Matt did stay in Cairo a couple more days. He returned to Giza and climbed the great pyramid on his own. Afterwards, he cycled through the Sinai Desert as he told me he would. He was caught in a sandstorm and taken in by Bedouins who fed him pigeon for dinner. He continued onto Israel, passing through Gaza en route, where he was mistaken as an American and chased by locals with kitchen knives. Fortunately, he outran them. He toured Israel and then worked on a kibbutz for six months before cycling overland to India.
He was gone from Canada another eleven months after we parted in Cairo. I only wrote to him in reply to his letters, as he preferred. I received two or three while he was in Israel but I didn't receive his last one for another for six months, sent from a beach in Goa in the spring of 1985. His letters were factual and didn't ask how I was doing.
I didn't need any more proof that we would not be lovers when he returned. I stopped harbouring such expectations or intentions, but I still had a soft spot for him in my heart. I looked forward to seeing him again and very much wanted to be his best friend. I knew it might take time and I was willing to give him that.
He arrived home a month earlier than expected, at the end of April before seasonal air fares increased. I was delighted to receive a call from him the following day, asking to meet me at work for lunch. I changed my lunch time to accommodate our meeting but he didn't show up until an hour later. He had already eaten, and he was totally cold and distant with me. It was confusing why he had contacted me right away if he wasn't eager to see me. I told myself he'd warm up on his own if I just gave him space, just as he had in Greece.
He said he would be out of town for two weeks, but I saw him in a gay bar in Toronto four days later. I thought nothing of it as plans can change, but he was as icy as he had been a few days before. As he spoke with his friends, he half-turned his back to exclude me. I foolish stuck around, thinking he'd warm up after a couple drinks. He didn't. His friends offered to drop me off at my home on the way to driving him home. I asked to kiss him good night as I got out. He agreed, but at the last second he turned his face away. "You've got to be careful what you'll catch these days," he commented without looking at me.
Those were perhaps the cruelest words ever spoken to me by anyone, and they cut me deeply. I knew then we would never be friends again. It was a sad and painful time for me, plagued by anxiety and a debilitating loneliness. He avoided me all summer and I felt too betrayed to contact him.
He did try to befriend me again once he met a new boyfriend in the fall. I wasn't enthusiastic but I agreed to give it try. I met them for dinner in a local restaurant. I tried to chat up his new lover, but he was very uncomfortable. In spite of my efforts he spent most of the evening staring at his plate. Matt thought it was worth a second try and invited me for coffee at their place, but his lover busied himself doing housework around us as we talked. The three of us never met again. Time passed, but the healing was slow and my absence did not make Matt's heart grow fonder. I occasionally asked him out for coffee to keep in touch, perhaps every year or so, but he usually kept me waiting a couple months before responding to my invitation.
My life rolled on. I continued expanding my art and had many wonderful adventures hiking in the Arctic, sailing in the Caribbean and cycling through France and other places. In 1991, I cycled from Lisbon to Norway to India, a route somewhat similar to his own, but he never showed any interest in my accomplishments. I eventually gave up trying. In 1996 I moved back to Vancouver. I tried one final time to contact him when I visited Toronto in January 2001. He was cordial but he didn't want to meet me or to even know where to reach me. I heard nothing more about him until his death 12 days ago.
Recounting this story has dredged up a painful flood of memories from my past. As I said at the start several entries ago, it tells me little about Matt except what was already obvious to me at the end of our travels together, that he and I were not compatible partners. He couldn't deal with emotions of love, sadness or anger. Right and wrong no longer matter, and I suppose they never did. What I do see is how hard it was for me to shake these painful experiences, and how these feelings were crippling me at that time. I don't court them anymore, but they are still buried in my memory banks.
As much as I loved him, it was too painful to hold onto the hope that we would one day be friends again, so I let it go. If he could speak to me now he'd accuse me of still loving him, and he would be right. Even if we could not be friends, I have never forgotten what it felt like to hold him while he slept, and I always wanted to know that he was safe and fine. When love becomes unconditional, it is easier than friendship.
Perhaps he overcame some of his fear of emotions over time. Certainly he must have known considerable happiness. After 24 years, he was still with the lover who replaced me when he died, the one who was so timid when we met. I don't know if theirs was ever a richly loving relationship, but Matt had so many accomplishments to be proud of before he died. He pushed every part of his being to achieve excellence, except his heart which, compromised after years of bottling up his emotions, became his weakest link. It gave out at the finish line of the Wasaga Beach Triathlon, when it could no longer keep up with the rest of him.
I will always miss you, Matt.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Story of Matt, Part 9 - Egypt
The worst of the fireworks between Matt and I was over by the time we returned to Athens. His bank had finally released his money and the next day we bought tickets on Air Egypt to Cairo.
The only international hostel in the city was full of refugees from Sudan so we took room in a hotel on Talaat Harb St, the main street of Cairo. It was built by Europeans a few decades earlier and had seen better days. The high ceilings had patterns of black mould, which Matt referred to as 'Egyptian motif'. The ground floor was a brothel, and while the upper floors were relatively clean, we saw the occasional rat scamper across the rundown lobby. It was no different from the rest of the city which had settled into decay long ago.
Egyptians say anyone who drinks from the Nile will always return. Travel agents warn us that anyone who drinks from the Nile will never leave. Matt seemed to be immune to the 'Pharaoh's Revenge'. I escaped it too, except for a few debilitating cramps one afternoon, so we were able to maximize the use of our time. Each day we woke to the morning prayer calls blaring mercilessly from loudspeakers at every street corner. We strolled the dusty streets and dodged the kamikaze drivers to see the City of the Dead, the street markets and museums.
I had never been anywhere for foreign to my Canadian sensibilities, but I adapted with enthusiasm. As we walked along the crowded streets, we placed bets on which we would be asked for most often, sex or money. Sex usually won out. Matt taught me to choose the food dishes at delicatessens that were crawling with ants, not flies, since ants don't shit on their food supply. He had learned this in Morocco. We also spent a romantic evening at the Felfela, a famous restaurant oozing is atmosphere and charm, with live pigeons in cages and street cats wandering about.
Then we began our excursions outside the city, up to hills east of the sprawling city to the fortress of Saladin, where Mohamed Ali headquartered his rebellion against the Turks a century ago, and to the great pyramids at Giza to the west. The excursions were a great deal of fun. On the bus to Giza we were packed so tightly we could hardly move. Matt was forced tightly against me, his crotch pressing against my hand that was clutching a railing. No one saw as I rubbed him with my thumb until he was hard as a rock. Our plan was to climb the great pyramid at sunset, as Peter Lee and Mel Gibson did in the movie "Gallipoli", but a scuzzy urchin claiming to be a guard wanted "baksheesh" or he would report us to the authorities. We opted not to try, fearing that he would report us for a reward even if we did. As part of the ying and yang of the universe, the wonderous creations of Man are always surrounded by human cess.
We put his bike in storage at the hotel and boarded a train to the south for a few days. The sun was setting as it rolled up the Nile past the sillhouettes of 30 or more ancient pyramids of all shapes and sizes, the palms trees looking like stick black cellophane against the coloured sky.
Our first stop was Luxor, where the ruins of Karnak are, the ancient capital of Upper Egypt. Our hotelier offered us a joint but Matt refused, fearing that the hotelier would then turn us over to the police and we'd have to pay thousands for our release while he collected a share. I learned from the hotelier three days later that he only hoped had sex with the both of us.
Everywhere we went, young men walked in pairs, hand in hand, as Egyptian friends do. They stared with unabashed lust and awe at Matt's red blond hair and muscular build. He could have had anyone he wanted, and I would have let him since I had accepted that we weren't really dating, but he was afraid of getting VD. On our way back from the Valley of the Queens we chatted with the proprietor of a refreshment stand, a handsome guy our age, who had good English from working in Switzerland two years. He offered us his special treat, "Egyptian hot milk", with a wink. Matt pretended to be interested and then asked if I would be. I said I might if he was, so we arranged to meet him at a certain location in town later. When it came time to meet him, Matt told he me never had any intention of going, that he had done it so that I could have fun. Perhaps he hoped I'd need or expect less of our relationship afterwards, or maybe he just wanted justification to accuse me of being a slut later. I left without discussion but I didn't go to the meet up point. I returned half an hour later and told him the proprietor did not show up.
There were no other incidents like that in Luxor, or later in Aswan, though we often took refuge in the 'winter gardens' of European hotels to escape the incessant attentions of admirers. On the train back north to Cairo, three handsome youths in their early 20s chatted us up, boldly praising our beauty, asking us to sing songs to them and begging us to be their friends. They wanted us to get off at Asyut and stay with them in their dorms at the university. The conductor came along and ordered them to leave us alone, probably as much for their protection as for ours. I suspect if he hadn't, Matt would have tried to get me to leave with them when we arrived in Asyut.
When we returned to Cairo, I only stayed two more nights. I tried to convince Matt to come with me to Israel, but he wanted stay a couple more days and then cycle through the Sinai Desert first. I asked if he wanted me to stay with him a couple more days, but he didn't want that either.
On our last night I cuddled with him on his bed and tried to get him to make love a final time, but he was deliberately cold and unresponsive. Tired of his callous oscillations, I gently pulled away without a word and crawled into my own bed on the other side of the room. What are you doing? he asked, suddenly concerned and sounding like a frightened child. Going to sleep, I replied. Then he became tearful and begged me to return to his bed. He held close me all night, but as I was leaving in the morning he was polite and mechanical, as though saying goodbye to a work colleague or client. That was the last I saw of him for almost a year.
The only international hostel in the city was full of refugees from Sudan so we took room in a hotel on Talaat Harb St, the main street of Cairo. It was built by Europeans a few decades earlier and had seen better days. The high ceilings had patterns of black mould, which Matt referred to as 'Egyptian motif'. The ground floor was a brothel, and while the upper floors were relatively clean, we saw the occasional rat scamper across the rundown lobby. It was no different from the rest of the city which had settled into decay long ago.
Egyptians say anyone who drinks from the Nile will always return. Travel agents warn us that anyone who drinks from the Nile will never leave. Matt seemed to be immune to the 'Pharaoh's Revenge'. I escaped it too, except for a few debilitating cramps one afternoon, so we were able to maximize the use of our time. Each day we woke to the morning prayer calls blaring mercilessly from loudspeakers at every street corner. We strolled the dusty streets and dodged the kamikaze drivers to see the City of the Dead, the street markets and museums.
I had never been anywhere for foreign to my Canadian sensibilities, but I adapted with enthusiasm. As we walked along the crowded streets, we placed bets on which we would be asked for most often, sex or money. Sex usually won out. Matt taught me to choose the food dishes at delicatessens that were crawling with ants, not flies, since ants don't shit on their food supply. He had learned this in Morocco. We also spent a romantic evening at the Felfela, a famous restaurant oozing is atmosphere and charm, with live pigeons in cages and street cats wandering about.
Then we began our excursions outside the city, up to hills east of the sprawling city to the fortress of Saladin, where Mohamed Ali headquartered his rebellion against the Turks a century ago, and to the great pyramids at Giza to the west. The excursions were a great deal of fun. On the bus to Giza we were packed so tightly we could hardly move. Matt was forced tightly against me, his crotch pressing against my hand that was clutching a railing. No one saw as I rubbed him with my thumb until he was hard as a rock. Our plan was to climb the great pyramid at sunset, as Peter Lee and Mel Gibson did in the movie "Gallipoli", but a scuzzy urchin claiming to be a guard wanted "baksheesh" or he would report us to the authorities. We opted not to try, fearing that he would report us for a reward even if we did. As part of the ying and yang of the universe, the wonderous creations of Man are always surrounded by human cess.
We put his bike in storage at the hotel and boarded a train to the south for a few days. The sun was setting as it rolled up the Nile past the sillhouettes of 30 or more ancient pyramids of all shapes and sizes, the palms trees looking like stick black cellophane against the coloured sky.
Our first stop was Luxor, where the ruins of Karnak are, the ancient capital of Upper Egypt. Our hotelier offered us a joint but Matt refused, fearing that the hotelier would then turn us over to the police and we'd have to pay thousands for our release while he collected a share. I learned from the hotelier three days later that he only hoped had sex with the both of us.
Everywhere we went, young men walked in pairs, hand in hand, as Egyptian friends do. They stared with unabashed lust and awe at Matt's red blond hair and muscular build. He could have had anyone he wanted, and I would have let him since I had accepted that we weren't really dating, but he was afraid of getting VD. On our way back from the Valley of the Queens we chatted with the proprietor of a refreshment stand, a handsome guy our age, who had good English from working in Switzerland two years. He offered us his special treat, "Egyptian hot milk", with a wink. Matt pretended to be interested and then asked if I would be. I said I might if he was, so we arranged to meet him at a certain location in town later. When it came time to meet him, Matt told he me never had any intention of going, that he had done it so that I could have fun. Perhaps he hoped I'd need or expect less of our relationship afterwards, or maybe he just wanted justification to accuse me of being a slut later. I left without discussion but I didn't go to the meet up point. I returned half an hour later and told him the proprietor did not show up.
There were no other incidents like that in Luxor, or later in Aswan, though we often took refuge in the 'winter gardens' of European hotels to escape the incessant attentions of admirers. On the train back north to Cairo, three handsome youths in their early 20s chatted us up, boldly praising our beauty, asking us to sing songs to them and begging us to be their friends. They wanted us to get off at Asyut and stay with them in their dorms at the university. The conductor came along and ordered them to leave us alone, probably as much for their protection as for ours. I suspect if he hadn't, Matt would have tried to get me to leave with them when we arrived in Asyut.
When we returned to Cairo, I only stayed two more nights. I tried to convince Matt to come with me to Israel, but he wanted stay a couple more days and then cycle through the Sinai Desert first. I asked if he wanted me to stay with him a couple more days, but he didn't want that either.
On our last night I cuddled with him on his bed and tried to get him to make love a final time, but he was deliberately cold and unresponsive. Tired of his callous oscillations, I gently pulled away without a word and crawled into my own bed on the other side of the room. What are you doing? he asked, suddenly concerned and sounding like a frightened child. Going to sleep, I replied. Then he became tearful and begged me to return to his bed. He held close me all night, but as I was leaving in the morning he was polite and mechanical, as though saying goodbye to a work colleague or client. That was the last I saw of him for almost a year.
Story of Matt , Part 8 - Crete, Part 2
If that first night in Sitia wasn't the worst night of my life it was close. It was certainly the worst night of our time together.
I marched into town knowing how hurt Matt would be when he found out I left without him, but had I stayed with him it would have been a miserable time too, and he wouldn't see the need to change the way he was treating me. It was a drastic action, and I was afraid I had gone too far. I knew he might never forgive me but I couldn't turn back.
I wanted nothing more than to forget the pain I felt and the pain I was causing him. At dinner I ordered a small bottle of Ouzo worth seventy cents and a 750ml bottle of retsina worth fifty cents and proceeded to become drunker and sicker than ever before (or since).
