Journal

The second half of group each day is open discussion. Things were going really well and I believe everyone was getting something good out of it. Then the counselor lost control.

One woman (who had made some very good points earlier) was trying to underscore the point made by another, who had done something really positive for herself this week. But when she started off with, "Well in my group home there are two women, no make that one-and-a-half, because the other one is a lesbian … " Then she launched into a twenty minute tirade about how she didn’t like this lesbian, (and if even half of what she said were true, I wouldn’t like her either,) but she kept relating things back to the lesbian resident’s sexuality. The counselor (also female) let it all go by.

There are two of us who are openly gay in the group, and we were waiting for this woman to finish before taking issue with her. Yet, it was a straight black man who finally got fed up with her and got to this woman’s core issue. Overtalking her, (which isn’t allowed), he said, "Lemme ask you something. Are you homophobic?"

"I don’t even know what that means," she shouted back. "Lay it out for me!" A free-for-all ensued, during which she rose from her chair shaking her finger at anyone and everyone who had challenged her. Fortunately, our time was up and the counselor solved the immediate problem by dismissing the group.

A few words and a final hug, and I leave him with the desk officer at the town hall. I made it all the way out to the car before I started sobbing again. My car is still in impound, so Vince was kind enough to drive us. I cried most of the way from the town hall to the hospital.

The waterworks were pretty much under control by the time I got to my desk. I fired up the PC, went to the men’s room to wash my face, then got coffee. When I got back to my desk, there was a call on my direct line. Slipping on my headset and into my professional persona, I answered, "Good morning, ISD Help Desk, this is Bruce."

"Hey dude. They won’t take me."

Not knowing whether to laugh or cry, I managed to do both at the same time. This draws the attention, and concern, of my coworkers. "Why won’t they take you?"

"Well the warrant was issued, but the judge didn’t sign it. So they can’t take me, and they won’t let me stay here."

I’m thinking here, well, why not forge the judge’s signature?

He continued, "What do I do now? And my bag ripped." They don’t exactly take luggage at the jail, so all his stuff was packed in a trash bag.

Thinking quickly, I said, "Okay. You know the janitor guy we saw? You can probably get trash bags from him." Consulting my bus schedule, "The next bus should be there in 10 or 15 minutes. There’s a stop right out in front. Get off at the hospital, and use the staff phone just inside the door to call me. I’ll bring out my backpack and the keys to the apartment."

A half-hour later I’m waiting for his call. Forty-five minutes pass. The direct line rings, "Hey, I must’ve gotten on the wrong bus, dude. Cause I’m at Daphne’s." Doh! The number 7 goes by the town hall too. I didn’t think to tell him to catch the number 18.

Am I not tortured enough?

Rewind to last night …

Arriving home after the second Monday of the week, there’s mail for Jeffrey from the County Public Defender’s Office. I hadn’t seen him since Saturday night, and we last spoke by phone on Sunday afternoon. I put the letter aside, changed clothes, checked e-mail, and started dinner. Actually, starting dinner means doing last night’s dishes so there’s room to start dinner.

Why does the phone always ring when you’re scrubbing the pots and pans? Call-ID says it’s from the payphone at Club Soda. Gotta be Danger-Boy. I decide to answer, selecting the cordless phone with the headset. Just the ticket for talking and scrubbing.

We catch up on the past couple of days. It had been a bear at work for me. He’d been basically living on the street, and hadn’t eaten in two days. I remember the letter from the PD. "Go ahead. Open it," he says.

Dear Jeffrey,

A bench warrant has been issued for your failure to appear in Brighton Town Court on Monday November 9, 1998.

He’s elated. "Awesome, dude! I’m going to jail tonight! I’ll be right over." I start to tremble. Well, at least it’s not a Monday this week. Three Mondays in a row were enough. Tuesday’s different. Change of pace.

A lot of this is becoming old hat. Due to the high levels of anxiety, we get on each other’s nerves, the petty bickering starts, then the arguments. We actually got that part over with in about an hour last night. Of course THE PHONE CALL kinda put a damper on everything.

