Unashamed (9 page)

We let Terrance dominate the first fifteen minutes of travel conversation. He provided the ice breaking we all needed so, by the time we arrived in Tucson, we were behaving like best friends.

I’d been surprised that Douglas, with all his portrayals of sophistication, would be buddies with a down-to-earth, slightly ghetto kid like Terrance. It definitely helped soothe my comfort level and showed me another side of Douglas, the great Italiano Magnifico— I mean “Medi-fucking-terranean.”

After having a few drinks at the hotel room, the four of us walked to the club. After having a few drinks at the club, Douglas and I walked back to the hotel.

I figured it would be better to have sex in private than to have his hands in my pants on the dance floor, although no one was actually looking. I was wet and this was rare in itself, so I whispered in his ear, “Let’s go back to the room.”

Without hesitation, we left our drinks behind right along with Terrance and the girl he came with. On the short walk back he held my hand, smiling. It was a genuinely happy smile, unlike the greedy, lustful faces I was accustomed to seeing. I thought he was absolutely the sexiest man I’d ever met without a shadow of a doubt. I wanted to sleep with him, and so it happened.

I cannot tell you how long it actually lasted or how wonderful it was because my first time with Douglas wasn’t about the sex. I actually can’t remember that part. It was all of the things before the encounter, and all of the things after it, that made me fall in love with him.

Afterward, I rested in his arms for hours as if we had been together for years. We talked and joked and laughed the entire time before deciding to really make an effort to fall asleep. In the morning we were the happiest couple. We dove into conversation as soon as we realized the other was awake. When an hour passed, Douglas got up to pee as I brushed my teeth at the sink. Then, he stepped into the shower as I took my turn on the toilet, quite naturally choreographed.

I pointed out a fact as I wiped the urine off and flushed. “Jesus, look at us, we have not stopped talking. You would think we were married! I’m peeing in front of you for God’s sake. I never do that!” I got up to wash my hands and proceeded to pick my teeth and two pimples in the mirror.

He echoed from the shower, “I feel like we are married too! Go make me breakfast, woman!”

We giggled and laughed together like lovestruck idiots before Terrance threw a pillow at the bathroom door and moaned for us to shut the fuck up.

Douglas and I just knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, our futures would be together.

We ordered a pizza upon our return to the barracks. The plan was to relax and watch a movie with his roommate, Terrance, and a few others.

But, while the cat’s away, the mice will play. We certainly took full advantage of the empty room while everyone was out gathering their share of the pizza payment and booze. Terrance, who was in charge of collecting the money, accidently walked in on us during an exceptionally compromising position. “Dude, you guys are fucking already? How rude; I was fucking talking to you, man. Put your dick away for two seconds so I can get your half of the pizza money.”

Douglas passed him the money with his pants half down, then resumed kissing me. Terrance left the room, mumbling audibly. “You guys do what you do, but the fucking pizza will be here in forty-five minutes.”

I stopped Douglas before things got heated, telling him I needed to use the restroom, and rushed myself down the hall. I stood in a stall with my pants half down, quietly listening for anyone who may be there. It took me less than a minute to masturbate before I zipped my jeans up and walked back to his room. This was my timed ritual with Franklin so I knew how long it would take for my body to produce wetness after a clitoral orgasm. After all, this guy was amazing, and I didn’t want him to think I wasn’t interested, nor did I want to attempt sex with my Sahara Desert vagina. Any woman knows how uncomfortable this is, even with the best of partners.

My clever little secret was duly noted by Douglas moments before we had sex hanging from the inside of the wall locker. But this fact is unimportant among the events that led to us to falling in love.

Who can explain why you fall for someone or what exactly happened? It’s all so intertwined with a series of things that lead you to that point. Some people are lucky enough to know when they first realized it was love and can tell a wonderful story to their families or friends. Gay people want the flamboyant coming-out tales; straight people want the story of the moment true love engulfed them. For me, once again, my account is totally lame.

What I can tell you is that I wanted to die when I accidentally slipped the words “I love you” after sex. I really thought he would never call me again, especially when he didn’t say anything.