I am not blessed with the ability to forget everything by the next morning after a drunken binge, although my memories are as altered as my vision was. I had the company of at least four other young travelers, a Brit, an Aussie, a German and an Irish lass, and we seemed to have fun until well into the night. They decided to do a stroll along the beach, but I was too wasted to keep up with them. I remember sitting on a log wondering what to do next.
Eventually I made it to solid ground and staggered up the main street towards the hostel, stopping into a café along the way. The old men, who to spend their days silently people watching from the café, all stood out of concern went I staggered in the door. I knew then I was seriously fucked up.
Somehow I made it back to the hostel, stopping at the primitive washroom to be sick. Then I stumbled into the dorm. I found Matt's bed, sat down and started explaining apologetically. His sole concern was getting me to keep quiet and not wake up everyone in the room. I found my own bunk, fortunately a lower one, and passed out.
The next morning I was up at the crack of dawn to use the washroom again. It was a total mess. I had apparently missed the toilet completely the night before. It was a terribly difficult chore in my condition but I spent half an hour cleaning up the mess the best I could before anyone else woke up.
Matt was furious with me, and although I was embarrassed and apologetic, I was still furious with him too. We stayed in Sitia another two days while I was too sick to travel. We were both too choked to talk about our feelings. The fact that he stayed with me, and that we traveled on together another three weeks, told me that he cared. He stayed right beside me the two days, in spite of the tensions between us. By the second day, we were talking politely and he was even sweet and caring at times.
Early the next day, still feeling the effects of my $1.20 hangover, I set out with him on a rural side road over the hills to the south coast. By noon we reached the port of Ierapetra. We caught the attention of a young local man about our age when we stopped for lunch. He struck up a conversation and insisted, against our objections, on buying us a big jug of Greek wine. The smell of it was enough to turn my stomach but he was seriously offended when I said I was too sick to have any. He toasted us with "Yamos!", which ironically means for 'to your health'. I pretended to drink it, spitting it back into my glass every second sip, and whenever he was distracted I poured half my glass into Matt's.
To save me from a fate worse than death, Matt eventually drank it all. For once he rode behind me after lunch as we continued west along the south coast. Alcohol brings out the sides of our personalities we usually keep a lid on. With Matt, it always made him horny. Suddenly I felt his hand caressing my back and ass as we rode along. He had pulled up beside me and had the biggest foolish grin on his face. I was grateful for his attention but also horrified that someone might see.
The road began a long and steep climb away from the coast at the beach town of Myrtos. Given Matt's condition, both his drunkenness and his horniness, I figured it was best to stop for the night. I left him fumbling with the bike lock while I booked a room for two. I filled his arms with our bags so he wouldn't fondle me until we got to the room, and once inside I helped him undress and guided him to the shower. As soon as he was out and toweling himself off in slow motion, I jumped into the shower myself. I was pretty horny too by this point, but in the time it took to shower off my sweat and return to the bed, he was already dead to the world and snoring like a lawn mower.
Early the next morning, we set out under grey skies to tackle the massive hill on the road that led north and inland away from Myrtos. Matt was his old self again, regrettably, and he powered swiftly up the hill and out of sight. I shifted down to my lowest gear but the chain slipped back up to second gear repeatedly. I pushed harder on the shift lever to lock it down. The plastic lever snapped off in my hand and the chain jammed between first and second gear. I couldn't even roll the bike so I waited patiently at the bottom of the hill.
It was close to an hour before Matt came looking for me. He had waited at the top for almost that long and he was angry to find me still at the bottom. He took out his tools and locked my derailleur into second gear for the rest of the trip. That would allow me to climb hills but I would never be able to get up a decent speed on the flat stretches.
The road we were on headed back to Iraklion on the north shore. We wanted to stay on the south side, which required us to take unpaved mountain roads for half the day to reach our destination. At points it was so rough that even riding at walking speed was nearly impossible. The vinyl-coated cardboard panniers couldn't stand the vibrations and tore away from their straps. Matt had a couple spare bungee cords we used to strap them onto the top of my rear rack. We hit pavement again when we reached a broad valley that led to the west. We followed it to the town of Mires.
We stayed two nights in Mires, using the day between to ride, baggage-free, to the famous hippy town of Matala on the south coast, where Joni Mitchell wrote the song "Carey". On the way, we passed an orchard of orange trees. Matt climbed the wall and picked a couple for later. Having no bike bag to keep them in, he stuffed them inside his cycling shorts where they settled nicely around his crotch. We glided by the Minoan ruins of Festos, where a bus load of school children were waiting for a tour. The boys were kicking a ball around the courtyard while the girls sat in row along the top of a wall facing the road. One by one I watched their mouths drop open in awe as they checked out Matt's crotch. As soon as we rounded the next corner we started laughing so hard that we had to stop riding for a while.
Matala was fascinating, a throw-back to the end of the 60s with period western rock music blaring out of hippie paraphernalia shops. Most of the "homeless" travelers had made camp in natural sea caves on the hill sides that the Nazis had expanded for defense during WWII. On its small, rocky beach we ate our lunch before returning to Mires. The oranges were sour, in spite of their lovely aroma (!), so we didn't eat them.
On our last day on the island we rode back to Iraklion, after having a delicious breakfast of octopus and potato stew at a local restaurant. The three engaging elderly women who ran it spoke no English but they insisted that we learn and practice the Greek word for bicycle - podilado I think. That put me on a natural high, so when our road bent to the north uphill and into a fierce headwind with intermittent rain showers, I was singing. Matt, on the other hand, was in a foul mood. How things change in just a week!
I returned the cursed bike. The bike rental shop owner was disheartened when I laid out the broken gear shift lever, the two torn panniers and the kick stand that had also snapped off by then. I am not sure whether later he was angry with me or if he realized that buying crap wasn't worth it. We didn't stick around long enough to find out.
I marched into town knowing how hurt Matt would be when he found out I left without him, but had I stayed with him it would have been a miserable time too, and he wouldn't see the need to change the way he was treating me. It was a drastic action, and I was afraid I had gone too far. I knew he might never forgive me but I couldn't turn back.
I wanted nothing more than to forget the pain I felt and the pain I was causing him. At dinner I ordered a small bottle of Ouzo worth seventy cents and a 750ml bottle of retsina worth fifty cents and proceeded to become drunker and sicker than ever before (or since).
I am not blessed with the ability to forget everything by the next morning after a drunken binge, although my memories are as altered as my vision was. I had the company of at least four other young travelers, a Brit, an Aussie, a German and an Irish lass, and we seemed to have fun until well into the night. They decided to do a stroll along the beach, but I was too wasted to keep up with them. I remember sitting on a log wondering what to do next.
Eventually I made it to solid ground and staggered up the main street towards the hostel, stopping into a café along the way. The old men, who to spend their days silently people watching from the café, all stood out of concern went I staggered in the door. I knew then I was seriously fucked up.
Somehow I made it back to the hostel, stopping at the primitive washroom to be sick. Then I stumbled into the dorm. I found Matt's bed, sat down and started explaining apologetically. His sole concern was getting me to keep quiet and not wake up everyone in the room. I found my own bunk, fortunately a lower one, and passed out.
The next morning I was up at the crack of dawn to use the washroom again. It was a total mess. I had apparently missed the toilet completely the night before. It was a terribly difficult chore in my condition but I spent half an hour cleaning up the mess the best I could before anyone else woke up.
Matt was furious with me, and although I was embarrassed and apologetic, I was still furious with him too. We stayed in Sitia another two days while I was too sick to travel. We were both too choked to talk about our feelings. The fact that he stayed with me, and that we traveled on together another three weeks, told me that he cared. He stayed right beside me the two days, in spite of the tensions between us. By the second day, we were talking politely and he was even sweet and caring at times.
Early the next day, still feeling the effects of my $1.20 hangover, I set out with him on a rural side road over the hills to the south coast. By noon we reached the port of Ierapetra. We caught the attention of a young local man about our age when we stopped for lunch. He struck up a conversation and insisted, against our objections, on buying us a big jug of Greek wine. The smell of it was enough to turn my stomach but he was seriously offended when I said I was too sick to have any. He toasted us with "Yamos!", which ironically means for 'to your health'. I pretended to drink it, spitting it back into my glass every second sip, and whenever he was distracted I poured half my glass into Matt's.
To save me from a fate worse than death, Matt eventually drank it all. For once he rode behind me after lunch as we continued west along the south coast. Alcohol brings out the sides of our personalities we usually keep a lid on. With Matt, it always made him horny. Suddenly I felt his hand caressing my back and ass as we rode along. He had pulled up beside me and had the biggest foolish grin on his face. I was grateful for his attention but also horrified that someone might see.
The road began a long and steep climb away from the coast at the beach town of Myrtos. Given Matt's condition, both his drunkenness and his horniness, I figured it was best to stop for the night. I left him fumbling with the bike lock while I booked a room for two. I filled his arms with our bags so he wouldn't fondle me until we got to the room, and once inside I helped him undress and guided him to the shower. As soon as he was out and toweling himself off in slow motion, I jumped into the shower myself. I was pretty horny too by this point, but in the time it took to shower off my sweat and return to the bed, he was already dead to the world and snoring like a lawn mower.
Early the next morning, we set out under grey skies to tackle the massive hill on the road that led north and inland away from Myrtos. Matt was his old self again, regrettably, and he powered swiftly up the hill and out of sight. I shifted down to my lowest gear but the chain slipped back up to second gear repeatedly. I pushed harder on the shift lever to lock it down. The plastic lever snapped off in my hand and the chain jammed between first and second gear. I couldn't even roll the bike so I waited patiently at the bottom of the hill.
It was close to an hour before Matt came looking for me. He had waited at the top for almost that long and he was angry to find me still at the bottom. He took out his tools and locked my derailleur into second gear for the rest of the trip. That would allow me to climb hills but I would never be able to get up a decent speed on the flat stretches.
The road we were on headed back to Iraklion on the north shore. We wanted to stay on the south side, which required us to take unpaved mountain roads for half the day to reach our destination. At points it was so rough that even riding at walking speed was nearly impossible. The vinyl-coated cardboard panniers couldn't stand the vibrations and tore away from their straps. Matt had a couple spare bungee cords we used to strap them onto the top of my rear rack. We hit pavement again when we reached a broad valley that led to the west. We followed it to the town of Mires.
We stayed two nights in Mires, using the day between to ride, baggage-free, to the famous hippy town of Matala on the south coast, where Joni Mitchell wrote the song "Carey". On the way, we passed an orchard of orange trees. Matt climbed the wall and picked a couple for later. Having no bike bag to keep them in, he stuffed them inside his cycling shorts where they settled nicely around his crotch. We glided by the Minoan ruins of Festos, where a bus load of school children were waiting for a tour. The boys were kicking a ball around the courtyard while the girls sat in row along the top of a wall facing the road. One by one I watched their mouths drop open in awe as they checked out Matt's crotch. As soon as we rounded the next corner we started laughing so hard that we had to stop riding for a while.
Matala was fascinating, a throw-back to the end of the 60s with period western rock music blaring out of hippie paraphernalia shops. Most of the "homeless" travelers had made camp in natural sea caves on the hill sides that the Nazis had expanded for defense during WWII. On its small, rocky beach we ate our lunch before returning to Mires. The oranges were sour, in spite of their lovely aroma (!), so we didn't eat them.
On our last day on the island we rode back to Iraklion, after having a delicious breakfast of octopus and potato stew at a local restaurant. The three engaging elderly women who ran it spoke no English but they insisted that we learn and practice the Greek word for bicycle - podilado I think. That put me on a natural high, so when our road bent to the north uphill and into a fierce headwind with intermittent rain showers, I was singing. Matt, on the other hand, was in a foul mood. How things change in just a week!
I returned the cursed bike. The bike rental shop owner was disheartened when I laid out the broken gear shift lever, the two torn panniers and the kick stand that had also snapped off by then. I am not sure whether later he was angry with me or if he realized that buying crap wasn't worth it. We didn't stick around long enough to find out.
Monday, September 21, 2009
Story of Matt , Part 7 - Crete, Part 1
Iraklion, if not stunning, was at least pleasant enough and free of smog. We spent our first day there taking a side trip to the famous labyrinth of Minoan ruins called Knossos and then looking for a bike rental shop.
The shop we found was quite new, operated by a middle-aged Hungarian. The bikes were new too. Only a couple had been rented previously and probably only for day trips around the city. The owner was excited about our plan to spend a week touring the east and south coasts of the island. He told us proudly that he had cycled from Budapest to Paris when he was younger. Judging by the size of his gut, it must have been much younger.
We found a bike the right size, a ten speed with a child's kick stand, a spongy seat and plastic gear shift levers. I was thankful there were no tassels dangling from the ends of the handlebars. The only panniers available to rent looked like cardboard file boxes covered with thin red vinyl. Matt agreed that they could not hold much weight so I gave him the lion's share of my supplies, as bare bones as they were.
The next day we headed east against a persistent head along the north shore of Crete. We started late morning and it took until early afternoon before the traffic diminished somewhat. Matt's powerful legs had no trouble against the wind but I hadn't been on a bike since the fall cycling season last October. He would ride on ahead and then wait for me. Fortunately it was a shorter day. By late afternoon, only 40 km out of Iraklion, we reached the town of Malia. We set up his tent in the beach side campground just as it started to rain. We spent the evening cuddling and eating dried snacks inside the tent.
The next morning my knees were paining me. It was recurring problem in my 20s after the first rides or hikes of the new season, and straining against the headwind had made it worse than usual. We continued east. The headwind was lighter but after Malia the road climbed considerably before it descended into Aghios Nikoloas (St. Nicholas) 50 km later. My knees complained sharply as I struggled to keep up with Matt, not that he minded waiting for me, but between the humiliation and the pain I was irritable most of the way. At least the weather was much nicer that evening. We checked into a local B&B and strolled along the harbour after dark.
The following day was much more challenging, both longer and hillier, but my knees were improving and we got an earlier start. The road twisted back and forth along the rocky shoreline for a couple hours before climbing high into the hills. It passed through a series of small, ancient villages - Lastros, Tourloti, Myrsini - each perched on high ridges with terraced fields of crops cascading down the hills beneath them. The road switch-backed up to each summit, then plummeted steeply before climbing up to the next one. The climbs were exhausting but the views and downhill runs were exhilarating.
The final ridge was the largest. The afternoon sun was beating down hard by this point so we stripped down to our shorts for the big climb. It was a full half hour long and we were soaked in sweat. There was a stiff, refreshing breeze at the top. I caught up to Matt and we took a well-deserved break. My spirits were as high as the ridge itself. It was a special moment of shared accomplishment and Matt was smiling at the change in my mood from the day before.
Rain clouds had recently passed over the far side of the mountain, wetting the road in front of us. It was going to be a cold ride downhill so we donned all the clothing at hand, including our gloves. Just as we set off for the final descent of the day, my left brake cable detached from the brake handle, but Matt was already coasting out of view. I could stop the bike with one brake so I started down after him. The road wasn't steep but it dropped steadily for several kilometres. The low stone wall between me and the valley floor hundreds of feet below as my bike continued to accelerate.