When THE PHONE CALL came in, he went right off the deep end. He started pushing and shoving me around again, then "Fuck jail! I’m gonna go kill myself right now!" and he stormed out of the apartment. Fortunately, the oven was still pre-heating and the water for the pasta hadn’t started boiling yet. But, I was barefoot, dressed only in gym shorts and a T-shirt, and it was below freezing outside So it was a few minutes before I could get out the door after him.

The cold must’ve shocked him to his senses. I found him sucking down a rum and coke around the corner at the Forum. Thank heavens for the friendly neighborhood gay leather bar!

We got calmed down from the anxiety, and he realized THE PHONE CALL could have meant good news not bad. He was staying there for a couple of drinks, and I went home to make dinner. He showed up a couple hours later, wound up staying the night, and we had a nice long talk about us, and our future.

When open discussion came today, she asked to speak again. And wow! What a difference. Apparently she had taken some of the feedback she got from group on Tuesday, and some feedback from others in her support network. What she realized was that the anger she held was affecting everyone around her, and it reminded her of how she felt in similar situations in the past, but with the roles reversed. She has settled things between the lesbian resident and herself, and as they say, life is good in rehab. And as for the rest of us in group who are "family", we have a new friend.

Between the emotional upheavals yesterday, sleep deprivation from Tuesday night and the unusually busy workdays this week, I was so beat last night that I considered skipping group and going right home to bed. Then I thought about what they say: "When you feel like skipping a meeting, that’s when you need to go the most." So I went to group. Turned out to be a really good meeting too, so I’m glad I did go.

Group gets out at 7:00. I walked home because it gets me there a half-hour to 45 minutes sooner than taking the bus at that time of day. Arriving home at 8:00, there was no evidence of Danger-Boy having been there all day. I heated up the dinner from the night before, was in bed by 8:45, and dead to the world by 9:00. Jeffrey didn’t show up overnight either. It leaves me wondering where he, my extra keys to the apartment, and my backpack are.

After making such a big stink about it yesterday morning, Jeffrey never used either the keys or my backpack, except for letting himself in the apartment a little while ago. Apparently getting his stuff out of the trash bags on Daphne’s porch lost it’s importance after a trick drove him to the hospital to get the damned keys and backpack. Yet he was angry with me for not tracking Vince down to get his backpack out of Vince’s car. And he was angry with me for allegedly not giving him a phone message from Debbie on Tuesday night.

Debbie was with him, also angry I allegedly didn’t give him the message. But, when I told him what the message was, Debbie, who hadn't told him what the message was that she left, corroborated the story and stormed out, now angry at him. He went out after her to "punch her lights out." Instead, she came back in with him.

I tried to refresh his memory of some of the events of Tuesday night, like the shoving match and THE PHONE CALL. He didn’t remember a bit of it. Didn’t change the fact he was angry with me. No "sorry, I was wrong for thinking you didn’t give me a message", no "thanks for taking care of me", no "sorry you were worried because I didn’t call", no "sorry I made you cry over me going to jail", no nothing.

Of course, his anger didn’t keep him from asking to borrow my hacksaw. Which I, of course, gladly lent him. Now, before you go thinking "here he goes again, when is he going to learn", I had a plan.

You see, Rochester Gas and Electric shut off Debbie’s electric last spring. They left the gas on. So she’s still had hot water and has been heating the apartment with the gas stove since the furnace won’t run without electric. Today RG&E shut off and padlocked the gas. The borrowed hacksaw was to cut the padlock off the gas valve. Not that it would work on a case-hardened lock anyway. But I guess they don’t know that.

I couldn’t decide whether to walk home from work tonight, or take the bus. I felt I needed some solitude, but I also I felt like I needed a nap. So the bus won out. I took a different bus than usual because I didn’t want to oversleep and wind up back at the hospital. I took the one I got on by accident just after I started work. It heads the other way around the city, past the jail, to downtown, then up Main St to the depot. Can’t really oversleep on that one. They kick you off just outside of downtown. Conveniently close to my apartment.

