Jeffrey-
Within seconds of making eye contact when we met first on Ward 1 of "G" Building at Wrentham, our mutual gaydars were flashing and we knew we had to get to know one another.
Funny thing about Wrentham...we were the staff but in many ways behavior among us was much like I would gather behavior would be like in any large "locked-down" institution, like a prison, or, what Wrentham was, after all, a mental hospital. (Oh it was named PC-ishly a state "school" for the mentally retarded (rather than mentally ill) but infact virtually all the "clients" (aka patients) were more accurately "dual-diagnosed", meaning both mental disabilities and mental illness.)
Staff at Wrentham grouped into cliques (much as inmates group into gangs in prisons).
The 2 main divisions were the interlopers like Jeff, me and several other younger men...we were there basically as a way to make ends meet until we found something better or, like me, as a way to pay for college (or so I told myself at the time).
Then there were the "lifers". The guys who were destined to be MRAs (Mental Retardation Assistants) for ever. For them this was about as good as it gets. No hefty prerequisites for employment like experience or degrees, very good blue collar wages and excellent benefits because it was a state job, along with a strong union in one of the most liberal states (Massachusetts), Man, you had it made.
Not to mention the fact that you got to abuse power by occasionally slapping around the "todds", sit on your ass all shift if management in your building was lax, and have the on campus connections for doing and dealing anything from prescription meds to coke, reefer, whatever.
It was a Loser's Paradise.
Jeff and I became fast friends but as I got to know Jeff more, I came to understand that rather than an interloper, Jeff was getting cozy with the lifers and emulating them.
Jeff had most likely already been a pot-head and boozer before Wrentham, but once ensconced in the lifer way of life, he fell deeper and deeper during that summer of '84 into the dark recesses of drug use, drinking and even molestation of a male client.
Not once to be judgmental, I continued being Jeff's friend and even partook in some of the drugging and drinking.
There was even a couple of weeks during that summer that we decided to actually become "lovers", even though we had already been circle jerking and I let him fuck me a couple of times. But our "relationship" lasted very briefly since he may have been sexually attracted to me but I really didn't get turned on by him. Though we would continue to circle jerk together for years.
Lisa-
The summer of '84 saw a slight modification of my relationship with one of my best friends, Lisa.
I had met Lisa several years before when she attended the same J.A. meetings as John and I and incorporated one of the members of our company (in fact it was she who named the company Sunshine and Rainbow Sales) (snik...little did she know how "rainbow" the company was!).
Lisa and I actually "dated" (I was unsure back then, LOL) and we attended each others junior proms. Mine at Woonsocket and hers at Cumberland.
We lost touch after those proms in the spring of '81 though, and I didn't see her until one evening in 1983 when she and her friend (and John's prom date) Kristen popped into Howard Johnson's at Park Square, not knowing (or so they said) that I worked as a "fountain boy" (aka soda jerk) there.
Lisa wanted to date me again and I agreed but this time only to be friendly and to provide an opportunity to explain why I had purposely "lost touch" with her.
On our first, post-high-school-years date in 1983, we went to a popular bar named Denny's Pub (later re-named Pub Dennis due to a court settlement with the Denny's restaurant chain) and I "came out" to her. She was oddly shocked. (Side Note: Back then and even to this day I am surprised by the people caught "unawares" when I come out to them...I always figure people suspect it anyway since, though I'm not effeminate, I do have many gay mannerisms. I guess I'm also a little perturbed as well because like Harvey Firestien once said about this same phenomenon to the "shocked" individual: "How dare you think I would be a heterosexual!")
Later that year we would frequent that bar, now, as friends, on many occasions and on one we decided to go clubbing in Providence. Lisa felt she had too much wine to drive and I, being, back then, immortal and a really good drunk driver since I did it all the time (sad, but true), got behind the wheel of her father's AMC Hornet and proceeded to drive it all the way to Providence only to ram it into the back of a stopped 18-wheeler on the highway, allowing both Lisa and I a bloody ambulance ride to the hospital (well, I was bloody, she was having chest pains).