It was a breathtaking view as I descended into the harbour town of Sitia. The town was framed in fields of daisies as I glided into it. The youth hostel was the first building on the edge of town and Matt was already dismounting as the end of the driveway. I coasted up behind him and just as I came to a stop the second brake cable detached itself. I was horrified. If this had happened a minute earlier I probably would have accelerated to my death.
Matt was already at the registration. He was offered two options: a private room for two or dorm-styled bunks in a room with a dozen others. He chose the second option to save $5. I couldn't believe it. I offered to pay the difference so we could be by ourselves, but he said he wouldn't be comfortable making me do that. I'm not comfortable doing this, I pointed at the dorm, but he carried his bags in anyway. There were a few guys talking in the room having a conversation, which served to end the discussion and avoid a scene.
While he locked the bikes and unpacked, I took a shower. I was so choked I wasn't sure if I wanted to break down or explode. So do you want to go into town and get something to eat after I shower, he asked, as I was dressing into my street clothes. Sure I nodded, but I was not in a mood for talking. My anger grew hotter as soon as he left the room. It occurred to me that it wasn't at all about the money, that after every truly joyful experience with me he needed cool the fires and distance himself from our intimacy. I'll distance him alright, I thought to myself. Then I made the first of several colossal pieces of bad judgment that evening: I marched out the door and into town without him.
The shop we found was quite new, operated by a middle-aged Hungarian. The bikes were new too. Only a couple had been rented previously and probably only for day trips around the city. The owner was excited about our plan to spend a week touring the east and south coasts of the island. He told us proudly that he had cycled from Budapest to Paris when he was younger. Judging by the size of his gut, it must have been much younger.
We found a bike the right size, a ten speed with a child's kick stand, a spongy seat and plastic gear shift levers. I was thankful there were no tassels dangling from the ends of the handlebars. The only panniers available to rent looked like cardboard file boxes covered with thin red vinyl. Matt agreed that they could not hold much weight so I gave him the lion's share of my supplies, as bare bones as they were.
The next day we headed east against a persistent head along the north shore of Crete. We started late morning and it took until early afternoon before the traffic diminished somewhat. Matt's powerful legs had no trouble against the wind but I hadn't been on a bike since the fall cycling season last October. He would ride on ahead and then wait for me. Fortunately it was a shorter day. By late afternoon, only 40 km out of Iraklion, we reached the town of Malia. We set up his tent in the beach side campground just as it started to rain. We spent the evening cuddling and eating dried snacks inside the tent.
The next morning my knees were paining me. It was recurring problem in my 20s after the first rides or hikes of the new season, and straining against the headwind had made it worse than usual. We continued east. The headwind was lighter but after Malia the road climbed considerably before it descended into Aghios Nikoloas (St. Nicholas) 50 km later. My knees complained sharply as I struggled to keep up with Matt, not that he minded waiting for me, but between the humiliation and the pain I was irritable most of the way. At least the weather was much nicer that evening. We checked into a local B&B and strolled along the harbour after dark.
The following day was much more challenging, both longer and hillier, but my knees were improving and we got an earlier start. The road twisted back and forth along the rocky shoreline for a couple hours before climbing high into the hills. It passed through a series of small, ancient villages - Lastros, Tourloti, Myrsini - each perched on high ridges with terraced fields of crops cascading down the hills beneath them. The road switch-backed up to each summit, then plummeted steeply before climbing up to the next one. The climbs were exhausting but the views and downhill runs were exhilarating.
The final ridge was the largest. The afternoon sun was beating down hard by this point so we stripped down to our shorts for the big climb. It was a full half hour long and we were soaked in sweat. There was a stiff, refreshing breeze at the top. I caught up to Matt and we took a well-deserved break. My spirits were as high as the ridge itself. It was a special moment of shared accomplishment and Matt was smiling at the change in my mood from the day before.
Rain clouds had recently passed over the far side of the mountain, wetting the road in front of us. It was going to be a cold ride downhill so we donned all the clothing at hand, including our gloves. Just as we set off for the final descent of the day, my left brake cable detached from the brake handle, but Matt was already coasting out of view. I could stop the bike with one brake so I started down after him. The road wasn't steep but it dropped steadily for several kilometres. The low stone wall between me and the valley floor hundreds of feet below as my bike continued to accelerate.
It was a breathtaking view as I descended into the harbour town of Sitia. The town was framed in fields of daisies as I glided into it. The youth hostel was the first building on the edge of town and Matt was already dismounting as the end of the driveway. I coasted up behind him and just as I came to a stop the second brake cable detached itself. I was horrified. If this had happened a minute earlier I probably would have accelerated to my death.
Matt was already at the registration. He was offered two options: a private room for two or dorm-styled bunks in a room with a dozen others. He chose the second option to save $5. I couldn't believe it. I offered to pay the difference so we could be by ourselves, but he said he wouldn't be comfortable making me do that. I'm not comfortable doing this, I pointed at the dorm, but he carried his bags in anyway. There were a few guys talking in the room having a conversation, which served to end the discussion and avoid a scene.
While he locked the bikes and unpacked, I took a shower. I was so choked I wasn't sure if I wanted to break down or explode. So do you want to go into town and get something to eat after I shower, he asked, as I was dressing into my street clothes. Sure I nodded, but I was not in a mood for talking. My anger grew hotter as soon as he left the room. It occurred to me that it wasn't at all about the money, that after every truly joyful experience with me he needed cool the fires and distance himself from our intimacy. I'll distance him alright, I thought to myself. Then I made the first of several colossal pieces of bad judgment that evening: I marched out the door and into town without him.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Story of Matt, Part 6 - our travels begin
Lenore kept her promise and left the next day, but not before I shared breakfast with her on the patio while Matt was showering. I found the courage to finally tell her that Matt and I were lovers. She said she figured something was up between us, but the look on her face was more like shock. I figured telling her would keep her from our doorstep, or at least if she did return we wouldn’t have to hide our relationship anymore.
I certainly didn’t want to hide it, certainly not from those who spent time with us. I was still glowing from the sweetness of last night. It seemed clear to me that Matt had overcome the reticence he showed when we met in Syntagma Square the day before, and I was more in love with him than I had ever been.
We spent that second day walking around, doing errands and checking out the local sites. The first stop was to a phone centre so he could call Canada. His bank had frozen his account through some misunderstanding and he had spent the past couple days trying to get access to his savings. He was assured the money would be released but it might take a few days.
Before it got too hot, we climbed up the Acropolis. It is stunning site to visit, steeped in so much history that I was studied in school. Mary Renault’s novel “Last of the Wine”, about two gay lovers caught up the Peloponnesian Wars against Sparta, was the most romantic gay story I had ever read. It was so exciting to be walking through the various settings of the novel, especially with a man I loved. But many of the buildings, including the most famous Parthenon, were covered in scaffolding as efforts were being made to slow the erosion of the marble carvings caused by the constantly thick blanket of smog over the city.
We climbed down a trail to the famous Agora at the base of the hill, slipping on the dusty marble outcroppings that had been polished smooth by millions of feet over the past three thousand years. When our explorations were over, we ate dinner in a sidewalk café. The sidewalks, I noted, were made of rough cut marble too, and we found out they could be deadly slippery when it rained.
On the way home from what had been one of the best days of my life, Matt turned to me and said that he didn’t want a relationship with me. I was blindsided by this as it made no sense. What did he mean, I asked him. Did he not like what was happening between us, did he not want to travel with me or to see me as a friend? Now, you’re making too much of my words, he replied. Then he refused to talk about it for the rest of the way home.
I didn’t want a public scene any more than he did, but my anger was boiling over by the time we reached our hotel room. He didn’t want to talk about it then either, but I gave him no choice. He had worried and disappointed me several times over the past year with his oscillations between hot and cold, but this was the first time I wanted to blow up at him. That fact that he would so casually spoil such a beautiful day pissed me off more than anything else.
I demanded that explain what he meant or he’d be looking for somewhere else to sleep that night. To keep the upper hand, he tried to make me look like the culprit. He said I was too emotional, that I loved him too much. That can be changed, I snapped at him angrily. I made it clear that I was prepared to book a flight to Cairo the next morning if he didn’t want my company. That’s when he broke down and started crying, something few people ever saw Matt do in his lifetime. The big man crumpled into a frightened child who begged me not to leave him. His tears totally melted my heart. Suddenly, there was no crime greater than causing this beautiful man such pain, and all I wanted to do was hold him.
He admitted that he liked my company and that he cared for me deeply, but he was worried that I would expect something of him that he might not be able to give me when he returned to Canada. I admitted to loving him as much as I had ever loved anyone, but I could accept that he didn’t want to be chained to expectations, especially when he was traveling, so we agreed to stick it out and just not call each other boyfriends. The only thing that changed is that I began to doubt his sincerity. We went out that night to a local gay bar and two older guys came onto him strongly. To stave them off, he told them we were boyfriends.
Tired of hanging around the city centre waiting for his money to come through, we decided to catch a bus to Cape Sounion, 70 km from Athens at the southern tip of Attica, the peninsula Athens is built on. Sounion rises to high promontory surrounded by the sea on three sides, at the top of which stand the ruins of the Temple of Poseidon, designed by the same architect who had built the Parthenon. Sounion is famous for its fabulous sunsets.
We scrambled around the ruins for a couple hours, waiting for sunset. It was Matt’s wish to sleep amongst the ruins but it was a popular wish amongst backpackers and the guards had been onto it for ages. They made sure everyone was off the property before dark.
We climbed down the hill and crossed onto the east side of a facing hill where we laid out our sleeping bags under a small tree five metres above the shore. We went to sleep there with the silhouette of the temple standing against the last light of the night sky. In the morning we stripped off our underwear and jumped naked into the Aegean Sea. After frolicking around for several minutes, we climbed back up and lay in the warm morning sun until we were dry. Then we made love right there, out in the open, with no sign of human life in view except for the ruins of the temple in the distance. That is, until a busload of school children poured into the picture. They didn’t see us as they raced to see who could get up to the ruins first. We reluctantly dressed and caught the next bus back to Athens.
The next morning Matt learned that it would be a week before he’d get access to his money so we decided to take a longer trip. It was still a bit cool and rainy so we decided to head south to Crete. The passenger ferry left Athens’ port, Piraeus, in the next evening and arrived in Iraklion, the largest town on Crete, the following morning. Matt brought his bike for he wanted to cycle with me there. He had read that there were places in Iraklion where I could a rent a bike for myself. What we didn’t need we stored at the hotel.
We brought a bottle of wine, which we weren’t supposed to have open on board, but it seemed everyone else was doing it. We shared it with a very cute 21-year-old American named Paul who was going to spend the summer studying the administration of the European Union, or something equally dull. Between the wine and Paul, Matt was in heat. We were all crammed in closely on my lower berth and Matt begun conspicuously rubbing his leg against mine, hoping this would excite Paul. I could have died with embarrassment but Paul, though he couldn’t help but notice, went right on talking as though nothing was happening. A few minutes later he said good night and wandered off. I lay in my berth below Matt’s that night, wondering what kind of relationship this was turning into.
I certainly didn’t want to hide it, certainly not from those who spent time with us. I was still glowing from the sweetness of last night. It seemed clear to me that Matt had overcome the reticence he showed when we met in Syntagma Square the day before, and I was more in love with him than I had ever been.
We spent that second day walking around, doing errands and checking out the local sites. The first stop was to a phone centre so he could call Canada. His bank had frozen his account through some misunderstanding and he had spent the past couple days trying to get access to his savings. He was assured the money would be released but it might take a few days.
Before it got too hot, we climbed up the Acropolis. It is stunning site to visit, steeped in so much history that I was studied in school. Mary Renault’s novel “Last of the Wine”, about two gay lovers caught up the Peloponnesian Wars against Sparta, was the most romantic gay story I had ever read. It was so exciting to be walking through the various settings of the novel, especially with a man I loved. But many of the buildings, including the most famous Parthenon, were covered in scaffolding as efforts were being made to slow the erosion of the marble carvings caused by the constantly thick blanket of smog over the city.
We climbed down a trail to the famous Agora at the base of the hill, slipping on the dusty marble outcroppings that had been polished smooth by millions of feet over the past three thousand years. When our explorations were over, we ate dinner in a sidewalk café. The sidewalks, I noted, were made of rough cut marble too, and we found out they could be deadly slippery when it rained.
On the way home from what had been one of the best days of my life, Matt turned to me and said that he didn’t want a relationship with me. I was blindsided by this as it made no sense. What did he mean, I asked him. Did he not like what was happening between us, did he not want to travel with me or to see me as a friend? Now, you’re making too much of my words, he replied. Then he refused to talk about it for the rest of the way home.
I didn’t want a public scene any more than he did, but my anger was boiling over by the time we reached our hotel room. He didn’t want to talk about it then either, but I gave him no choice. He had worried and disappointed me several times over the past year with his oscillations between hot and cold, but this was the first time I wanted to blow up at him. That fact that he would so casually spoil such a beautiful day pissed me off more than anything else.
I demanded that explain what he meant or he’d be looking for somewhere else to sleep that night. To keep the upper hand, he tried to make me look like the culprit. He said I was too emotional, that I loved him too much. That can be changed, I snapped at him angrily. I made it clear that I was prepared to book a flight to Cairo the next morning if he didn’t want my company. That’s when he broke down and started crying, something few people ever saw Matt do in his lifetime. The big man crumpled into a frightened child who begged me not to leave him. His tears totally melted my heart. Suddenly, there was no crime greater than causing this beautiful man such pain, and all I wanted to do was hold him.
He admitted that he liked my company and that he cared for me deeply, but he was worried that I would expect something of him that he might not be able to give me when he returned to Canada. I admitted to loving him as much as I had ever loved anyone, but I could accept that he didn’t want to be chained to expectations, especially when he was traveling, so we agreed to stick it out and just not call each other boyfriends. The only thing that changed is that I began to doubt his sincerity. We went out that night to a local gay bar and two older guys came onto him strongly. To stave them off, he told them we were boyfriends.
Tired of hanging around the city centre waiting for his money to come through, we decided to catch a bus to Cape Sounion, 70 km from Athens at the southern tip of Attica, the peninsula Athens is built on. Sounion rises to high promontory surrounded by the sea on three sides, at the top of which stand the ruins of the Temple of Poseidon, designed by the same architect who had built the Parthenon. Sounion is famous for its fabulous sunsets.
We scrambled around the ruins for a couple hours, waiting for sunset. It was Matt’s wish to sleep amongst the ruins but it was a popular wish amongst backpackers and the guards had been onto it for ages. They made sure everyone was off the property before dark.
We climbed down the hill and crossed onto the east side of a facing hill where we laid out our sleeping bags under a small tree five metres above the shore. We went to sleep there with the silhouette of the temple standing against the last light of the night sky. In the morning we stripped off our underwear and jumped naked into the Aegean Sea. After frolicking around for several minutes, we climbed back up and lay in the warm morning sun until we were dry. Then we made love right there, out in the open, with no sign of human life in view except for the ruins of the temple in the distance. That is, until a busload of school children poured into the picture. They didn’t see us as they raced to see who could get up to the ruins first. We reluctantly dressed and caught the next bus back to Athens.
