When I was growing up I was a very confused kid. I was Hispanic by name but as far as many of the neighborhood kids thought, I was a gringo. This distinction was placed upon me for one basic reason: I could not speak Spanish. Kids can be cruel and they can also be very simple. A common thought was if I could not speak Spanish I was not Spanish. It was unfortunate but I became friends with many white kids and many black kids. For someone who wasn’t sure what he was it was an amazing experience to be exposed to different aspects of culture. My love for music, film, comedy, style, sports and so much more was cultivated by having friends of all types. My personal philosophies and my love for people also were born of this. Unfortunately so was my deep isolation.
While I hung around with nearly anyone I never felt like I belonged. It was something that ate away at me until I reached my twenties and began to not only accept but embrace who I was. It was a long road and during my teens when I was a very long way from the answers it meant following the crowd and making what could be considered in hindsight as some bad choices. I grew up in the Allentown neighborhood which was mostly on the poor side but had deep diversity which I’ve always cherished.
During these years my best friend was Paul. He was an Italian kid whose most notable physical characteristic was that he resembled Fred Flintstone. He was a big guy, lazy; narrow minded and completely insensitive although being insensitive isn’t something that matters much to the typical teen. He was my friend when I had very few and that’s something about me that endures to this day. I don’t have many close friends and the ones I have I feel a great deal of loyalty and dedication to despite their flaws. The difference is the friends I have today are actually decent people who I respect or admire in some way as opposed to my teen years when I’d be friends with anyone who’d be friends with me.
Growing up in a mixed neighborhood had many advantages but the white kids didn’t always see them. There was a small group of white kids who always hung out together and they didn’t have much love for the black kids, Puerto Rican kids or any other types. In fact those kids used to beat me up occasionally. They didn’t like me much either, not because I was mixed or anything like that but more because I just wasn’t a dirtbag who sat around and smoked joints, drank beers and listened to Lynyrd Skynyrd like they did. They did those things and I didn’t bother them or judge them (until now) but they bothered and judged me because I was around and I guess they had some deficiencies to work out.
There were a few other odd kids who were the subject of abuse from those guys and other packs of kids. This is how I met and because buddies with Paul. He was one of the outcasts and so were these two brothers who lived a few houses from him. Now the Brown brothers weren’t the brightest kids and they had a very strict mother so they couldn’t run with the packs. They were often picked on for being dumb and they were friends with Paul because well they lived right across the street from him and he didn’t beat them up or call them names. He did however make them do things for him, sometimes at great risk to themselves. He enjoyed manipulating people and I sometimes fell into that role as well once I became friends with him.
Paul was careful not to push me too hard because he knew I was smarter than him and he learned over time despite my easy going nature how sensitive I could be. Since his only friends were the Brown brothers he appreciated having a friend who he felt was his equal in most ways. I was just happy to be friends with anyone at that point in my life.
After many years and many regretful stories I could tell you about, we started college. At this point in our lives being an outcast in the neighborhood wasn’t that big of a deal. Many people had cars and life became bigger than Allentown. We went to the malls and to the clubs in Canada. Our worlds grew tenfold and so did our adventures. When your existence becomes more than 10 square blocks you get a chance to see a large number of different things. Your eyes become wide open. I had the chance to mix with people of different classes, different philosophies and different perspectives. When this occurs, you can go in one of two directions; you can embrace it or you can close yourself off to it. I chose the former. College changed me.
I met a half Puerto Rican, half white female named Melissa Morales. Until recently she was the only blonde woman I’ve ever been attracted to. She was the nicest person you could ever meet. I’ll never forget the day I met her because I met her through her kindness but that’s a story for another time. While my first year of college was based in humility and mostly bad experiences she was the one bright spot. When I was kicked out of school after that first year for bad grades I spoke with her occasionally on the phone and a few times I’d see her out at the clubs. I was often too afraid to tell her how I felt. She obviously liked me because I felt like she was the kind of person who wouldn’t waste her time on someone who wasn’t a good person and she certainly wouldn’t waste her time on someone she didn’t have interest in.