Vince had left the rest of Jeffrey’s stuff at my apartment when he dropped off my allowance during the day. It pained me to see that backpack there when I got home. I dilly-dallied around for a while. Tried to make some sense out of Ajilon’s new employee benefits package for 1999.

They dumped the six month waiting period to join the 401(k). Their matching contributions stays the same, they’ll kick in up to 3%, if you kick in up to 6%. Because of the changes to the medical, vision and dental plans, I’ll have to run some figures to see if I can afford more than 6%. So as of the first of the year, I’ll actually have a retirement plan! At 41, it’s about damned time, don’t cha think? Won’t be long before I’ll hit the age where loud plaid shirts with Bermuda shorts and black over-the-calf socks becomes fashionable. (Someone shoot me first. Promise me!)

That thought sent chills up my spine, so I put that stuff away and putzed around on the web for a while. That got old too, so I called Daphne. I asked her if it was okay if I brought Jeff’s backpack over there, since all the rest of his stuff was there. I didn’t really want to deal with him if he came here looking for it. She tried, but she couldn’t think of a reason not to, so I walked over there with it. We sat around and shot the breeze for a while.

I wanted to be home by 9:00 thinking that would be early enough to avoid Jeff’s working hours. At 8:45 I had to wait for the light to change at "his" corner, and damn if he wasn’t there already, leaning against Breugger’s Bagels, 40oz not too discreetly at his feet. Working. Monroe is still pretty crowded at that time on a Friday, and I couldn’t be sure if he’d spotted me or not.

We had words over the phone late last night. I hung up on him because I just didn’t need it right before bedtime. He called right back, the wise-ass. He dialed *67 first to turn off the Call-ID hoping he could fool me into thinking maybe Vince or Mark was calling. At 11:45? I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck, you know! Naturally I checked voice-mail right away. He left quite a creatively nasty message, but ruined the whole thing by closing with the rather mundane "You’d better grow eyes in the back of your head." He’s usually so much better with words.

Anyhow, I considered my options, which didn’t take much brainpower since I had only two. Pretend I didn’t see him and keep walking down Goodman St, or brazenly turn down Monroe Ave after I crossed the street. Not one to be bullied, I chose the latter. Turns out, he really hadn’t seen me, and he was looking the other way, so I really had the upper hand. I walked up behind him and asked the classic pick-up-a-rentboy question, "Hey, ya workin’?"

He was shocked, both by hearing my voice, and by hearing me ask that question. When he turned around, he just glared at me silently. I shrugged and said, "Guess not. Sorry to bug ya," and started through the parking lot.

He stopped me and asked "Why are you hassling me?" I said I was sorry and that I just wanted to say hi. There were a few awkward moments as we each told how we were hurt by the other last night. I said I didn’t appreciate his arriving with an attitude and then being accused of something I didn’t do before being asked if I’d done it. He said he felt I had an attitude as soon as he walked in. I conceded that yes, I guess I probably had an attitude, but it was because I’d been worried. That thought hadn’t occurred to him, and he asked me to explain.

"I get worried whenever you’re out ‘working’, especially when you’re out of touch for so long afterwards. I worry that you’ll be found butchered and buried somewhere, and that I’ll never see you again."

He was visibly shaken by that image. Well perhaps not by the image itself, because he has worried about that himself. But I guess the fact that someone else, someone close to him worried about it too, is what shook him up.

Compensating, he filled with boldness and bluster, "You know I can take care of myself. I’m a fightin’ mutherfucker."

Deciding this was going nowhere fast, I just said, "Well, I gotta get home and make something for dinner."

"Yeah, you do that," he replied. "We’ve been eating at the churches, since we can’t cook any more."

"Well at least you’re eating. Take care." And I walked through the parking lot back to Goodman.