The next morning Matt learned that it would be a week before he’d get access to his money so we decided to take a longer trip. It was still a bit cool and rainy so we decided to head south to Crete. The passenger ferry left Athens’ port, Piraeus, in the next evening and arrived in Iraklion, the largest town on Crete, the following morning. Matt brought his bike for he wanted to cycle with me there. He had read that there were places in Iraklion where I could a rent a bike for myself. What we didn’t need we stored at the hotel.
We brought a bottle of wine, which we weren’t supposed to have open on board, but it seemed everyone else was doing it. We shared it with a very cute 21-year-old American named Paul who was going to spend the summer studying the administration of the European Union, or something equally dull. Between the wine and Paul, Matt was in heat. We were all crammed in closely on my lower berth and Matt begun conspicuously rubbing his leg against mine, hoping this would excite Paul. I could have died with embarrassment but Paul, though he couldn’t help but notice, went right on talking as though nothing was happening. A few minutes later he said good night and wandered off. I lay in my berth below Matt’s that night, wondering what kind of relationship this was turning into.
Story of Matt, Part 5 - reuniting in Athens
As the plane began to descend into Athens I was doing my best to keep my cool. It was my first time outside of North America, not counting the last three nights in London, and my first time in a non-English speaking country. If that wasn’t enough to make me nervous, I was only a day away from reuniting with Matt, who hadn’t exactly sounded thrilled to see me again in his last postcard.
A young Australian woman across the aisle from suddenly took an interest in me and did her best to get a conversation going. I was in no mood to engage her attentions. I was polite but dismissive, but she was harder to shake than a lamprey eel. Finally, losing my Canadian correctness, I told her I had too much on my mind to be interested in conversation and asked her to chat someone else up. She was taken aback a bit, but she cut to the chase. She was looking for someone to share a hotel room with.
I was dumbstruck. To save some money, of course, she explained, and besides, she didn’t feel safe in this strange city alone. I don’t know…., I started. I told her I was meeting a friend the next day to go traveling together. It’s just for one night, she insisted. She would be catching a bus to Piraeus in the morning and from there a ferry to the island of Kos. Reluctantly I agreed, uncertain whether I was making a big mistake. Lenore, she announced, extending her hand to introduce herself.
We caught a cab from the airport to the Keramikos district just north-west of the Acropolis at my insistence. According to the guide books it was close to the only gay bars are in town as well as the best restaurants and Syntagma Square where I was to meet Matt. We found a clean-looking, medium-priced hotel which had a room facing the Acropolis a kilometre away. Lenore made a big show of getting a room with two single beds. She made it perfectly clear that she wouldn’t be sleeping with me. I didn’t object.
I didn’t regret my decision to share with her. It did save some money and she was excellent company, keeping my mind off my nerve-wracking worries about what I would do if I couldn’t find Matt the next day, or what he would be like when I did. We found a pleasant sidewalk café in the area with a view of the floodlit Acropolis and shared a bottle of wine while she told me her story.
Lenore had been traveling for a few months. She too had a boyfriend and she was planning to meet him soon. He was a Russian, living in Australia, and they had met a few months before she started her travels. She said he was getting restless and anxious for her to return home. I wasn’t bold enough to tell her about Matt, but if I had been I might have suggested that we swap boyfriends for a while.
We passed the hotel manager on the way back to our room. I caught his disgruntled look. I assume he didn’t approve a young unmarried couple sharing a room, and that our insistence on two single beds was just a rouse. I just suppressed a smile and nodded politely.
Lenore kept her word. She didn’t try to crawl into bed with me and she left the next morning and we shared a light breakfast on the hotel patio. After we checked out, I even walked her to Syntagma Square. Ironically that was where her bus departed for Piraeus. She asked me to wait with her until it came. I casually scanned the square looking for Matt. The bus left right at noon, the exact time I was to meet him. As soon as it pulled out, I raced to the centre of the square to look for him.
I found him sitting on a bench. He greeted me in quite a disinterested manner as though it had been quite a bother for him to show up at all. I was horrified, but did my best not to let it show. I asked if he would like to get a coffee somewhere and we headed off in the direction of where he was staying to a cheap place he had found. It was nothing special, but it was on a quiet side street where we could hear ourselves talk. I fed him questions and let him do most of the talking, fearing I would say something stupid or pathetic if I was the centre of attention.
We talked for a couple hours. He opened right up and told me so many things he didn’t have the time or space to in his letters. His icy manner melted away in the warm afternoon sun and he finally seemed happy to see me. He showed me his pathetic, dirty, windowless room in some apartment hovel where he had already stayed three nights. I asked him to share a room with me in hotel where Lenore and I has stayed, but it was cost more than his skeletal budget would allow. It upset me that he’d forego a romantic night with me after an eight month absence just to save a couple dollars, but he relented when I promised to three-quarters of the cost.
He locked his bike and unloaded his gear while I went inside to book another room. The hotel manager asked if I wanted the same room with two single beds. I asked if I could have one with a double bed, also facing the Acropolis. He eyed me suspiciously and produced a key for a different room. Then Matt joined me at the counter, his bike bags tucked under his arms. The manager looked quite surprised and confused, not being sure what to make of us. We thanked him and ran up the stairs to our room.
The room worked its charm on him when he saw the sun pouring in and the view of the Acropolis. He gave his signature nod of approval, accompanied by his broad, silly grin that meant he was pleased. As he stripped down for a quick shower, I took in the changes in him that had occurred since the previous summer. He was beautifully tanned all over, except for the parts covered by his cycling shorts, and his legs, if it was possible, had grown larger. He looked like an Egyptian statue with its over-sized legs meant to give the impression from below that the statue was taller than its actual size.
When he was dry again he threw on his T-shirt and shorts and sat beside me on the bed. He asked me about my life in Canada and my visit to London, and while I was in the middle of some story he stretched out on the bed beside me, exposing his rock-hard stomach in the process. I stopped talking and stared at him. He was grinning ear to ear and the bulge in his crotch was rising.
It was the sweetest, most passionate sex we ever had. Afterwards we cuddled, looking at the view and basking in the hot Athenian sun, which by then was hitting the bed. We were still wet with cum when the phone rang. It was Lenore’s voice. The schedule was all wrong. Her boat wouldn’t leave until the next day. She was in the lobby and had our room number and was on her way up. No! I shouted into the receiver, a bit too emphatically. I fumbled for a reason why. I told her Matt had just had a shower and was still dressing, and that I’d meet her on the patio in a five minutes. We splashed water on ourselves and flapped our towels around to dissipate the smell of semen.
Matt didn’t seem to mind if Lenore shared our room or not, and not knowing how to explain why I wanted to be alone with him (Oh, how times have changed!) I said it would be OK. We went to reception to ask for an extra cot. The hotel manager searched our faces for clues. He had no idea what to make of us by this point.
We shared the day with Lenore, most of the talk centering around her. Matt was charming and engaging as always and she seemed impressed. But when bedtime came she was emphatic that she was not going to share the bed with either of us as she readied her cot. Matt slipped me one of his sly smiles but said nothing. That night we dared not do anything that would make noise. We lay close, tracing the contours of each others' bodies with our fingertips, caressing our erections and kissing ever so softly. I doubt we slept more than an hour or two, but it was a night to remember.
A young Australian woman across the aisle from suddenly took an interest in me and did her best to get a conversation going. I was in no mood to engage her attentions. I was polite but dismissive, but she was harder to shake than a lamprey eel. Finally, losing my Canadian correctness, I told her I had too much on my mind to be interested in conversation and asked her to chat someone else up. She was taken aback a bit, but she cut to the chase. She was looking for someone to share a hotel room with.
I was dumbstruck. To save some money, of course, she explained, and besides, she didn’t feel safe in this strange city alone. I don’t know…., I started. I told her I was meeting a friend the next day to go traveling together. It’s just for one night, she insisted. She would be catching a bus to Piraeus in the morning and from there a ferry to the island of Kos. Reluctantly I agreed, uncertain whether I was making a big mistake. Lenore, she announced, extending her hand to introduce herself.
We caught a cab from the airport to the Keramikos district just north-west of the Acropolis at my insistence. According to the guide books it was close to the only gay bars are in town as well as the best restaurants and Syntagma Square where I was to meet Matt. We found a clean-looking, medium-priced hotel which had a room facing the Acropolis a kilometre away. Lenore made a big show of getting a room with two single beds. She made it perfectly clear that she wouldn’t be sleeping with me. I didn’t object.
I didn’t regret my decision to share with her. It did save some money and she was excellent company, keeping my mind off my nerve-wracking worries about what I would do if I couldn’t find Matt the next day, or what he would be like when I did. We found a pleasant sidewalk café in the area with a view of the floodlit Acropolis and shared a bottle of wine while she told me her story.
Lenore had been traveling for a few months. She too had a boyfriend and she was planning to meet him soon. He was a Russian, living in Australia, and they had met a few months before she started her travels. She said he was getting restless and anxious for her to return home. I wasn’t bold enough to tell her about Matt, but if I had been I might have suggested that we swap boyfriends for a while.
We passed the hotel manager on the way back to our room. I caught his disgruntled look. I assume he didn’t approve a young unmarried couple sharing a room, and that our insistence on two single beds was just a rouse. I just suppressed a smile and nodded politely.
Lenore kept her word. She didn’t try to crawl into bed with me and she left the next morning and we shared a light breakfast on the hotel patio. After we checked out, I even walked her to Syntagma Square. Ironically that was where her bus departed for Piraeus. She asked me to wait with her until it came. I casually scanned the square looking for Matt. The bus left right at noon, the exact time I was to meet him. As soon as it pulled out, I raced to the centre of the square to look for him.
I found him sitting on a bench. He greeted me in quite a disinterested manner as though it had been quite a bother for him to show up at all. I was horrified, but did my best not to let it show. I asked if he would like to get a coffee somewhere and we headed off in the direction of where he was staying to a cheap place he had found. It was nothing special, but it was on a quiet side street where we could hear ourselves talk. I fed him questions and let him do most of the talking, fearing I would say something stupid or pathetic if I was the centre of attention.
We talked for a couple hours. He opened right up and told me so many things he didn’t have the time or space to in his letters. His icy manner melted away in the warm afternoon sun and he finally seemed happy to see me. He showed me his pathetic, dirty, windowless room in some apartment hovel where he had already stayed three nights. I asked him to share a room with me in hotel where Lenore and I has stayed, but it was cost more than his skeletal budget would allow. It upset me that he’d forego a romantic night with me after an eight month absence just to save a couple dollars, but he relented when I promised to three-quarters of the cost.
He locked his bike and unloaded his gear while I went inside to book another room. The hotel manager asked if I wanted the same room with two single beds. I asked if I could have one with a double bed, also facing the Acropolis. He eyed me suspiciously and produced a key for a different room. Then Matt joined me at the counter, his bike bags tucked under his arms. The manager looked quite surprised and confused, not being sure what to make of us. We thanked him and ran up the stairs to our room.
The room worked its charm on him when he saw the sun pouring in and the view of the Acropolis. He gave his signature nod of approval, accompanied by his broad, silly grin that meant he was pleased. As he stripped down for a quick shower, I took in the changes in him that had occurred since the previous summer. He was beautifully tanned all over, except for the parts covered by his cycling shorts, and his legs, if it was possible, had grown larger. He looked like an Egyptian statue with its over-sized legs meant to give the impression from below that the statue was taller than its actual size.
When he was dry again he threw on his T-shirt and shorts and sat beside me on the bed. He asked me about my life in Canada and my visit to London, and while I was in the middle of some story he stretched out on the bed beside me, exposing his rock-hard stomach in the process. I stopped talking and stared at him. He was grinning ear to ear and the bulge in his crotch was rising.
It was the sweetest, most passionate sex we ever had. Afterwards we cuddled, looking at the view and basking in the hot Athenian sun, which by then was hitting the bed. We were still wet with cum when the phone rang. It was Lenore’s voice. The schedule was all wrong. Her boat wouldn’t leave until the next day. She was in the lobby and had our room number and was on her way up. No! I shouted into the receiver, a bit too emphatically. I fumbled for a reason why. I told her Matt had just had a shower and was still dressing, and that I’d meet her on the patio in a five minutes. We splashed water on ourselves and flapped our towels around to dissipate the smell of semen.
Matt didn’t seem to mind if Lenore shared our room or not, and not knowing how to explain why I wanted to be alone with him (Oh, how times have changed!) I said it would be OK. We went to reception to ask for an extra cot. The hotel manager searched our faces for clues. He had no idea what to make of us by this point.
We shared the day with Lenore, most of the talk centering around her. Matt was charming and engaging as always and she seemed impressed. But when bedtime came she was emphatic that she was not going to share the bed with either of us as she readied her cot. Matt slipped me one of his sly smiles but said nothing. That night we dared not do anything that would make noise. We lay close, tracing the contours of each others' bodies with our fingertips, caressing our erections and kissing ever so softly. I doubt we slept more than an hour or two, but it was a night to remember.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Story of Matt, Part 4 - waiting for spring
I wasn’t about to mope my days away after Matt left for Europe, though to the same degree, I was not prepared to let go of our relationship. I took a more positive stance. I set about improving my life and filling it with new activities, getting ready for some distant date when he would return and I’d have much more to share with him. If it didn’t work out that way, at least I’d have new interests and experiences to launch me on a new path.
I joined a gym and tried to build more muscle, not that that did anything for me. My body was probably preprogrammed for muscular dystrophy, though I had no idea at the time.
With my friend Chris Bearchell’s encouragement, I also began taking on news feature journalism assignments with The Body Politic, the first pieces of public writing I had ever done. I joined Out & Out, a gay outdoors club, the month he left and in November I was elected president of the club. I no longer had any time to be idle.
I wrote to Matt every week, eager to have as much news to share with him as he would have for me. But the weeks passed without a letter from him. This was before internet services, when letters to travelers had to be sent to “Poste Restante” to wait in whatever city they would arrive in at some later date. I couldn’t be sure he would ever get them, but I knew I would always be here to receive his.
I was determined not to resent him for abandoning me. It made no sense to, but feelings are not logical, and a pattern of betrayal and abandonment had echoed through the past years of my life. So I resumed the meditation exercises I had once done years before, always placing an image of him in white light in my mind as I did them.
On the advice of friends, I also began seeing an energy worker who worked with magnetic polarities, usually focusing on my digestive ailments. He always tested to see where my opposing poles were first, to know what my body was trying to heal on its own. One day he paused after doing this, muttering softly “That’s interesting.” I asked him to explain. Well, one pole is at your right lung and the other is on the left frontal lobe of your brain, he told me. The lung indicated sadness and the left brain indicated that I was thinking about a man. The pole being on the front lobe of the brain meant that I was worried about the future.