After the next year, she was still at Buffalo State and I had been going to community college and we lost touch. We lost touch because of my immaturity and because Paul would always speak badly of her and maybe for a short while I believed the hype. I don’t know why he did it but maybe he was afraid of losing me in some way. I was really his only good friend and if I had devoted my time to a female like her who I could have easily fallen in love with it would have meant a whole lot of less time for him. Many times he would only be supportive of me trying to connect with a female if he had a chance with her friend. That way we could all hang out together.
Not telling her how I felt is the biggest regret I have in my life. Unfortunately, a little while after we lost touch she moved to North Carolina and I never heard anything about her ever again. She was such a selfless, intelligent and beautiful person and I’m sure she’s enriching someone’s life somewhere. I’m really happy just to have known her and experience her selflessness. It’s really taught me a lot. I wish I could have made a more permanent bond with her either as her friend or more.
The truth was I wasn’t ready yet. Instead I spent my weekends going out to clubs and trying on hit on “skanks” as Paul called them. He wasn’t very successful at it. He had hideous fashion sense and wore some of the ugliest shirts you’ve ever seen because he saw them in a rap video. He’d combine that with two heaping handfuls of hair gel and gold chains with ridiculous charms attached to them like dollar signs. His reasons for striking out so often was that he had no game. He had no style and he had no charm. My excuse was that I sucked at hitting on women. What I would discover later on was that my heart wasn’t into it.
I’ve always found talking to women at nightclubs and bars as kind of disingenuous. People say what they think people want to hear. People paint pictures of themselves without blemishes and if you want a more transparent example look at how people dress. Girl you know you don’t dress like that every day and fellas you know you wouldn’t put that much time into your appearance if you weren’t trying to hook up. It’s always felt very phony to me and when I meet people I want that meeting to stand up on its own, not on some silly fantasy or shaky ground potentially rooted in lies and exaggerations. I’m not telling people how they should live; I’m just discussing what works for me.
After a few years in community college I got the itch to resume my studies at Buffalo State. It was around this time I began to have some direction and motivation in my life. I began to understand what kinds of people I wanted to be around. I began to realize who I was and I really began to embrace that idea of me as that person. Soon, the idea of hanging around all the time with a deceitful, manipulative, ignorant, hateful, homophobic, abusive friend was no longer one that was appealing to me.
Sometime around 1995 when I returned to Buffalo State I went through a very rough period. I contracted bronchitis for the first time and followed that with a brutal case of pneumonia that almost cost me a whole semester. While that was going on my father became really ill and after a few months in the hospital withering away he eventually died.
When I emerged from that period I was a changed person. My sense of morality and values were intricately defined and there was no more room in my life for Paul. I basically stopped hanging out with him and while he’d occasionally get me to chat on the phone, before too long we stopped talking completely. While I did feel bad because we were really good friends for about a dozen years I felt like he would have tired of me anyway. He wanted to bang sluts. I wanted to fall in love. He wanted the girl to leave the next morning and more importantly leave him alone completely. I wanted to give and receive attention and affection in the hope of building a meaningful relationship. As an INFJ personality we are gentle, caring, warm, complex and highly intuitive individuals and he was the opposite of every one of those qualities. We didn’t have nearly as much in common now that we were living in different neighborhoods, attending different schools and living different lives.
Many years passed and while occasionally I’d wonder what happened to him most of time if I thought about him I simply hoped he found happiness out there somewhere. I don’t know if he knew what he was looking for when we last spoke but I had hoped he found it. I just couldn’t be close with someone like that or more importantly let someone like that be close to me and I think he understood that I grew in a completely different direction than he did. I don’t think he held a grudge about it.
My parents had the same phone number for about 20 years and because of this he found me when he came into town one weekend in 2003. He told me had he relocated to Virginia and was a guard at a correctional facility. He told me he’d heard that I was on the radio for a while and that I had done some writing for school papers and websites. It was nice that he still cared enough to wonder how I was. I didn’t hear anything at all about him because I was his only good friend at the time and the Brown brothers found their way into a life of crime and jail so I hadn’t spoken to them longer than I hadn’t spoken to Paul. I didn’t know anyone else who knew him.