I can tell you the story of his “wooing” me under the moonlit sky on the range in Arizona with words in Italian:
Your eyes shine as beautiful as you under the light of the moon.
I can tell you how we were attached at the hip after that night in the club and how natural it was to tell my first love, on the phone, that I just couldn’t marry him. But explaining the “story of the moment” it happened eludes me.

Maybe it was when Douglas and I painted my barracks room together and I received a call from my first love. Almost callously, I broke off our engagement. I don’t believe I even cried during the shocking four-minute breakup. Douglas was a little surprised, considering my history with Robert. He graciously asked if I needed some time and let me know that, if he should go, he respectfully would.

I stared to the floor as I responded, but it wasn’t out of guilt. I stared because there was a lack of feeling for a man-turned-boy that I had loved for so long. “Strangely, I’m okay,” I said. “I can’t believe I just told the love of my life that I cannot marry him and I am okay.” I smiled with charm and poise even though my face was freshly painted from several playful smears at Doug’s hand.

By the end of the night, the room was mauve but looked more like pink; I was single but looked more like taken. And my lesbian life was present but looked more like breeder beginnings.

Chapter 7

Enchanted
is a word you can use to describe a portion of what you are feeling when you fall in love. All other life ceases to exist when a person is enchanted by the mystical powers of The Big L. I can’t say you even know that it is love until you are six feet under it and are unable to breathe without that person.

Douglas and I didn’t need discussion of a future together to know where we were headed. Our conversations consisted of matter-of-fact statements like “when we get married” or “I’m so glad you don’t want kids.” We honestly have no proposal story either. I was nineteen, he was twenty-three, and it was six weeks later when we drove to get our marriage license. It was more romantic because there was no romance, if that makes any sense. We were in an enchanted whirlwind of the engulfment of love. Oh, someone should chime a triangle and sprinkle fairy dust across this page, it was so heavenly.

The car ride to apply for our marriage license became a last-minute confessional as Douglas asked me to pull over. I did without too much question. He was highly agitated so, for a while, I just assumed he was nervous. “I have something to tell you,” he said. Strangely enough, his request didn’t faze me. I’m not sure why, but I know that whatever he was about to tell me, no matter how bad it was, wasn’t going to change my decision to marry him. So I entertained his request for my undivided attention by positioning my ass closer to the driver’s door and twisting myself in his direction. Patiently, I waited for him to begin with a crooked smile on my face.

When he spoke, his voice cracked like he was tired. He hung his head low, although he maintained eye contact. “You might not want to do this with me after what I tell you.” He looked down to his hands that were fidgeting with a string on his pants and took a huge breath, then exhaled. He lifted his head to the ceiling of the car and took another deep breath as his eyes reconnected to mine. It was as if he were asking the Lord to help him through this. I was patient.

After he exhaled the second time, he practically spit it all out in one long monologue. ”Before I met you, I was at a party and this girl begged me to take her in the back on the balcony. I didn’t really want to, but she kind of pulled down my pants and started sucking me off and, you know, I wasn’t going to stop her, but I really, honestly, didn’t like her, but I was drunk but…” Douglas put his hands over his face, laughing in frustration while breathing through his fingers. He sighed and tried to get a grip, but his face was changing colors as his eyes went from tears to fright with wide open clarity. He looked at me in a last-ditch effort to gather all his strength and finally released. “She called yesterday and told me she is pregnant. She wants me to help pay for an abortion or start doing paperwork for child support.” Douglas stopped, held his breath, and sat in an awkward heart-pounding silence.

Calmly I asked him, “That’s it?”

“That’s it,” he said and began inhaling again.

I didn’t mean to sound as if I was mocking him, but I was genuinely curious. “Is she about five-foot-five with short brown hair and huge boobs? Lives in the barracks across the street from you, right?” I smiled confidently because I knew exactly what was going on.

Maybe confusion isn’t the right word for how he expressed what he was feeling in his facial movements. It was confusion, for sure, but it was also that look of
how the fuck does she know
. Much like the face of a skeptic being told his darkest desires by a stranger who claims to be a psychic. He was further dumbfounded by my inability to hold a straight face as I burst into laughter. His puzzlement turned into an uncomfortable sort of relief.

“That ho,” I said and dismissed the whole thing with a hand gesture you would use to wave away a peasant field worker. “That is some funny shit.”

