Although I am concerned in those areas, what really bothers me is the way it screws people up between the ears. It takes a lot of something (usually drugs) to turn off all of one’s emotions and put one’s true identity, sexual and otherwise, aside to turn tricks. You have to completely transform yourself from who and what you are into nothing more than a sex object. There’s a huge psychological cost to doing this.

I’m convinced that the low or absent self-esteem, the drug abuse, and the emotional difficulties common to rentboys is not so much the cause that leads them into the sex trade, but the effect of having been there.

Jeff’s decided that he no longer wants to pay these psychological costs, and return to hustling. And although it means a greater financial burden to me, I couldn’t be more delighted.