But that is another FLASHBACK entirely.
By summer of '84 Lisa was living off-campus with a college friend in Cambridge and though in winter and spring of '84 I was visiting her virtually twice a month at her dorm at Leslie College, by summer she was spending time with her girl buddy.
She was also busy dating (I think that's around when she met her future husband Ahbid, a Palestinian exchange student attending M.I.T.), more actively pursuing a mate now that her attempt to sexually convert me that past winter proved unsuccessful. (Eh, she played with my nipples and that back then was like having just taken the then yet-to-be-discovered Viagra...what can I say. But once I tried to insert Mr. Mikey into her um...er...a..."thing", he decided to "call it a night" right quick!
So, since that "penetration attempt" failed, and that was the one and only attempt ever, I am, essentially by text book definition, still a "virgin"...so now you know.)
Now, I mainly saw Lisa only when she came down to Cumberland to visit her family.
David-
In the summer of '84 there was a nurse at Wrentham who worked in "G" Building who, thankfully, since she was an experienced fag hag, immediately picked up that I was gay and "pssted" me over to her one day and told me that she had a best friend (her "gay", as Kathy Griffin would say) named David who she thought I would make a perfect match for.
I said that "sure, I was game" and so she called him, told him what I looked like and arranged a blind date between us.
We arranged to meet at the restaurant he worked at, some trendy yuppie joint on Boylston St. or around there...definitely Back Bay. (Boston, in case you didn't know.) I'm not sure where we ended up going...I don't think we ate dinner there but we hit it off immediately and before the night was over we were going at each other like rabbits in heat.
(Sorry, I used this metaphor in a previous FLASHBACK, please excuse my lack of variety...how lame of me.)
This began a whirlwind one month fling. Yup, just one month. (During this summer...I would hook up with him over Christmas later that year.)
Why just one month. Well, he was the most gorgeous guy I had ever gone out with, had it all together and was going places (although he was just a waiter he was very smart and I knew he was headed somewhere).
He seemed totally into me and it seemed we'd be a perfect match. But somewhere along the line we got to talking about beliefs. He stated he was Jehovah Witness (which I found strange since I didn't think that religion was too fond of queers...eh, what do I know!) and I, being proud of my beliefs and unaware that others might find my boldness "offensive" to their "mind's-eye-image of their version of reality", blurted out that, I thought his faith in his God was misguided since, I felt, in fact that God didn't even exist. So why was he wasting his time with those kooks. (Oh, I was not always the most diplomatic back then)
(Side Note: But really, for a whole month I thought I knew him and thought he was a jaded intellectual like me...fascinated by the world mainly for it's fucked-upness, not for it's "God-given Beauty". I was really shocked that he was "one of them" the countless millions who are too stupid or too scared to let go of the lies and the superstition. I thought he was above that.)
When his "faith" was not shaken by my postulating logical dilemmas to his way of "thinking" (aka hallucinating) I went a wee bit too far and in a brazen declaration hoping to show him my unbound freedom from the poisonous Opium of the Masses, I looked up to the stars in the dark night sky and yelled: "Fuck You, God!" And turned smiling to him to show him that in fact no bolt of lightning had just fried me to a crisp.
He just nodded his head back and forth and didn't say another word until I dropped him off at his house and he told me we shouldn't see each other again.
Paoula-
During this summer I had decided to continue my art studies and a former instructor at CCRI offered to tutor me at her Boston Harborfront studio for something like $25 a session. (Not a bad deal.)
Each week for at least a couple of months I would take the commuter rail from Franklin, Mass. just north of Woonsocket, RI and spend an hour or two painting and drawing with Paoula's instruction.
(I had a car during this time, of course, but it was an 1972 Olds Delta 88 and it guzzled gas like, well, like a contemporary SUV! It was cheaper (and funner) to take the train...even the luxury of the Amtrak was only $8.00 each way back then...I think the Commuter "T" was only a couple bucks each way.)