“I can’t believe you are laughing.” He didn’t move other than to slowly spread a nervous smile over his face.

“I can’t believe you believe that ho! Listen, the last guy I was fucking before I met you came to me crying with the same story. He told me she said it was either his or Mike’s baby. Mike is the other guy I used to doink. This skank is leaving me with all the sloppy seconds. Jesus, this chick is not pregnant. I think it’s a scam to get money. Don’t give her shit until you see a paternity test. If I was scamming, I would say it was you too because you are the most responsible and respectable one of the three. Fuck that ho, you aren’t having any babies.” Again, I dismissed the whole situation with a wave of my hand, which gave his tense body unspoken permission to relax. He glared out of the front window to the Arizona mountains that surrounded the post in quiet relief.

“Okay. You are right,” he agreed, then looked over to me in the driver’s seat, still smirking. “Fuck that ho. Let’s go get our license.” He was amped that I took things so well, but I cut his excitement short to stop him from leaning over to kiss me. “Wait. Since we are sharing…”

Douglas really thought he had thrown the worst at me, but he wasn’t prepared to receive. I figured that, since we were in a moment of elation and human redemption, I would go ahead and say what I had to say.

“You know I’m bi, right? I won’t give up women, so, if you can’t handle that, maybe we shouldn’t get married.” My eyebrows lifted to the top of my forehead in a very straightforward manner. He was slightly surprised by my retort, but what he didn’t know was that this was a side note compared to the secret yet unveiled. I knew my sexuality was not an issue for Douglas, and he confirmed it when he told me he didn’t mind, joking about working something out. So I went on with it, trying not to pause. I figured if I actually thought about what was coming out, I wouldn’t say it at all.

“Before I met you, I was with this asshole who gave me a VD, but it is gone now and I’m finishing up my meds. You would have gotten it by now if I was still infected.”

I shied away, covering my mouth with my hand, looking at him with widened eyes. I choked on my spit a little as I stopped breathing for a moment to let him digest the information. He scrunched his eyebrows together. ”What do you have?” His voice trailed upward in pitch.

“No, I don’t have it anymore. It was genital warts,” I corrected with my hands still over my mouth.

“That’s forever!” He was surprisingly calm having just heard his fiancée, to whom he was about to commit himself, admitting to having had a venereal disease.

“No, herpes is forever. I had genital warts. They are gone now. I swear it.” I corrected him for a second time with the imaginary shield of fingers still crossed over my lips.

“It’s gone?” His demeanor was inquisitive rather than judgmental.

“It’s gone.” My voice was quiet as I finally dropped my hands into my lap but maintained eye contact as if my life depended on it. He knew as I did that purging was probably the best thing we could have done before finalizing paperwork.

“Pinky swear it?” He held his hand up, pinky finger extended. I looked to his previously broken pinky that never quite healed right, then to his big brown eyes. The air was clear and clean, so I shook my head, grabbed his crooked finger with mine, and giggled. “Anything else?” he added with a firm squeeze around my little finger.

“I got nothin’. That’s it. Clean slate now. You?”

“Nope, I’m good. Skeletons are all out. Let’s get married, ya dirty barracks ho.” He laughed a fantastic, pure, whole-hearted laugh as I put the car in gear and looked for traffic. The left turning signal ticked through my surprise.

“You got jokes! Okay, when your bastard son comes knocking on our door for a child support check, we’ll see who was the barracks ho. Go ahead, tell your bastard son you da baby daddy.”

“Ohhhhh burn! That’s a good one coming from a cum-guzzling gutter slut. Boo-yeah, puta!”

The jokes went on like that getting more vulgar at each stoplight until we had to whisper them in each other’s ear while we stood in line at the courthouse. It must have looked as if we were in an enchanted whirlwind of love.

I didn’t talk much about Doug and the whirlwind of young love to my family. My sister knew more about him than anyone but never figured I would run off to get married. I told my mother what my plans were the week before we were to elope in Vegas in a slipup on the phone. She was so hurt and caught off guard that she and her second husband immediately drove from Ohio to Arizona to meet this punk kid. I’m sure their plan was to deter me from a horrible fleeting mistake. A mother’s idea of her daughter’s wedding does not involve jeans or an ordained minister dressed as Elvis. This is why her eyes were swollen with tears when she finally arrived in the small western town outside of the military installation. You could tell she had her husband stop at a gas station so she could splash a little water on her saddened face and attempted to hide red eyes with makeup.