He asked if I knew what that was about and I told him about Matt. But I wasn’t feeling any resentment for him leaving, I insisted. Who said anything about resentment, he replied. It was sadness I was avoiding and he told me his treatment would help me feel it more clearly. Would I want to feel it, I asked, and he just chuckled, “Of course you would. It’s part of the healing process.”
Sadness had seemed like a dirty feeling to me until that point of my life. It repulsed me. I associated it with weakness and helplessness, a state without hope. Perhaps that is why I had always masked it with anger. But life had never promised me an easy course so I let him treat me.
It took a few days, but I woke to the sadness one morning. At first I thought it was just the power of suggestion but it stayed with me off and on for several weeks. It was a healing sadness, not the wallowing, self-pitying kind. It rose from very deep within me, from so far back in my past that it might have been from another life. It rose like an artesian well, brimming on the edge of my eyelids and threatening to spill over. It made everything sparkle with beauty and vulnerability, a sadness that told me that everything is beautiful, but that everything will also pass. It filled me with awe.
Matt’s letters began to arrive. The first arrived at the end of September. He related how he crossed to the north coast of England and caught a boat to Bergen. On the ship he told a man who asked if he had a wife or girlfriend at home that he was gay, something he would never have dreamed of doing when I met him. In Bergen a ruggedly handsome sailor came onto him. I felt an unaccustomed pang of jealousy until he added, to his disappointment, that the sailor was so totally a bottom that he left his footprints all over the ceiling. He also related the story of his trip through the mountains to Oslo, where he had picked up the half dozen letters I had sent to him so far. At one point there were three long, winding, unlit tunnels close together. When he emerged from the third one he realized, to his profound shock and dismay, that he was at the entrance to the first tunnel heading back towards Bergen. He eventually figured out that he got totally turned around in the middle of the second tunnel.
His stories thrilled me to my core. I so wanted to be with him that I asked in my next letter, which I sent to Berlin, if there was any way I could join him somewhere on his route. I had to wait weeks for his answer. He first headed east through Sweden to Finland where, during a drunken party, he agreed to catch a ride with some sailors to Gdansk, Poland. He spent at least three weeks touring Poland. While the Poles were very friendly, food was in terribly short supply that fall, except for tomatoes. They could scarcely satisfy his voracious appetite, so he was relieved to make it to Germany without losing too much weight.
In my letters I asked a multitude of silly questions that would help me imagine what his life on the road was like, questions like where did he shave or shower when he was camping or how did he communicate with others in non-English speaking countries. He never bothered to answer them. He made up for it in other ways by telling me about experiences that did matter to him. And also by agreeing, without a firm commitment, to meet me in Athens in the spring.
The sun shone all that winter, at least in my heart. I followed his accounts that arrived sporadically, every six weeks or so, with intense fascination. The series of forwarding addresses he gave me included Amsterdam, Paris, Barcelona, Marrakesh and Tunis. He described in his letters how he had slept in orchards scented with orange blossoms, and how it was the poor farmers, not the rich or middle class who helped him when he needed it. He wintered south of the Atlas Mountains in southern Morocco, where the local children threw rocks at him for fun, from cliffs high above him. If any of them had hit its mark, he probably would have died.
He also met a woman working with CUSO in northern Morocco who fell in love with him. To my surprise he let her seduce him and was her lover for a couple weeks. She followed him across North Africa to Tunis where he finally left her. From there he crossed to Sicily and across to the heel of Italy before catching a boat to Greece.
I made my plans for my first overseas trip ever, getting special permission from my employer for an extended six-week trip. I made arrangements fly to London, and then three days later to catch another flight to Athens where I would meet Matt. From there I planned to go to Egypt and Israel, hopefully with him, before returning to Greece and London on my way home. I told my friends simply that I would be spending my vacation in Europe, Asia and Africa.
But with the vacation booked and my non-refundable tickets purchased the day of departure fast approached with no word from Matt. It was painful and infuriating time but I had no choice but to continue with my plans alone. Finally, less than two days before my flight, a postcard arrived from Italy saying he’d try to meet me Syntagma Square in central Athens at noon, four days later.
I joined a gym and tried to build more muscle, not that that did anything for me. My body was probably preprogrammed for muscular dystrophy, though I had no idea at the time.
With my friend Chris Bearchell’s encouragement, I also began taking on news feature journalism assignments with The Body Politic, the first pieces of public writing I had ever done. I joined Out & Out, a gay outdoors club, the month he left and in November I was elected president of the club. I no longer had any time to be idle.
I wrote to Matt every week, eager to have as much news to share with him as he would have for me. But the weeks passed without a letter from him. This was before internet services, when letters to travelers had to be sent to “Poste Restante” to wait in whatever city they would arrive in at some later date. I couldn’t be sure he would ever get them, but I knew I would always be here to receive his.
I was determined not to resent him for abandoning me. It made no sense to, but feelings are not logical, and a pattern of betrayal and abandonment had echoed through the past years of my life. So I resumed the meditation exercises I had once done years before, always placing an image of him in white light in my mind as I did them.
On the advice of friends, I also began seeing an energy worker who worked with magnetic polarities, usually focusing on my digestive ailments. He always tested to see where my opposing poles were first, to know what my body was trying to heal on its own. One day he paused after doing this, muttering softly “That’s interesting.” I asked him to explain. Well, one pole is at your right lung and the other is on the left frontal lobe of your brain, he told me. The lung indicated sadness and the left brain indicated that I was thinking about a man. The pole being on the front lobe of the brain meant that I was worried about the future.
He asked if I knew what that was about and I told him about Matt. But I wasn’t feeling any resentment for him leaving, I insisted. Who said anything about resentment, he replied. It was sadness I was avoiding and he told me his treatment would help me feel it more clearly. Would I want to feel it, I asked, and he just chuckled, “Of course you would. It’s part of the healing process.”
Sadness had seemed like a dirty feeling to me until that point of my life. It repulsed me. I associated it with weakness and helplessness, a state without hope. Perhaps that is why I had always masked it with anger. But life had never promised me an easy course so I let him treat me.
It took a few days, but I woke to the sadness one morning. At first I thought it was just the power of suggestion but it stayed with me off and on for several weeks. It was a healing sadness, not the wallowing, self-pitying kind. It rose from very deep within me, from so far back in my past that it might have been from another life. It rose like an artesian well, brimming on the edge of my eyelids and threatening to spill over. It made everything sparkle with beauty and vulnerability, a sadness that told me that everything is beautiful, but that everything will also pass. It filled me with awe.
Matt’s letters began to arrive. The first arrived at the end of September. He related how he crossed to the north coast of England and caught a boat to Bergen. On the ship he told a man who asked if he had a wife or girlfriend at home that he was gay, something he would never have dreamed of doing when I met him. In Bergen a ruggedly handsome sailor came onto him. I felt an unaccustomed pang of jealousy until he added, to his disappointment, that the sailor was so totally a bottom that he left his footprints all over the ceiling. He also related the story of his trip through the mountains to Oslo, where he had picked up the half dozen letters I had sent to him so far. At one point there were three long, winding, unlit tunnels close together. When he emerged from the third one he realized, to his profound shock and dismay, that he was at the entrance to the first tunnel heading back towards Bergen. He eventually figured out that he got totally turned around in the middle of the second tunnel.
His stories thrilled me to my core. I so wanted to be with him that I asked in my next letter, which I sent to Berlin, if there was any way I could join him somewhere on his route. I had to wait weeks for his answer. He first headed east through Sweden to Finland where, during a drunken party, he agreed to catch a ride with some sailors to Gdansk, Poland. He spent at least three weeks touring Poland. While the Poles were very friendly, food was in terribly short supply that fall, except for tomatoes. They could scarcely satisfy his voracious appetite, so he was relieved to make it to Germany without losing too much weight.
In my letters I asked a multitude of silly questions that would help me imagine what his life on the road was like, questions like where did he shave or shower when he was camping or how did he communicate with others in non-English speaking countries. He never bothered to answer them. He made up for it in other ways by telling me about experiences that did matter to him. And also by agreeing, without a firm commitment, to meet me in Athens in the spring.
The sun shone all that winter, at least in my heart. I followed his accounts that arrived sporadically, every six weeks or so, with intense fascination. The series of forwarding addresses he gave me included Amsterdam, Paris, Barcelona, Marrakesh and Tunis. He described in his letters how he had slept in orchards scented with orange blossoms, and how it was the poor farmers, not the rich or middle class who helped him when he needed it. He wintered south of the Atlas Mountains in southern Morocco, where the local children threw rocks at him for fun, from cliffs high above him. If any of them had hit its mark, he probably would have died.
He also met a woman working with CUSO in northern Morocco who fell in love with him. To my surprise he let her seduce him and was her lover for a couple weeks. She followed him across North Africa to Tunis where he finally left her. From there he crossed to Sicily and across to the heel of Italy before catching a boat to Greece.
I made my plans for my first overseas trip ever, getting special permission from my employer for an extended six-week trip. I made arrangements fly to London, and then three days later to catch another flight to Athens where I would meet Matt. From there I planned to go to Egypt and Israel, hopefully with him, before returning to Greece and London on my way home. I told my friends simply that I would be spending my vacation in Europe, Asia and Africa.
But with the vacation booked and my non-refundable tickets purchased the day of departure fast approached with no word from Matt. It was painful and infuriating time but I had no choice but to continue with my plans alone. Finally, less than two days before my flight, a postcard arrived from Italy saying he’d try to meet me Syntagma Square in central Athens at noon, four days later.
Story of Matt, Part 3 - summer of '83
The summer of 1983 was the hottest on record in Toronto. Matt and I filled our weekend days riding the roads on the outskirts of Toronto, wetting out cycling shirts in fountains and sprinklers along the way to make the scorching heat and humidity bearable. Every week night, after he had finished work and his swim at the local pool, I cycled to his place, or he to mine, to make dinner, make love and lay in each others’ arms.
It took some getting used to. He liked to sleep on his back. I preferred to sleep with my head on his chest but it was so thick that it always gave me a kink in my neck. It was also so hot in the evenings that we could barely tolerate a single sheet over our legs and Matt naturally gave off heat like a wood stove. But I preferred to lay awake in sweaty discomfort over spending a night alone. He felt the same way.
Sex was another imperfect exercise. My first lover, Mike, was a total top. I doubt one could have gotten a pencil into his butt after an hour of rimming. Anal sex had always been difficult for me until I met him, but I was so smitten and he was so talented that I opened up like a flower for him. We used to fall asleep with him spooning me from behind, his arms encircling my chest and his cock still inside me. When I stirred a couple hours later I could feel his cock start to swell again and soon we were making love once more. This was before of days of safe sex, before Mike became positive and died AIDS a few years later.
I came to love being screwed more than anything else, but it was hard to get into sex with anyone else after we broke up. Matt was the first person to drive me crazy with desire since Mike. Besides having the nicest body I had ever been with, Matt also had a lovely, irresistible cock. The thought of him topping me was a great turn-on, but he was a total bottom. I wasn’t going to settle for masturbation so I adapted. After all, I am a Gemini and we are known for our ability to adapt.
In a few weeks I came to see myself as a top instead of a bottom. I remember watching him shave in the nude at his bathroom mirror and lustfully admiring his perfectly round muscular butt. But desire alone didn’t make our sex easy. It would all go fine at first, his big legs in the air draped over my slender shoulders, he masturbating while I humped him as hard as I could. Then he started to come and I was out of the picture, literally. He’d drop his legs on either side of me, and arching his back in ecstasy, he would press his huge thighs together as hard as he could while he pounded his meat like a war drum. I wasn’t big or strong enough to endure the pressure of his thighs. He squeezed me out of him like a watermelon seed every time, cutting me out of the fun.
My love for him grew in leaps and bounds in spite of this. But I knew it would be short-lived. From the moment in June when he confessed his love for me, he was quick to add that it would only be for the summer. Until August the 11th, to be exact. That was the date he had set his sites on for the past year and a half, the day he would leave for England to begin a cycling tour through three continents for an indefinite number of months and possibly years.
It was a beautiful goal, one I would never think of depriving him of, just another of his goals that stoked my admiration of him, but it seemed a cruel stroke of fate that I should meet him scarcely more than two months before he left. They were an intensely happy two months for both of us, but as the end date approached I was silently freaking out inside. I caught glimmers of sadness or thoughtfulness in him too, though they were always very brief and he never wanted to talk about it. His treatment of me became an erratic mix of tenderness and indifference.
One day shortly before his departure, during a board meeting at Marks & Spencer, a colleague of his had a heart attack. He died in Matt’s arms while they waited for the ambulance. He told me this after work in an almost matter-of-fact way. He turned away from me the moment his lips and voice started to tremble, but he composed himself instantly. Except for his quietness and distraction, it was hard to tell that anything out of the ordinary had happened.
I suggested we see a funny movie to keep his mind off darker thoughts. I chose “The Ruling Class”, a British comedy in which Peter O’Toole plays a delusional inmate of a psyche ward who gets released upon inheriting his uncle’s massive countryside estate. O’Toole thinks he’s Jesus, which is a constant embarrassment to his upper class family, so they subject him to electro-shock treatments against his will. Instead of curing him, his delusions change to that of a vengeful punishing God who ends up murdering them all. I left the theatre feeling terrible. I offered my embarrassed apologies. He agreed that it wasn’t the best choice.
I accompanied him to the airport the day he left Canada. Close friends of his, an older gay couple who had known him for a year, drove us there and drove me back. As we said our goodbyes outside of the security gate, he embraced me for an extended period and kissed me on the lips. It shocked me. Neither of us were out and he was not one for public displays of affection. This was still 1983 when there were no gay rights or protections, and little public awareness of gays as equals.
I rode home very much alone in the back seat of his friends’ car, now as empty of his presence as his abandoned apartment that I would never see again. I was feeling raw inside from his kiss. As I sat quietly wondering how I’d make it through the coming evening, one of the couple in the front seat turned to me. “You have made an incredible difference in his life,” he said with a tone of thanks in his voice. I felt hugely grateful for these words. They were a branch to hang onto in the swift emotional current that was dragging me under, but the branch wasn’t attached to the shore any more than Matt was.
It took some getting used to. He liked to sleep on his back. I preferred to sleep with my head on his chest but it was so thick that it always gave me a kink in my neck. It was also so hot in the evenings that we could barely tolerate a single sheet over our legs and Matt naturally gave off heat like a wood stove. But I preferred to lay awake in sweaty discomfort over spending a night alone. He felt the same way.
Sex was another imperfect exercise. My first lover, Mike, was a total top. I doubt one could have gotten a pencil into his butt after an hour of rimming. Anal sex had always been difficult for me until I met him, but I was so smitten and he was so talented that I opened up like a flower for him. We used to fall asleep with him spooning me from behind, his arms encircling my chest and his cock still inside me. When I stirred a couple hours later I could feel his cock start to swell again and soon we were making love once more. This was before of days of safe sex, before Mike became positive and died AIDS a few years later.
I came to love being screwed more than anything else, but it was hard to get into sex with anyone else after we broke up. Matt was the first person to drive me crazy with desire since Mike. Besides having the nicest body I had ever been with, Matt also had a lovely, irresistible cock. The thought of him topping me was a great turn-on, but he was a total bottom. I wasn’t going to settle for masturbation so I adapted. After all, I am a Gemini and we are known for our ability to adapt.