These art lessons did no real good, BTW, I think initially Paoula, a junior art instructor and professional painter in her 20's was probably looking for more than just a "willing mind" to tutor. (Hey, I was gorgeous back then, what can I say!)
But when I started telling her about David she suddenly spent less of our hour session actually instructing and challenging me to "paint what I feel passionate about", and more just nodding at what ever I did and saying it looked "good".
But the scheduled lessons gave me an excuse to regularly commute to the city I loved every week.
Boston-
Finally, the last character I'll mention about that summer...the city of Boston herself.
Since meeting up with Lisa again the year before, I had been regularly visiting the area and fell in love with it.
During the summer of '84...this was the height of my love affair with Beantown.
Harvard frat parties with Lisa and her friends.
Picnic concerts sipping cabernet and nibbling brie with Lisa, listening to Al Jerreau in the Boston Gardens.
Getting shitfaced at a gay bar in the Fenway with Michael, Jerry and Paul Aubin.
The train pulling into South Station on my way to Paoula's classes...and after one session, heading over to the newly opened Computer Museum nearby and seeing, first hand, the computer that everyone was talking about that year, a Macintosh.
Going with Nancy to the Boston Museum of Art and our favorite which was just a block away, the Isabella Gardner Museum.
Attending the "King and I" at the Wang Theater starring Yul Brenner, audibly wheezing through the "Shall We Dance" number, in what would be one of his last performances before his death.
Visiting Lisa during her internship at the Museum of Science and going to see a film at the newly constructed Mugar OmniTheater domed IMAX cinema.
Treating Lisa out to a fancy dinner at the Top of the Hub Restaurant atop the Prudential Tower.
Strollin' alone through Fanueil Hall Marketplace, sipping a cup of Lapsang Souchong and heading over to the nearby New England Aquarium to catch a beluga whale show.
Ah the Summer of 1984...
There was never another summer quite like it.
Within seconds of making eye contact when we met first on Ward 1 of "G" Building at Wrentham, our mutual gaydars were flashing and we knew we had to get to know one another.
Funny thing about Wrentham...we were the staff but in many ways behavior among us was much like I would gather behavior would be like in any large "locked-down" institution, like a prison, or, what Wrentham was, after all, a mental hospital. (Oh it was named PC-ishly a state "school" for the mentally retarded (rather than mentally ill) but infact virtually all the "clients" (aka patients) were more accurately "dual-diagnosed", meaning both mental disabilities and mental illness.)
Staff at Wrentham grouped into cliques (much as inmates group into gangs in prisons).
The 2 main divisions were the interlopers like Jeff, me and several other younger men...we were there basically as a way to make ends meet until we found something better or, like me, as a way to pay for college (or so I told myself at the time).
Then there were the "lifers". The guys who were destined to be MRAs (Mental Retardation Assistants) for ever. For them this was about as good as it gets. No hefty prerequisites for employment like experience or degrees, very good blue collar wages and excellent benefits because it was a state job, along with a strong union in one of the most liberal states (Massachusetts), Man, you had it made.
Not to mention the fact that you got to abuse power by occasionally slapping around the "todds", sit on your ass all shift if management in your building was lax, and have the on campus connections for doing and dealing anything from prescription meds to coke, reefer, whatever.
It was a Loser's Paradise.
Jeff and I became fast friends but as I got to know Jeff more, I came to understand that rather than an interloper, Jeff was getting cozy with the lifers and emulating them.
Jeff had most likely already been a pot-head and boozer before Wrentham, but once ensconced in the lifer way of life, he fell deeper and deeper during that summer of '84 into the dark recesses of drug use, drinking and even molestation of a male client.
Not once to be judgmental, I continued being Jeff's friend and even partook in some of the drugging and drinking.