Doug and I met Mom and her second husband at a local award-winning steak house that was a brothel until the Gold Rush ended. We used the history of the place to strike up ice-breaking conversation. It worked and they both seemed a little calmer by the end of dinner, but not enough to make it any easier to not be a part of the wedding. The truly sad part was that we left for Las Vegas right after the meal was finished. We had no idea she was coming until she called that afternoon to let me know she was a few hours away.

Mom drove across the United States of America to rescue her daughter from insanity; after dinner, she watched me drive off to the City of Sin. I broke my mother’s heart, but for some reason her only verbal protest consisted of one question: “Are you sure?”

If there was more, I didn’t hear it. In fact, I was so self-absorbed that when I opened the box of gifts my mother had selected in haste, I passed judgment on almost every item. I was ashamed that she went to the thrift store, embarrassed that she spent money she didn’t have on items I didn’t want. I was reluctant to take joy in her attempt to salvage her dreams for my wedding day. I pitied her and thought it was cute how she tried to make it special for me.

My egotistical mind was arrogant to what I was doing to everyone but myself and my new fiancé. I thought I was being humble in my desire to be in love. I didn’t need a frilly dress and huge ceremony to feel that or proclaim it. Weddings are for families and friends anyway. It was as true to me then, as it is now; only now I can say it with older, wiser convictions.

Weddings
are
for friends. They want to see your happiness in ceremony and cry with you as they have done at every major event shared between friends. They
are
for family. Siblings want to be a part of supporting who you vow to spend the rest of your life with and witness the passion to which you devote yourself to another person. Mothers want to be in the back and do whatever it is they do to comfort their daughters and cry uncontrollably as the vows are said. Fathers want to give their daughters away and share that special father-daughter dance before another man becomes the center of her world. It’s a religious experience. It’s tradition. It’s the right way to declare that two people are one in the eyes of friends, family, the legal system, and God. I was just fucking ignorant enough to think that I could be in love without the approval of anyone.

Doug and I drove to Las Vegas in his immaculate black car with the marriage license stowed away in a book bag he carried throughout high school. Mom’s box of white wedding gifts sat opened in the backseat minus the tiara that read, “I’m the bride,” which was on my head until the cheap plastic dug into the back of my ears about fifteen minutes into the drive.

Sometime during hour number three, after the singing and frantic chatting died down, slow music and the hypnotizing road gave pause for reflection. “This is just crazy.”

“Isn’t it?” I agreed. “What are you going to say to your parents? They are going to hate me.” I immediately looked beyond the farthest mountain of the Arizona desert, as it slowly seemed to move with our travel.

“No, they won’t. Did you tell your dad yet?”

I whipped my head to him and shot daggers from my eyes. Doug knew my dad and I had a falling out just before I turned eighteen. Three weeks before my birthday, I moved in with my mother and didn’t talk to him for almost a year until I went home for Sunny’s wedding. Since then, I had discovered independence, sexuality, the value of a dollar, and my right to utterly break free from a living Diablo I knew as my stepmom, thus creating an insurgency against my father and anything else that I felt was holding back my life force.

“No, I did not. He is seriously going to kill me.” I looked to the mountains again for comfort.

“You should call him.”

“I will once we get there,” I assured him as a beautiful bird gracefully dove to the earth and lifted in its grasp a small desert snake.

My dad was unfairly oblivious to the happenings in my life as I met and surprised my future in-laws with the news. I’m sure they thought I was a lovely, foolish girl, but nothing topped the insanity of calling my dad. I’d never mentioned a word about Doug to him. He didn’t even know I was seeing someone other than Robert back home. In fact, my dad was still building a son in-law relationship with my first love when I decided to tell him the news.

When we finally arrived in Las Vegas and all of the hugs had gone to each one of his family members, I called my dad. “Guess where I’m at.” I paused for a moment as Douglas sat with me on the bed.