In a few weeks I came to see myself as a top instead of a bottom. I remember watching him shave in the nude at his bathroom mirror and lustfully admiring his perfectly round muscular butt. But desire alone didn’t make our sex easy. It would all go fine at first, his big legs in the air draped over my slender shoulders, he masturbating while I humped him as hard as I could. Then he started to come and I was out of the picture, literally. He’d drop his legs on either side of me, and arching his back in ecstasy, he would press his huge thighs together as hard as he could while he pounded his meat like a war drum. I wasn’t big or strong enough to endure the pressure of his thighs. He squeezed me out of him like a watermelon seed every time, cutting me out of the fun.
My love for him grew in leaps and bounds in spite of this. But I knew it would be short-lived. From the moment in June when he confessed his love for me, he was quick to add that it would only be for the summer. Until August the 11th, to be exact. That was the date he had set his sites on for the past year and a half, the day he would leave for England to begin a cycling tour through three continents for an indefinite number of months and possibly years.
It was a beautiful goal, one I would never think of depriving him of, just another of his goals that stoked my admiration of him, but it seemed a cruel stroke of fate that I should meet him scarcely more than two months before he left. They were an intensely happy two months for both of us, but as the end date approached I was silently freaking out inside. I caught glimmers of sadness or thoughtfulness in him too, though they were always very brief and he never wanted to talk about it. His treatment of me became an erratic mix of tenderness and indifference.
One day shortly before his departure, during a board meeting at Marks & Spencer, a colleague of his had a heart attack. He died in Matt’s arms while they waited for the ambulance. He told me this after work in an almost matter-of-fact way. He turned away from me the moment his lips and voice started to tremble, but he composed himself instantly. Except for his quietness and distraction, it was hard to tell that anything out of the ordinary had happened.
I suggested we see a funny movie to keep his mind off darker thoughts. I chose “The Ruling Class”, a British comedy in which Peter O’Toole plays a delusional inmate of a psyche ward who gets released upon inheriting his uncle’s massive countryside estate. O’Toole thinks he’s Jesus, which is a constant embarrassment to his upper class family, so they subject him to electro-shock treatments against his will. Instead of curing him, his delusions change to that of a vengeful punishing God who ends up murdering them all. I left the theatre feeling terrible. I offered my embarrassed apologies. He agreed that it wasn’t the best choice.
I accompanied him to the airport the day he left Canada. Close friends of his, an older gay couple who had known him for a year, drove us there and drove me back. As we said our goodbyes outside of the security gate, he embraced me for an extended period and kissed me on the lips. It shocked me. Neither of us were out and he was not one for public displays of affection. This was still 1983 when there were no gay rights or protections, and little public awareness of gays as equals.
I rode home very much alone in the back seat of his friends’ car, now as empty of his presence as his abandoned apartment that I would never see again. I was feeling raw inside from his kiss. As I sat quietly wondering how I’d make it through the coming evening, one of the couple in the front seat turned to me. “You have made an incredible difference in his life,” he said with a tone of thanks in his voice. I felt hugely grateful for these words. They were a branch to hang onto in the swift emotional current that was dragging me under, but the branch wasn’t attached to the shore any more than Matt was.
My young German couch surfer
Lennart is my first couch surfer since late June, my 41st overall since May 2007. He arrived at my home Sunday afternoon after spending 3 days at the International Youth Hostel. He had come over to introduce himself the day before while Eric Mourre and I were playing a game of "Settlers of Catan". At 19, he's the youngest couch surfer I've ever hosted, but by no means the most immature. He's shorter and slight with tight, curly blond hair that he says grows into an Afro if he doesn't keep it closely cropped. He picked me for a host because I live in the core, not because I am gay. He isn't bothered by my gayness; he doesn't walk around with his defenses up like younger gay guys would. In spite of his young age, he has had the same girlfriend for 4 years, twice as long as my longest relationship. But then, he's probably easier to get along with.
He's sharp as a tack too. He fully understood the logic of "Settlers of Catan" before he was half-finished the first game. I have nothing on him as an adversary.
He is considerate and orderly, like many Germans, but he also has a freshness about him, a joyful, loving ease exuded only by young people who have been raised in a warm, nurturing environment and who not yet experienced deep loss or pain. He inspires my parental instincts. I've been making him meals and helping him out wherever I can, though I don't think he really needs my help.
It was a bit hard to endure company the first day or so after learning of Matt's death, especially when I lost sleep the next two nights, but he was a very compassionate friend through it all, and his company was probably better for me than solitude would have been.
Today he is hiking in Lynn Canyon. He'll return this evening to play his first 4-person games of Settlers with Luis, Rich and I. I suspect he will move onto Vancouver Island Monday or Tuesday.
Story of Matt, Part 2
My new relationship with Matt wasn’t easy. Two and a half years before I had ended a painful relationship with my first lover and I had dragged the corpse of it around until shortly before I met him. It had shattered my self-confidence, the little bit I had built up before it started. My feelings for Matt rekindled all those feelings of loss and self-doubt, and I feared I would meet the same demise if I allowed myself to fall in love with him.
It didn’t help that Matt was so hard to read. It seemed to be his mission in life to communicate to everyone around him that life was fine and good and that nothing was out of the ordinary. But for me meeting and spending time with him was definitely extraordinary. Having little other choice, I decided I had best go along with his positive, unflustered attitude and accept that nothing was wrong for now, even if he didn’t want to celebrate our connection as enthusiastically as I did.
My caution was both kindled and overwhelmed by this amazing man that held me close each night. He was way too cool for 25. How did I, a scrawny 138 lb weakling, hook up with such a handsome muscled hunk. But he was so much more than that. He taught me foot reflexology and massage and about old blues music. He ate amazingly well for a young guy, making his own combination of granola and eating it every morning with a live yogurt culture mixed with alfalfa sprouts that he grew on his windowsill with half a dozen other herbs. Then he was off to work as a nutritionist at Marks & Spencer, tasting pork pies and sausages all day long. He hated his job, though he never admitted this until he left it.
Two weeks after we met he invited me to his parents’ place in Woodstock, two hours west Toronto. We drove this time, but threw our bikes in his car. His parents had a lovely piece of property, a couple acres in size, that sloped down to railway tracks at the bottom. Most of it was a grass lawn, which Matt didn’t like. He said that when he had his own property he’d only scatter seeds for wild flowers and let them grown naturally. That concept was important to him. He glanced at me when he said it, to see if I shared his vision.
I did. Mowing our family’s vast lawn was my chore when I was a teenager in Tsawwassen. I felt lawns were a pointless and unquestioned habit that reflected society’s lack of imagination. I liked little yellow and white flowers and saw no purpose to killing them just because they were different. He beamed his approval when I told him this.
His father had a woodworking shop on the property. Matt and I slept in a small shed nearby, away from the house where we had our own cozy privacy. His parents, Sid and Marnie, were very kind and polite. They may have suspected that Matt was gay. I had the impression that they would have loved him anyway, but the subject would never be mentioned again. Perhaps they, like many Canadian families, thought denial was a river in Egypt.
There was a natural spring at the bottom of their property near the tracks and they had excavated a large pond, 25 metres square and six metres deep. They had converted a scrapped hydro tower into a 10 metre diving board had built a five metre and two three metre boards beside it. Marnie had been a coach for the Canadian national diving team ten years earlier, an international force in those days, and later a judge of international diving championships. The national diving team used to work out in their back yard in those days not long past.
Matt and his four siblings witnessed all this and were immersed in the swimming and diving culture from birth. It was nothing for them to scramble up the hydro tower and do a triple back flip into the pond. They could do this all day and think nothing of it. There was a trapeze that hung above the three metre board. I watched his brother Paul swing out on it, flip upside down to hang by his knees and swing back to grab his sister Mary Ellen’s arms and swing her out over the pond. He released her and she did a back flip before splashing down.
I, on the other hand, was afraid of heights. I climbed to the ten metre platform and inched half way out onto the board, but when I felt the tower shaking as the next sibling clamored up the tower behind me, I almost feinted. I was a pathetic swimmer too. It was best to just watch the others, I decided, as I choked back my feelings of inadequacy.
The next day I was more in my element. We took our bikes out on the mostly flat rural back roads down to Lake Erie, which was totally unimpressive, and came back north a different route. It was a long day, over 140 km, but we were happily alone together. It was heaven in his company, even when we were silent. He cherished my company too. I thought a lot about owning property together and scattering wild flower seeds. Though he was three years my junior, I knew I had so much to learn from him.
On our drive home he told me he had registered for his first ever triathlon, which would be held between Woodstock and Fort Erie two weeks later. He had begun running in the mornings and swimming in evenings for the first time in months, but had not told me why until then. I learned that he always set and plan his goals on his own without need for approval or encouragement.
I was impressed by his determination and strength, but it made me uneasy too. I was afraid he did not need or want my support. On the day of the triathlon he left me in Toronto. I can’t remember the reasons he gave me. Perhaps he thought I’d be a distraction or encumbrance, or that he’d need to explain my presence to the other friends and athletes. These speculations tormented me that day while I, the unnecessary cheerleader, stayed near home and busied myself with a myriad of chores.
The first part of the triathlon was a one-kilometre swim. After returning to the pool to train only three weeks before, Matt came in first out of 156 participants. He was sixth after the run and a disappointing 40th after the cycling. His weaknesses, he said, were not knowing how to change gears effectively during the cycling and not training long enough with his running.
But none of it looked like weakness to me. His swimming ability left me speechless and feeling very much like an inadequate lover, but it was the next night, while holding me tenderly, he confessed to being in love with me.
It didn’t help that Matt was so hard to read. It seemed to be his mission in life to communicate to everyone around him that life was fine and good and that nothing was out of the ordinary. But for me meeting and spending time with him was definitely extraordinary. Having little other choice, I decided I had best go along with his positive, unflustered attitude and accept that nothing was wrong for now, even if he didn’t want to celebrate our connection as enthusiastically as I did.
My caution was both kindled and overwhelmed by this amazing man that held me close each night. He was way too cool for 25. How did I, a scrawny 138 lb weakling, hook up with such a handsome muscled hunk. But he was so much more than that. He taught me foot reflexology and massage and about old blues music. He ate amazingly well for a young guy, making his own combination of granola and eating it every morning with a live yogurt culture mixed with alfalfa sprouts that he grew on his windowsill with half a dozen other herbs. Then he was off to work as a nutritionist at Marks & Spencer, tasting pork pies and sausages all day long. He hated his job, though he never admitted this until he left it.
Two weeks after we met he invited me to his parents’ place in Woodstock, two hours west Toronto. We drove this time, but threw our bikes in his car. His parents had a lovely piece of property, a couple acres in size, that sloped down to railway tracks at the bottom. Most of it was a grass lawn, which Matt didn’t like. He said that when he had his own property he’d only scatter seeds for wild flowers and let them grown naturally. That concept was important to him. He glanced at me when he said it, to see if I shared his vision.
I did. Mowing our family’s vast lawn was my chore when I was a teenager in Tsawwassen. I felt lawns were a pointless and unquestioned habit that reflected society’s lack of imagination. I liked little yellow and white flowers and saw no purpose to killing them just because they were different. He beamed his approval when I told him this.
His father had a woodworking shop on the property. Matt and I slept in a small shed nearby, away from the house where we had our own cozy privacy. His parents, Sid and Marnie, were very kind and polite. They may have suspected that Matt was gay. I had the impression that they would have loved him anyway, but the subject would never be mentioned again. Perhaps they, like many Canadian families, thought denial was a river in Egypt.
There was a natural spring at the bottom of their property near the tracks and they had excavated a large pond, 25 metres square and six metres deep. They had converted a scrapped hydro tower into a 10 metre diving board had built a five metre and two three metre boards beside it. Marnie had been a coach for the Canadian national diving team ten years earlier, an international force in those days, and later a judge of international diving championships. The national diving team used to work out in their back yard in those days not long past.
Matt and his four siblings witnessed all this and were immersed in the swimming and diving culture from birth. It was nothing for them to scramble up the hydro tower and do a triple back flip into the pond. They could do this all day and think nothing of it. There was a trapeze that hung above the three metre board. I watched his brother Paul swing out on it, flip upside down to hang by his knees and swing back to grab his sister Mary Ellen’s arms and swing her out over the pond. He released her and she did a back flip before splashing down.
I, on the other hand, was afraid of heights. I climbed to the ten metre platform and inched half way out onto the board, but when I felt the tower shaking as the next sibling clamored up the tower behind me, I almost feinted. I was a pathetic swimmer too. It was best to just watch the others, I decided, as I choked back my feelings of inadequacy.
The next day I was more in my element. We took our bikes out on the mostly flat rural back roads down to Lake Erie, which was totally unimpressive, and came back north a different route. It was a long day, over 140 km, but we were happily alone together. It was heaven in his company, even when we were silent. He cherished my company too. I thought a lot about owning property together and scattering wild flower seeds. Though he was three years my junior, I knew I had so much to learn from him.
On our drive home he told me he had registered for his first ever triathlon, which would be held between Woodstock and Fort Erie two weeks later. He had begun running in the mornings and swimming in evenings for the first time in months, but had not told me why until then. I learned that he always set and plan his goals on his own without need for approval or encouragement.
I was impressed by his determination and strength, but it made me uneasy too. I was afraid he did not need or want my support. On the day of the triathlon he left me in Toronto. I can’t remember the reasons he gave me. Perhaps he thought I’d be a distraction or encumbrance, or that he’d need to explain my presence to the other friends and athletes. These speculations tormented me that day while I, the unnecessary cheerleader, stayed near home and busied myself with a myriad of chores.
The first part of the triathlon was a one-kilometre swim. After returning to the pool to train only three weeks before, Matt came in first out of 156 participants. He was sixth after the run and a disappointing 40th after the cycling. His weaknesses, he said, were not knowing how to change gears effectively during the cycling and not training long enough with his running.
But none of it looked like weakness to me. His swimming ability left me speechless and feeling very much like an inadequate lover, but it was the next night, while holding me tenderly, he confessed to being in love with me.
Friday, September 18, 2009
Story of Matt, Part I
These are my memories of Matt, ripened and coloured by the passage of time. Now that he has passed, they are more about my perceptions and what was important to me a quarter century ago.
I met Matt through a personal ad in The Body Politic, Toronto's gay bi-weekly at the time. I had tried meeting guys through ads before with little success and wanted to try something a bit different. It was April, the end of winter and the start of a new bicycling season, so I wrote an ad looking specifically for a cycling partner to hang out with. Chris Bearchell, a friend and member of the TBP collective, agreed to create a new ad category just for my ad - "Recreation" - so my ad stood out from the others. It didn't get many replies. A couple older guys wanted to meet me. They didn't have bicycles but they really loved Lycra....