There was even a couple of weeks during that summer that we decided to actually become "lovers", even though we had already been circle jerking and I let him fuck me a couple of times. But our "relationship" lasted very briefly since he may have been sexually attracted to me but I really didn't get turned on by him. Though we would continue to circle jerk together for years.
Lisa-
The summer of '84 saw a slight modification of my relationship with one of my best friends, Lisa.
I had met Lisa several years before when she attended the same J.A. meetings as John and I and incorporated one of the members of our company (in fact it was she who named the company Sunshine and Rainbow Sales) (snik...little did she know how "rainbow" the company was!).
Lisa and I actually "dated" (I was unsure back then, LOL) and we attended each others junior proms. Mine at Woonsocket and hers at Cumberland.
We lost touch after those proms in the spring of '81 though, and I didn't see her until one evening in 1983 when she and her friend (and John's prom date) Kristen popped into Howard Johnson's at Park Square, not knowing (or so they said) that I worked as a "fountain boy" (aka soda jerk) there.
Lisa wanted to date me again and I agreed but this time only to be friendly and to provide an opportunity to explain why I had purposely "lost touch" with her.
On our first, post-high-school-years date in 1983, we went to a popular bar named Denny's Pub (later re-named Pub Dennis due to a court settlement with the Denny's restaurant chain) and I "came out" to her. She was oddly shocked. (Side Note: Back then and even to this day I am surprised by the people caught "unawares" when I come out to them...I always figure people suspect it anyway since, though I'm not effeminate, I do have many gay mannerisms. I guess I'm also a little perturbed as well because like Harvey Firestien once said about this same phenomenon to the "shocked" individual: "How dare you think I would be a heterosexual!")
Later that year we would frequent that bar, now, as friends, on many occasions and on one we decided to go clubbing in Providence. Lisa felt she had too much wine to drive and I, being, back then, immortal and a really good drunk driver since I did it all the time (sad, but true), got behind the wheel of her father's AMC Hornet and proceeded to drive it all the way to Providence only to ram it into the back of a stopped 18-wheeler on the highway, allowing both Lisa and I a bloody ambulance ride to the hospital (well, I was bloody, she was having chest pains).
But that is another FLASHBACK entirely.
By summer of '84 Lisa was living off-campus with a college friend in Cambridge and though in winter and spring of '84 I was visiting her virtually twice a month at her dorm at Leslie College, by summer she was spending time with her girl buddy.
She was also busy dating (I think that's around when she met her future husband Ahbid, a Palestinian exchange student attending M.I.T.), more actively pursuing a mate now that her attempt to sexually convert me that past winter proved unsuccessful. (Eh, she played with my nipples and that back then was like having just taken the then yet-to-be-discovered Viagra...what can I say. But once I tried to insert Mr. Mikey into her um...er...a..."thing", he decided to "call it a night" right quick!
So, since that "penetration attempt" failed, and that was the one and only attempt ever, I am, essentially by text book definition, still a "virgin"...so now you know.)
Now, I mainly saw Lisa only when she came down to Cumberland to visit her family.
David-
In the summer of '84 there was a nurse at Wrentham who worked in "G" Building who, thankfully, since she was an experienced fag hag, immediately picked up that I was gay and "pssted" me over to her one day and told me that she had a best friend (her "gay", as Kathy Griffin would say) named David who she thought I would make a perfect match for.
I said that "sure, I was game" and so she called him, told him what I looked like and arranged a blind date between us.
We arranged to meet at the restaurant he worked at, some trendy yuppie joint on Boylston St. or around there...definitely Back Bay. (Boston, in case you didn't know.) I'm not sure where we ended up going...I don't think we ate dinner there but we hit it off immediately and before the night was over we were going at each other like rabbits in heat.
(Sorry, I used this metaphor in a previous FLASHBACK, please excuse my lack of variety...how lame of me.)
This began a whirlwind one month fling. Yup, just one month. (During this summer...I would hook up with him over Christmas later that year.)