It’s late, I’m tired, I’ll finish up later …

The nice thing about money is that it gives you options, even if you only have a little, it increases the options available to you. On the rest of the way home, I considered my options. Twelve dollars in my pocket. I could blow the whole thing and have a pizza delivered, but they had pizza brought in at lunch, for some unknown reason. Still, leave an unguarded pizza around computer people, actually three unguarded full-sheet pizzas, and it disappears faster than you can say, "Hold the anchovies." Yum.

On the other hand, there were groceries in the house. And among them, stuff that only needs heating instead of cooking. I decided on soup and sandwiches. And ice cream. So I continued past the apartment to the corner store, which not coincidentally, is called, The Corner Store. A loaf of whole-wheat bread and a half-gallon of Death by Chocolate, and I was out the door for under six bucks.

I’d just gotten the soup in the microwave, the tunafish made and four slices in the toaster when the phone rang. One of the payphones along Monroe Ave. Damn. Here I was hoping it would be Ed McMahon telling me I’d won ten-million. That would give me LOTS of options.

"You know," he said, "I can’t stand feeling like this. If it’s okay with you, can I stop by and we can settle this thing one way or the other?"

"Yeah, I don’t like it either." I thought a minute. "Okay, c’mon over."

"I’ll be there in ten minutes. You sure you’ll let me in?"

"I’m sure. I don’t like feeling like this either."

Soup out of the nuke, tunafish on whole-wheat toast on the plate, Danger-Boy on the phone from the lobby. Dinner would wait.

We have a terrible habit of interrupting each other whenever we have serious talks. It gets majorly frustrating. I thought it was a really good sign when he sat on the edge of the credenza and said, "You start."

He listened, occasionally nodding acknowledgement, without saying an word for nearly five minutes as I expressed my thoughts and feelings. If you think I’m roundabout when I’m writing, you haven’t hear me try to have a serious conversation.

I told him that after our disagreement the night before, I went back and read most of the journal for the past six months. It confirmed my memory of how things had gone between us. We’ve had major ups and downs, usually three or four weeks apart. And throughout it all, my core feelings towards him have never once changed. Since that very first weekend, I’ve always felt the same.

"I love you," I said, "and I always want you as part of my life. We bang heads occasionally, and that’s just because we’re both strong willed. But lately, it’s been different." I pretty much recited the journal entry from Monday the 9^th, when I told of the stresses of taking him to court and all that. And I pretty much recited the letter I’d started last week when we decided to begin settling things by letter before I visited him in jail. It began:

They say that in life, timing is everything. And lately, ours has been off. I don’t really know why that is, or how to get us resynchronized, so I just have to accept it on it’s own terms.

Our relationship lately has been one of two addicts enabling each others addictions. It’s a piece of cosmic irony that we’ve exchanged addictions in the process. I started smoking crack, you started smoking cigarettes. We had each been planning to start a rehab program once you got into MCF. I can understand why you want to wait until the last possible moment to go jail. It’s not a place I’d be in a hurry to get to either.

Whatever you want to call it, rehab, recovery, treatment or whatever, I’m not in a position where I can’t put off for another six weeks. The fear of where I’m heading has become greater than the fear of damaging our friendship. I’ve been hoping you’d understand because of all the times you’ve said I shouldn’t go there, and how you felt guilty about, perhaps not pointing me down that path, but illuminating it.

I ended by saying something to the effect that I thought we each have a spot in each other’s lives, but we needed to back off a bit until we’re both doing a bit better.

When it was his turn, he said he agreed that the anxiety of the past few weeks have made things really difficult. He hadn’t really realized that it had been affecting me in the same way it was affecting him. He seemed touched by the depth of my feelings and expressed that he felt the same.

The he said something to the effect of, "You know, for the past few months, I argue with everybody. I argue with you, I argue with Debbie, I argue with my mother, and the list goes on and on. I’m beginning to think that maybe it’s not everybody else that’s wrong, maybe it’s me."

It’s late again. I’m still tired, (so what else is new.) I’ll have to continue tomorrow …