The month passed and the ad stopped running. Then I got his unexpected call. We had a great conversation that lasted an hour, all about bicycles, travel, training and the like, and we agreed to call again in a couple days. When I hung up it struck me that it was not a "gay" call. There was no mention of personal stats, no discussion of sexual preferences or habits, no fishing around for clues of whether we'd find each other appealing. So, of course, he was compellingly appealing to me.
There were several subsequent calls over the next four weeks. I decided, for my part, to keep our calls on a non-sexual level so I could learn more without fantasizing about him. I learned that he was 25, into old blues music, locally-brewed beer, picking wild mushrooms, foot reflexology and swimming. My interest in him grew but there were still no "gay" questions raised by either of us. It was like chatting to a high school buddy. I began to wonder if he was gay at all, but how could he not be if he answered a gay ad?
He had planned a cycling trip to Guelph at the end of May to visit a school buddy and he invited me along. It was a distance of 110 km and we agreed that it would be a good measure of how well matched we were for cycling together. As the date grew near, I knew his curiosity about me must be peaking, as mine was about him, but I stuck to my guns and asked nothing "gay". It was like a staring contest, but much more fun. Finally, two days before the trip, he overcame his shyness and suggested we should meet beforehand, but by then we had other obligations that got in the way, so we didn't meet until the morning of the trip.
My heart was beating faster and my palms sweating a bit when I pushed his front door buzzer, but when he opened the door I did a double take. He was just over six feet, naked but for his cycling shorts, with muscled arms and chest that took my breath away. His arms and legs had a slight tan but the rest of his skin was white as a Canadian winter. He had a silly grin on his face, partly bashful, partly playful. He bobbed his head in greeting, shook my hand and invited me in.
It didn't take him long to finish dressing and to prepare his bike for the trip. In a few minutes we were standing in his driveway. He gave me his signature grin and head bob acknowledging that we were about to start, and then we threw our legs over our bikes and set off. He led the way and I spent the rest of the trip watching the various parts of his superb body doing their work.
Holding a conversation was nearly impossible in city traffic, so we fell silent for the first hour. It gave me lots of time to think, and I spent that time wondering what to say to him. My questions about his appearance that had played with my imagination for the past month had been answered, but they were replaced by a multitude of other more anxious questions about whether he found me attractive, how to draw this out of him and how to keep a lid on my lust until I did. When we reached the rural side roads we were able to ride side by side and start a conversation, but he wasn't offering me any clues to the answers.
That soon changed. We stopped for lunch a couple hours before Guelph on a sloped field behind a thicket of trees. I grabbed my lunch and lay on the grass. He lay down beside me, carefully resting the full length of his forearm against mine, sending a shock wave through the length of my body. A few sweet seconds later we locked fingers and started kissing. For the remainder of the trip our anxieties took a breather while our hearts soared like kites.
He cautioned me not to let on to our host that we had the hots for each other. He was not out to anyone but his sex partners. He'd only been out a year. I understood as I wasn't fully out yet either, but it impressed me how easily he could disguise his feelings for me in the presence of his friend.
His friend apologized that we'd have to share a room. We assured him that we didn't mind. Matt had a narrow foam pad on the floor and I had a folding cot. Neither one was big enough for the both of us but we were so grateful to be alone that our predicament made us laugh. We spent the night on the cot wrapped tightly in each others' arms, not daring to move an inch for fear of falling.
The next day we headed back to Toronto, still glowing from our first night together. The obvious question that plagued my thoughts then was whether I would see him again and, if so, how soon. I feared he might be only interested in playing the field. Though he hadn't been out long, he was already having lots of sex. He confessed that just before he answered his door the day before he had rushed a half-naked trick out the back door, which explained the sheepish grin on his face and why he was only wearing cycling shorts.
The day wore on and once again it was a contest to see who would be the first to raise the issue. I held my tongue but I was quietly dying to know. Finally, as we passed entered the suburbs of Toronto, he asked if he could see me again. The concern in his voice was clear, but as soon as I said I'd love to see him, he coolly added that he didn't want any commitments. We'd only see each other whenever we wanted to. How he saw our relationship always see-sawed from that moment on, between his need for me and his need to disguise this need from me.
Fortunately, he wanted to see me every day that summer.
I met Matt through a personal ad in The Body Politic, Toronto's gay bi-weekly at the time. I had tried meeting guys through ads before with little success and wanted to try something a bit different. It was April, the end of winter and the start of a new bicycling season, so I wrote an ad looking specifically for a cycling partner to hang out with. Chris Bearchell, a friend and member of the TBP collective, agreed to create a new ad category just for my ad - "Recreation" - so my ad stood out from the others. It didn't get many replies. A couple older guys wanted to meet me. They didn't have bicycles but they really loved Lycra....
The month passed and the ad stopped running. Then I got his unexpected call. We had a great conversation that lasted an hour, all about bicycles, travel, training and the like, and we agreed to call again in a couple days. When I hung up it struck me that it was not a "gay" call. There was no mention of personal stats, no discussion of sexual preferences or habits, no fishing around for clues of whether we'd find each other appealing. So, of course, he was compellingly appealing to me.
There were several subsequent calls over the next four weeks. I decided, for my part, to keep our calls on a non-sexual level so I could learn more without fantasizing about him. I learned that he was 25, into old blues music, locally-brewed beer, picking wild mushrooms, foot reflexology and swimming. My interest in him grew but there were still no "gay" questions raised by either of us. It was like chatting to a high school buddy. I began to wonder if he was gay at all, but how could he not be if he answered a gay ad?
He had planned a cycling trip to Guelph at the end of May to visit a school buddy and he invited me along. It was a distance of 110 km and we agreed that it would be a good measure of how well matched we were for cycling together. As the date grew near, I knew his curiosity about me must be peaking, as mine was about him, but I stuck to my guns and asked nothing "gay". It was like a staring contest, but much more fun. Finally, two days before the trip, he overcame his shyness and suggested we should meet beforehand, but by then we had other obligations that got in the way, so we didn't meet until the morning of the trip.
My heart was beating faster and my palms sweating a bit when I pushed his front door buzzer, but when he opened the door I did a double take. He was just over six feet, naked but for his cycling shorts, with muscled arms and chest that took my breath away. His arms and legs had a slight tan but the rest of his skin was white as a Canadian winter. He had a silly grin on his face, partly bashful, partly playful. He bobbed his head in greeting, shook my hand and invited me in.
It didn't take him long to finish dressing and to prepare his bike for the trip. In a few minutes we were standing in his driveway. He gave me his signature grin and head bob acknowledging that we were about to start, and then we threw our legs over our bikes and set off. He led the way and I spent the rest of the trip watching the various parts of his superb body doing their work.
Holding a conversation was nearly impossible in city traffic, so we fell silent for the first hour. It gave me lots of time to think, and I spent that time wondering what to say to him. My questions about his appearance that had played with my imagination for the past month had been answered, but they were replaced by a multitude of other more anxious questions about whether he found me attractive, how to draw this out of him and how to keep a lid on my lust until I did. When we reached the rural side roads we were able to ride side by side and start a conversation, but he wasn't offering me any clues to the answers.
That soon changed. We stopped for lunch a couple hours before Guelph on a sloped field behind a thicket of trees. I grabbed my lunch and lay on the grass. He lay down beside me, carefully resting the full length of his forearm against mine, sending a shock wave through the length of my body. A few sweet seconds later we locked fingers and started kissing. For the remainder of the trip our anxieties took a breather while our hearts soared like kites.
He cautioned me not to let on to our host that we had the hots for each other. He was not out to anyone but his sex partners. He'd only been out a year. I understood as I wasn't fully out yet either, but it impressed me how easily he could disguise his feelings for me in the presence of his friend.
His friend apologized that we'd have to share a room. We assured him that we didn't mind. Matt had a narrow foam pad on the floor and I had a folding cot. Neither one was big enough for the both of us but we were so grateful to be alone that our predicament made us laugh. We spent the night on the cot wrapped tightly in each others' arms, not daring to move an inch for fear of falling.
The next day we headed back to Toronto, still glowing from our first night together. The obvious question that plagued my thoughts then was whether I would see him again and, if so, how soon. I feared he might be only interested in playing the field. Though he hadn't been out long, he was already having lots of sex. He confessed that just before he answered his door the day before he had rushed a half-naked trick out the back door, which explained the sheepish grin on his face and why he was only wearing cycling shorts.
The day wore on and once again it was a contest to see who would be the first to raise the issue. I held my tongue but I was quietly dying to know. Finally, as we passed entered the suburbs of Toronto, he asked if he could see me again. The concern in his voice was clear, but as soon as I said I'd love to see him, he coolly added that he didn't want any commitments. We'd only see each other whenever we wanted to. How he saw our relationship always see-sawed from that moment on, between his need for me and his need to disguise this need from me.
Fortunately, he wanted to see me every day that summer.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Sad news
Last night I came home to an e-mail from Seph, a former lover from 20 years ago, a man who I had re-connected with and had become a "friend" with through Facebook a year ago. Though he had accepted my request to be Facebook friends, he had repeatedly ignored my inquiries about his current life since then, so I was surprised to see a message asking me to call him as soon as I could. We hadn't spoken since my visit to Toronto in January 2001. There was much I wanted to ask him and news to catch up on, but his message mentioned he had sad news to tell me. I have lost so many friends in T.O. to AIDS in the 80s and 90s so I braced myself to hear of the loss of one more acquaintance.
His voice rang through like a beautiful scent connected to distant memories, totally recognizable in spite of the passage of time. I savoured every syllable he spoke. But he quickly got to the point of his call, which was that my lover five years before him, Matt, had dropped dead of a heart attack at the finish line of the Wasaga Beach Triathlon last Saturday, having just won first place in his age category. He would have been 52 in two months.
Seph forwarded me a link to Matt's obituary, which noted most of his remarkable accomplishments over the past 30 years. He had played football and had made it to the Ontario championships in wrestling in his teens; he graduated with a degree in Food Sciences from the University of Guelph; he was an ardent gardener and horticultural society award winner; he grew his own hops and brewed his own beer; his hobbies included photography, kite making, kite flying and kite fighting, and stamp collecting; he composed, played and recorded his own music; he traveled extensively from Machu Picchu to Iceland to India, skied most of the best destinations in western Canada with his brothers each year, and had hiked the West Coast Trail. He was Masters World Champion triathlete and had successfully defended his title in Copenhagen earlier this year. He had also become a highly respected professional in the North American bakery industry over the past 25 years.
Most of this I knew, at least that which had become true by the early 90s. Matt was my second serious lover. We met in May 1983 and were lovers that summer until he left to cycle through Europe and Asia for 21 months, a trip he had been planning for months before we met. I was overwhelmed by his beauty and physical abilities, often feeling like I was an unworthy match, but he was first to confess his love for me. His confession came as a surprise to me because I had few clues about how he felt about me or anything else, as he kept his emotions tightly bottled up. When he left his closest friends told me I had made such a huge difference in his life, even though he had difficulty expressing it.
I felt so adrift after he left on his travels. I wrote to him every week but got very few replies. I was confused and frightened, but I couldn't think of dating any other men while he was foremost in my heart. We met in Athens the following April and traveled together for four weeks. It was a difficult time. He was hot and cold, pushing me away at times and begging me to still love him at other times. I never knew where I stood, but it was never as close to his heart as I wanted to be.
Once I was home again I only wrote in reply to his letters, which were sporadic at best, and mine were still longer and newsier. When he returned to Canada from India in 1985 he was cold to me, even cruel at times, but he burst into tears when I suggested that we stop trying to be friends. Within four months he met a new lover who was never comfortable in my presence, though even if he had remained single I doubt we would have ever settled into a comfortable friendship. As it was, we drifted further and further apart. On occasion I would invite him to meet me for a coffee or beer just to catch up but he usually didn't respond for a couple months just to keep me at a safe distance and prove that he didn't care too much for me.
I finally became exasperated by his attitude and stopped contacting him. That was around 1992. I moved to Vancouver in 1996 without telling him or seeing him again. When I visited Toronto in 2001, I phoned him but he was blasé. He was not interested in meeting me or staying in touch. I never tried again, though I thought of him often. Ours was the largest, unresolved relationship in my heart and I often wondered how I would react if our paths ever crossed again, and whether he would soften or be repulsed by my disability.
The news of his death was shocking, so much so that I wasn't sure how I felt for some time. In self defense, he had become a taboo subject, unlike any of my other past lovers. I have no memorabilia or photos of him anymore. Neither had I mentioned him to my friends. I had become accustomed to blocking memories and emotions related to him as soon as they arose. Suddenly the flood gates of memories were opened and I wasn't prepared.
Friends arrived a few minutes after I got the news and they kept me distracted for a couple hours, but my thoughts were tugging at my concentration. Once I was alone the walls began to slowly close in. Lying awake in bed in the middle of the night the weight of my memories piled up on my chest. I wanted to cry for his loss, and for his company, but I couldn't. I was breathing as deeply as I could to ease the pressure in my lungs, trying to keep my urge to panic at bay.
My muse came to my rescue, as he often does when I am troubled in the middle of the night. He is invisible but I feel his presence in the air above me. If you have never been a writer it is hard to explain. He was tossing words at me like a lifeline, enticing me to grab them. There's no getting back to sleep when he does this. The words made sense of my pain. I realized I need to describe what happened between us, to write down our history that has haunted me for the past two and a half decades.
The next few journal entries will record the most significant of these stories, and only that way will I be able to let go of them. If you are reading this they will show a part of my history I haven't shared in depth with anyone I know.
His voice rang through like a beautiful scent connected to distant memories, totally recognizable in spite of the passage of time. I savoured every syllable he spoke. But he quickly got to the point of his call, which was that my lover five years before him, Matt, had dropped dead of a heart attack at the finish line of the Wasaga Beach Triathlon last Saturday, having just won first place in his age category. He would have been 52 in two months.
Seph forwarded me a link to Matt's obituary, which noted most of his remarkable accomplishments over the past 30 years. He had played football and had made it to the Ontario championships in wrestling in his teens; he graduated with a degree in Food Sciences from the University of Guelph; he was an ardent gardener and horticultural society award winner; he grew his own hops and brewed his own beer; his hobbies included photography, kite making, kite flying and kite fighting, and stamp collecting; he composed, played and recorded his own music; he traveled extensively from Machu Picchu to Iceland to India, skied most of the best destinations in western Canada with his brothers each year, and had hiked the West Coast Trail. He was Masters World Champion triathlete and had successfully defended his title in Copenhagen earlier this year. He had also become a highly respected professional in the North American bakery industry over the past 25 years.
Most of this I knew, at least that which had become true by the early 90s. Matt was my second serious lover. We met in May 1983 and were lovers that summer until he left to cycle through Europe and Asia for 21 months, a trip he had been planning for months before we met. I was overwhelmed by his beauty and physical abilities, often feeling like I was an unworthy match, but he was first to confess his love for me. His confession came as a surprise to me because I had few clues about how he felt about me or anything else, as he kept his emotions tightly bottled up. When he left his closest friends told me I had made such a huge difference in his life, even though he had difficulty expressing it.