He wanted to catch up and maybe grab a beer somewhere. Although I wasn’t quite the drinker I was back when I knew him well I agreed and he told me he’d pick me up later that day. When he arrived I got into the car and found the exact same guy I knew nearly a decade before. He was driving a flashy sportscar, sporting gold jewelry and had the same fashion sense he had then. I wondered how I appeared to him but I didn’t ask. We drove down to the Allentown area to find a bar to drink and catch up. It seemed like a logical choice considering that’s where we grew up.
We drove around and we passed by a few places. He hadn’t been around the area for some time but he still knew which bars were “gay bars” and which ones weren’t… although I think he thought of the Pink as a gay bar, so what did he know. We were cruising around and I could sense he was getting impatient. He didn’t like Nietzsche’s or Brick Bar or even Colter Bay. I started to think that getting food somewhere might be an easier plan and suddenly as we approached Franklin I saw a place out of the corner of my eye.
The bar was called Fugazi. I had never heard of the bar but it was named after a great band so it had to be a cool place right? He asked me if Fugazi was a good bar and because I just wanted to stop somewhere already I said; “Yeah, it’s a great place” having no actual idea if that was true. So finally we had a place to go and we stopped and headed inside.
It was pretty early in bar time. I believe it was around four thirty or just a bit after. We walked into a small and empty place and took 2 seats over at the end of the bar. He bought a beer and I bought a mixed drink. It was a vodka and cranberry I believe. The bar was dimly lit and cozy. Plus they were popping free popcorn for the patrons that weren’t really there yet. What kind of bar does this? I was thinking the place was really cool. It was just us and a bartender talking to another guy at the other end of the bar. Like I said, it was kind of early.
I asked Paul about his life in Richmond, VA and what he’d been doing since we last spoke. I mean, he’d heard a lot about the things I was doing and had done so in some ways it was like I had told him some stuff about me already. While he was going on about his bad back and his job a bunch of guys came into the place and grabbed a table nearby. I remember thinking that a couple of the guys were dressed a bit flamboyantly for a late afternoon but I kept listening and within a few seconds I was focused again on my friend’s life story and not so much my surroundings.
That’s probably why I missed the next two groups of guys who entered the place. I might have taken a look around and saw what was going on but Paul started to ask me a lot about what I was up to. I told him all about the radio thing and some of my writing work. I talked about how I played sports a lot and about some mutual acquaintances and what they were doing but strangely I forgot to mention one of the biggest things going on in my life at the time.
Only a few months before I had a bad break up with the girl I was in love with. It was and still stands as the only substantial relationship I’ve ever been involved in and she was the only person I’ve ever considered marrying. We were together for about a year. As it turned out it took me years to recover from the heartache and baggage of being dumped by someone you love so passionately and thought felt the same way. I really hurt for so long. At this point I was only a few months removed from the break up and I was still deeply wounded but I didn’t bring it up. Maybe I was just sick of talking about it and with someone who didn’t even know at all about the situation maybe I thought I’d have to really explain it which didn’t seem appealing to me. Perhaps I figured talking about deep personal pain to someone so shallow and insensitive was pointless. Looking back, if I had brought it up it might have helped to avoid the misunderstanding that was brewing.
I could tell Paul wasn’t comfortable. We were chatting and things were cool but I noticed that he kept looking around and he was very aware that there were nothing but guys inside this bar and that I was ordering nothing but vodka cranberry mixed drinks or cosmopolitans. In a simple minded brain, these things combined with me talking about art and beauty equaled something he was afraid of and hateful towards. I could tell he wanted to leave after we’d been there an hour and the place with crawling with gay men. So I accidently selected a gay bar, who cares? We still were able to sit down and catch up and that was what was important right?
He was driving me back to my place and I asked him how much longer he was in town and he mentioned that he’d had a few more days before he had to go back. I started talking about how we should go out that night (it was a Saturday) and how I knew of some good places to check out. He probably cringed on the inside. When we got to my place and he pulled over he told me he thought that was a good idea. He put on some fake enthusiasm about it and even negotiated a pick up time for that night. I remember at the time I thought he was acting weird but I didn’t think more of it until he drove off and I never heard from him again. Sometimes life just has a way of working out.
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