Why just one month. Well, he was the most gorgeous guy I had ever gone out with, had it all together and was going places (although he was just a waiter he was very smart and I knew he was headed somewhere).
He seemed totally into me and it seemed we'd be a perfect match. But somewhere along the line we got to talking about beliefs. He stated he was Jehovah Witness (which I found strange since I didn't think that religion was too fond of queers...eh, what do I know!) and I, being proud of my beliefs and unaware that others might find my boldness "offensive" to their "mind's-eye-image of their version of reality", blurted out that, I thought his faith in his God was misguided since, I felt, in fact that God didn't even exist. So why was he wasting his time with those kooks. (Oh, I was not always the most diplomatic back then)
(Side Note: But really, for a whole month I thought I knew him and thought he was a jaded intellectual like me...fascinated by the world mainly for it's fucked-upness, not for it's "God-given Beauty". I was really shocked that he was "one of them" the countless millions who are too stupid or too scared to let go of the lies and the superstition. I thought he was above that.)
When his "faith" was not shaken by my postulating logical dilemmas to his way of "thinking" (aka hallucinating) I went a wee bit too far and in a brazen declaration hoping to show him my unbound freedom from the poisonous Opium of the Masses, I looked up to the stars in the dark night sky and yelled: "Fuck You, God!" And turned smiling to him to show him that in fact no bolt of lightning had just fried me to a crisp.
He just nodded his head back and forth and didn't say another word until I dropped him off at his house and he told me we shouldn't see each other again.
Paoula-
During this summer I had decided to continue my art studies and a former instructor at CCRI offered to tutor me at her Boston Harborfront studio for something like $25 a session. (Not a bad deal.)
Each week for at least a couple of months I would take the commuter rail from Franklin, Mass. just north of Woonsocket, RI and spend an hour or two painting and drawing with Paoula's instruction.
(I had a car during this time, of course, but it was an 1972 Olds Delta 88 and it guzzled gas like, well, like a contemporary SUV! It was cheaper (and funner) to take the train...even the luxury of the Amtrak was only $8.00 each way back then...I think the Commuter "T" was only a couple bucks each way.)
These art lessons did no real good, BTW, I think initially Paoula, a junior art instructor and professional painter in her 20's was probably looking for more than just a "willing mind" to tutor. (Hey, I was gorgeous back then, what can I say!)
But when I started telling her about David she suddenly spent less of our hour session actually instructing and challenging me to "paint what I feel passionate about", and more just nodding at what ever I did and saying it looked "good".
But the scheduled lessons gave me an excuse to regularly commute to the city I loved every week.
Boston-
Finally, the last character I'll mention about that summer...the city of Boston herself.
Since meeting up with Lisa again the year before, I had been regularly visiting the area and fell in love with it.
During the summer of '84...this was the height of my love affair with Beantown.
Harvard frat parties with Lisa and her friends.
Picnic concerts sipping cabernet and nibbling brie with Lisa, listening to Al Jerreau in the Boston Gardens.
Getting shitfaced at a gay bar in the Fenway with Michael, Jerry and Paul Aubin.
The train pulling into South Station on my way to Paoula's classes...and after one session, heading over to the newly opened Computer Museum nearby and seeing, first hand, the computer that everyone was talking about that year, a Macintosh.
Going with Nancy to the Boston Museum of Art and our favorite which was just a block away, the Isabella Gardner Museum.
Attending the "King and I" at the Wang Theater starring Yul Brenner, audibly wheezing through the "Shall We Dance" number, in what would be one of his last performances before his death.
Visiting Lisa during her internship at the Museum of Science and going to see a film at the newly constructed Mugar OmniTheater domed IMAX cinema.
Treating Lisa out to a fancy dinner at the Top of the Hub Restaurant atop the Prudential Tower.
Strollin' alone through Fanueil Hall Marketplace, sipping a cup of Lapsang Souchong and heading over to the nearby New England Aquarium to catch a beluga whale show.
Ah the Summer of 1984...
There was never another summer quite like it.