I felt so adrift after he left on his travels. I wrote to him every week but got very few replies. I was confused and frightened, but I couldn't think of dating any other men while he was foremost in my heart. We met in Athens the following April and traveled together for four weeks. It was a difficult time. He was hot and cold, pushing me away at times and begging me to still love him at other times. I never knew where I stood, but it was never as close to his heart as I wanted to be.
Once I was home again I only wrote in reply to his letters, which were sporadic at best, and mine were still longer and newsier. When he returned to Canada from India in 1985 he was cold to me, even cruel at times, but he burst into tears when I suggested that we stop trying to be friends. Within four months he met a new lover who was never comfortable in my presence, though even if he had remained single I doubt we would have ever settled into a comfortable friendship. As it was, we drifted further and further apart. On occasion I would invite him to meet me for a coffee or beer just to catch up but he usually didn't respond for a couple months just to keep me at a safe distance and prove that he didn't care too much for me.
I finally became exasperated by his attitude and stopped contacting him. That was around 1992. I moved to Vancouver in 1996 without telling him or seeing him again. When I visited Toronto in 2001, I phoned him but he was blasé. He was not interested in meeting me or staying in touch. I never tried again, though I thought of him often. Ours was the largest, unresolved relationship in my heart and I often wondered how I would react if our paths ever crossed again, and whether he would soften or be repulsed by my disability.
The news of his death was shocking, so much so that I wasn't sure how I felt for some time. In self defense, he had become a taboo subject, unlike any of my other past lovers. I have no memorabilia or photos of him anymore. Neither had I mentioned him to my friends. I had become accustomed to blocking memories and emotions related to him as soon as they arose. Suddenly the flood gates of memories were opened and I wasn't prepared.
Friends arrived a few minutes after I got the news and they kept me distracted for a couple hours, but my thoughts were tugging at my concentration. Once I was alone the walls began to slowly close in. Lying awake in bed in the middle of the night the weight of my memories piled up on my chest. I wanted to cry for his loss, and for his company, but I couldn't. I was breathing as deeply as I could to ease the pressure in my lungs, trying to keep my urge to panic at bay.
My muse came to my rescue, as he often does when I am troubled in the middle of the night. He is invisible but I feel his presence in the air above me. If you have never been a writer it is hard to explain. He was tossing words at me like a lifeline, enticing me to grab them. There's no getting back to sleep when he does this. The words made sense of my pain. I realized I need to describe what happened between us, to write down our history that has haunted me for the past two and a half decades.
The next few journal entries will record the most significant of these stories, and only that way will I be able to let go of them. If you are reading this they will show a part of my history I haven't shared in depth with anyone I know.
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
The Shopping Channel
I haven't dated for eons. The thought of rejection pains me. Being over 50 and with an undisguisable disability, I am very much prone to rejection. There are many types of "alternative attractiveness" in gay circles, but weakness is never an element of any of them, except for perhaps for those who need their objects of affection to be powerless and dependent. My last bf couldn't stand to hold me after my diagnosis and I've had some pretty heavy-handed and defensive reactions since then when I let it be known that I found another guy attractive.
But one never knows, right? I didn't want to prejudice my dating chances by never trying again. My challenge is where to look for a potential partner. I used to love hiking, cycling and other outdoor activities, but that's out. Physically-focused environments, like gay saunas, only emphasize my disability. Besides, I can't get into most of them because of the stairs and I have also lost the taste for casual sex. (I can't get into them that way either!) I hate the noise and confusion of bars, and my reception to alcohol is not much warmer. Besides, it's discouraging to see mostly the same faces again when I do visit every two or three months. I would not find much in common with a bar fly.
That leaves dating services and chat lines. I'm not ready to pay big bucks for an unlikely success (people don't pay extra to be matched with a gimp) so that leaves chat lines. I've tried them before, both Internet and phone lines, so I am not a virgin, but I have rarely made any memorable connections though them, at least not positive ones. But that was years ago. My virginity had almost grown back.
Saturday I bit the bullet and signed onto gay.com. I created a profile, pictures and all, with all the info sections filled in (what I am like, my interests and hobbies, what I am looking for, etc), and emphasizing friendship first. I said I was looking for someone heart-centered with good communication skills. Then I spent a couple empty hours on the chat rooms.
I probably don't need to describe what they are like, but I will. There may be 100 men signed on in a chat room but rarely are more than 4 or 5 of them "chatting", and nothing much is said other than mild chiding between those who know each other and what I call foreshadowing to foreplay. The rest of the action is invisible, where the silent men signed on are exchanging instant messages restlessly looking for sexual hook-ups or something stronger. Some are addicted to sex, some to infatuation and others to anticipation. "Regular" guys fall into one of these 3 categories. Very few of the men in the chat room had entered information about themselves other than their basic stats and 40% didn't bother with a picture either. If they had communication skills, they certainly weren't about to use them.
Just for fun (and I told myself I would have fun in spite of my chances of success), after making inane chatter with a few others for 15 minutes, I asked if anyone would like to play a board game. That raised a few questions but it was clear the thought of actually meeting someone was altogether too dangerous or distasteful to consider. One fellow sent me an instant message and complained about how hard it was to meet anyone in Vancouver. He was a foreign visitor so I took pity on him and suggested we meet, but nothing I suggested seemed to work for him, though a couple minutes later he was back in the chat room making similar and equally unsuccessful offers to others.
That night as I lay in bed I had an adverse, almost-phobic reaction to the whole experience. I was furious with myself for having wasted so much time. The thought of going back on was repugnant to me. I had to force myself not to think about it. The next morning, I was fine. I thought I'd try again to see of the early Sunday morning chatters were any different. In fact, with one exception, it was exactly the same small group of chatters who were on the night before.
Beam me up, Scottie. It's time to leave this place.
But one never knows, right? I didn't want to prejudice my dating chances by never trying again. My challenge is where to look for a potential partner. I used to love hiking, cycling and other outdoor activities, but that's out. Physically-focused environments, like gay saunas, only emphasize my disability. Besides, I can't get into most of them because of the stairs and I have also lost the taste for casual sex. (I can't get into them that way either!) I hate the noise and confusion of bars, and my reception to alcohol is not much warmer. Besides, it's discouraging to see mostly the same faces again when I do visit every two or three months. I would not find much in common with a bar fly.
That leaves dating services and chat lines. I'm not ready to pay big bucks for an unlikely success (people don't pay extra to be matched with a gimp) so that leaves chat lines. I've tried them before, both Internet and phone lines, so I am not a virgin, but I have rarely made any memorable connections though them, at least not positive ones. But that was years ago. My virginity had almost grown back.
Saturday I bit the bullet and signed onto gay.com. I created a profile, pictures and all, with all the info sections filled in (what I am like, my interests and hobbies, what I am looking for, etc), and emphasizing friendship first. I said I was looking for someone heart-centered with good communication skills. Then I spent a couple empty hours on the chat rooms.
I probably don't need to describe what they are like, but I will. There may be 100 men signed on in a chat room but rarely are more than 4 or 5 of them "chatting", and nothing much is said other than mild chiding between those who know each other and what I call foreshadowing to foreplay. The rest of the action is invisible, where the silent men signed on are exchanging instant messages restlessly looking for sexual hook-ups or something stronger. Some are addicted to sex, some to infatuation and others to anticipation. "Regular" guys fall into one of these 3 categories. Very few of the men in the chat room had entered information about themselves other than their basic stats and 40% didn't bother with a picture either. If they had communication skills, they certainly weren't about to use them.
Just for fun (and I told myself I would have fun in spite of my chances of success), after making inane chatter with a few others for 15 minutes, I asked if anyone would like to play a board game. That raised a few questions but it was clear the thought of actually meeting someone was altogether too dangerous or distasteful to consider. One fellow sent me an instant message and complained about how hard it was to meet anyone in Vancouver. He was a foreign visitor so I took pity on him and suggested we meet, but nothing I suggested seemed to work for him, though a couple minutes later he was back in the chat room making similar and equally unsuccessful offers to others.
That night as I lay in bed I had an adverse, almost-phobic reaction to the whole experience. I was furious with myself for having wasted so much time. The thought of going back on was repugnant to me. I had to force myself not to think about it. The next morning, I was fine. I thought I'd try again to see of the early Sunday morning chatters were any different. In fact, with one exception, it was exactly the same small group of chatters who were on the night before.
Beam me up, Scottie. It's time to leave this place.
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Labour Day weekend
There is no question this year that autumn has started early. Not regrettably though after such a long, wonderful summer. The an almost constant sunshine has been replaced with almost constant combination of cloud and rain.
For myself, September always brings both sadness and anticipation. It is always a time of reflection and getting back to focusing on my goals, whatever they are at the time. This year it will completing the revision of my novel to the point I have written so far and outlining the next chapter. I have spent the last year of so revising what I have written before so this will be a big accomplishment.
Last year I went through a bit of a crisis in September and October as several close friends had disappeared from my life as if they had fallen through some hole in the floor. My ensuing loneliness came at a time when I realized the high hopes I had about the new muscle-building drug Acadesine would not be realized. I had broken my long-standing promise not to succumb to 'hope' and I was being punished by a swift kick in the heart. It was my worst autumn in a decade, so it's not hard to imagine this coming one as something much better.
This long weekend started off a bit lonely, however. Stitch and Raven are up the coast at Germain's in Sechelt, setting up and holding a sweat lodge on his property. (I was invited but the insufferable heat and darkness of the ceremony sends me on a fit of claustrophobia.) Rich is Toronto, as is my new friend Dennis. Larry is somewhere out of the area and Danzante and Gerry are in Portland this weekend, part of their 2-week vacation. Flash and Doozer have moved back to Colorado and Michal is in Poland most of this month. The wet, gloomy weather, seen through the tinted windows of my condo, helped to worsen my mood. I had to whip myself to do every errand I set for myself. If I hadn't, I might have succumbed to a much worse mood.
Tinkerbell and Foxtail rescued me last night by coming over to watch "Love In The Time of Cholera", an excellent movie. We munched popcorn and sipped the last of my cointreau.
It's still raining today. The corn plants in the community garden have already withered to an autumn gold. Frederic met me for breakfast at Joe's, already dressed for his waitering work at "Cafe Bellaggio", which was scheduled to start at 2pm. Meeting him put me in the finest of moods and made the rain look like a blessing from heaven.
With my travels and his heavy work schedule, it has been almost a month since I have seen him. He is still stressed from his workload, but hopefully that will change after this weekend as the tourist trade drops off. I sat across from his big beautiful brown eyes as he told me again how useless the women he works with are and how happy he is that he doesn't have a girlfriend at the moment. I'm not sure if he says this to reassure me as a gay man that he won't abandon me anytime soon, or if he really means it. He never breaks eye contact as he pours out his heart to me and asks about my life. I was proud of myself today. I did not look away out of shyness or modesty. I let myself feel his love without fantasizing that he was falling in love with me.
After breakfast we walked back to my place so he could collect the mail that has piled up for him and Eric over the past 2 weeks. The results of their English tests had come back, and he was delighted that he scored higher than Eric across the board. I'm sure Eric will never hear the last of it as they love to tease each other.
We had just started into a game of "Settlers of Catan" when Eric called from the restaurant. There was some sort of crisis, a staff shortage most likely, and he had to leave right away. I took it as a sign that today I should be writing, but not before I listened to a couple of my favourite Gordon Lightfoot songs. They are perfect on grey, pensive days, for opening my heart even wider.
For myself, September always brings both sadness and anticipation. It is always a time of reflection and getting back to focusing on my goals, whatever they are at the time. This year it will completing the revision of my novel to the point I have written so far and outlining the next chapter. I have spent the last year of so revising what I have written before so this will be a big accomplishment.
Last year I went through a bit of a crisis in September and October as several close friends had disappeared from my life as if they had fallen through some hole in the floor. My ensuing loneliness came at a time when I realized the high hopes I had about the new muscle-building drug Acadesine would not be realized. I had broken my long-standing promise not to succumb to 'hope' and I was being punished by a swift kick in the heart. It was my worst autumn in a decade, so it's not hard to imagine this coming one as something much better.
This long weekend started off a bit lonely, however. Stitch and Raven are up the coast at Germain's in Sechelt, setting up and holding a sweat lodge on his property. (I was invited but the insufferable heat and darkness of the ceremony sends me on a fit of claustrophobia.) Rich is Toronto, as is my new friend Dennis. Larry is somewhere out of the area and Danzante and Gerry are in Portland this weekend, part of their 2-week vacation. Flash and Doozer have moved back to Colorado and Michal is in Poland most of this month. The wet, gloomy weather, seen through the tinted windows of my condo, helped to worsen my mood. I had to whip myself to do every errand I set for myself. If I hadn't, I might have succumbed to a much worse mood.
Tinkerbell and Foxtail rescued me last night by coming over to watch "Love In The Time of Cholera", an excellent movie. We munched popcorn and sipped the last of my cointreau.
It's still raining today. The corn plants in the community garden have already withered to an autumn gold. Frederic met me for breakfast at Joe's, already dressed for his waitering work at "Cafe Bellaggio", which was scheduled to start at 2pm. Meeting him put me in the finest of moods and made the rain look like a blessing from heaven.
With my travels and his heavy work schedule, it has been almost a month since I have seen him. He is still stressed from his workload, but hopefully that will change after this weekend as the tourist trade drops off. I sat across from his big beautiful brown eyes as he told me again how useless the women he works with are and how happy he is that he doesn't have a girlfriend at the moment. I'm not sure if he says this to reassure me as a gay man that he won't abandon me anytime soon, or if he really means it. He never breaks eye contact as he pours out his heart to me and asks about my life. I was proud of myself today. I did not look away out of shyness or modesty. I let myself feel his love without fantasizing that he was falling in love with me.
After breakfast we walked back to my place so he could collect the mail that has piled up for him and Eric over the past 2 weeks. The results of their English tests had come back, and he was delighted that he scored higher than Eric across the board. I'm sure Eric will never hear the last of it as they love to tease each other.
We had just started into a game of "Settlers of Catan" when Eric called from the restaurant. There was some sort of crisis, a staff shortage most likely, and he had to leave right away. I took it as a sign that today I should be writing, but not before I listened to a couple of my favourite Gordon Lightfoot songs. They are perfect on grey, pensive days, for opening my heart even wider.
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Seal of approval
Today a harbour seal leapt four feet out of the water to grab a 5-yr old girl off a wharf in West Vancouver, where her father was cleaning fish and where she had been feeding the seals scraps earlier in the morning. It grabbed her hand and dragged her underwater. Her father heard the splash and thought to himself that she had fallen off. She had her life jacket on so he thought she would pop to the surface and he pluck her out, but it was several seconds before the seal tired. She eventually popped up coughing and bleeding and was taken to hospital a bit traumatized. She told hospital staff that she thought it was very rude of the seal to pull her off the dock without asking whether she wanted to go for a swim first, and that she declared that it was no longer her friend and she wouldn't feed it fish anymore. Smart kid.
"If you smell like fish, don't play with seals." - Soupy Sales
"If you smell like fish, don't play with seals." - Soupy Sales
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