My life had calmed down a bit from the drama of the earlier months of this year. I was falling into a “same old, same old” routine and though stress-free and supportive of my alcohol-free, fitness-first lifestyle I’d clung dearly to over the past 16 months, I was starting to feel a bit lonely again.
Wayne had left for “greener pastures” in March and I hadn’t been very much in touch with him and his new East Side friends. I did attend his house warming for his new apartment near the campus of Brown University in the spring and presented him what would turn out to be one of my last (and best, I might add) artworks of the ‘90s “Torso”, it was a large (5’x3’) Conte crayon drawing of a muscular male torso. It came out really nice and I have to admit, I thought about keeping it for myself rather than giving it away.
My fling with Almir was definitely over. Just as well, I had trust issues with him. I highly suspected he had AIDS or was at least HIV+ so when I had last visited him in his small walkup in the Inwood neighborhood of Manhattan (re: practically the Bronx) after a night of odd sex which even included a bit of roleplay (him in my Atlanta Braves baseball cap, me in his leathermen biker cap), I got up at the crack of dawn, left a Dear John message on a paper napkin and drove back to Rhode Island.
I had finished my project making a semi-partition half wall in the living room with drywall and glass brick accents. I’d gotten butch and built it all myself, using a Time-Life “How To” book to teach myself drywall construction. It came out great and everyone who saw it liked how it broke the huge living room back to what it originally had been when the tenement-style house was first built…a separate living room and dining room.
My leg had finally healed after this summer’s varicose vein stripping and I was now back at work after enjoying about two months off for which I got regular time-off pay and disability insurance pay…almost a double salary for doing nothing. It was sweet. And much needed. Since Wayne was gone, I had to foot the bill solo for all house expenses like rent, electric, and especially gas. The gas bills were outrageous…almost $200/month in winter! Thankfully my landlord Dan never got around to fixing the hole in the ceiling above the tub so rent was still at the reduced rate of just $500/month. But at my salary of $8.25/hour, I was thankful for the rare increases in income like this comp time.
I was cruising my Internet stomping ground, the M-to-M Forum on America Online and came across the ad of a guy in Providence who was into computers and thought it might be fun to contact him. From his profile I saw he was in his early 40s and considered himself overweight so I made it clear that I wasn’t interested in dating or anything, just friendship. He emailed me back and said he was cool with that so we arranged to meet at Borders in Cranston.
There was live music there that night, some folk singer with a guitar I think. It was nice and made for a very comfortable relaxed environment. John was already sitting at a table; he saw me and waved me over. We shook hands greeted each other and started to chat, in what we would now call RL (real life). You got to remember, this was still in the infancy of the Web and the M-to-M Forum of AOL was really nothing more than a dedicated and monitored IRC with BB and E-Mail services included.
I don’t know what sign we had designated as identifying each other but it wasn’t by face recognition since this was before the days of exchanging GIFs or JPGs of each other. Yes, those image formats were around and if you were patient, you could download them. But AOL didn’t allow uploads of personal images yet and in any event it was rare to have a binary copy of a photo of yourself then. It would require you to scan the image (virtually nobody had scanners yet) and then upload it to an FTP server (I think AOL did allow storage space on their FTP servers, but it would have been at exorbitant rates, for sure, with the average PC hard drive space back then of around 100 – 200 MB)
I could tell right away that he was attracted to me but I made it clear that I was only interested in friendship so he visibly struggled with suppressing his horned up self and ogled my crotch a little less often. I could also tell that he was likely manic-depressive and he openly divulged the fact that he was on the new social-anxiety drug Zoloft. Being in the mental health field and well-familiar with MDD I wasn’t turned off by this trait, it intrigued me to see this in someone intelligent and “normal”, as opposed to the folks I dealt with at work.
John and I would come to be good friends, going to Borders, out to eat (which he loved to do and I was starting to get back into), to arthouse movies on the East Side, to computer trade shows. John even got me interested in attending, for a while, a support group for Catholic or former Catholic gay men run by and primarily attended by a non-canonical brotherhood.
But as the season crawled on into the doldrums of a typical long and bleak New England winter John and I started seeing less of each other. I had taken on, again, part time work at DialAmerica in Warwick and had little leisure time now, plus, John’s home-based computer reseller business started failing, mainly as a result of his inability to get new clients due to his social-anxieties. As he became poorer, his health suffered since he couldn’t see his doctors or buy the prescription meds, so he became more and more withdrawn. By the Holidays he could hardly speak without severely stuttering and spent most days at home in bed.
So it was, by the new year, I was alone again and had to face my inner demons by myself. Fortunately I was able to stave off the urges and remained true to my commitment to abstaining from alcohol. But the food issue was making a return and it would take a whole new commitment to fitness in early ’95 to turn it back around.
Wayne had left for “greener pastures” in March and I hadn’t been very much in touch with him and his new East Side friends. I did attend his house warming for his new apartment near the campus of Brown University in the spring and presented him what would turn out to be one of my last (and best, I might add) artworks of the ‘90s “Torso”, it was a large (5’x3’) Conte crayon drawing of a muscular male torso. It came out really nice and I have to admit, I thought about keeping it for myself rather than giving it away.
My fling with Almir was definitely over. Just as well, I had trust issues with him. I highly suspected he had AIDS or was at least HIV+ so when I had last visited him in his small walkup in the Inwood neighborhood of Manhattan (re: practically the Bronx) after a night of odd sex which even included a bit of roleplay (him in my Atlanta Braves baseball cap, me in his leathermen biker cap), I got up at the crack of dawn, left a Dear John message on a paper napkin and drove back to Rhode Island.
I had finished my project making a semi-partition half wall in the living room with drywall and glass brick accents. I’d gotten butch and built it all myself, using a Time-Life “How To” book to teach myself drywall construction. It came out great and everyone who saw it liked how it broke the huge living room back to what it originally had been when the tenement-style house was first built…a separate living room and dining room.
My leg had finally healed after this summer’s varicose vein stripping and I was now back at work after enjoying about two months off for which I got regular time-off pay and disability insurance pay…almost a double salary for doing nothing. It was sweet. And much needed. Since Wayne was gone, I had to foot the bill solo for all house expenses like rent, electric, and especially gas. The gas bills were outrageous…almost $200/month in winter! Thankfully my landlord Dan never got around to fixing the hole in the ceiling above the tub so rent was still at the reduced rate of just $500/month. But at my salary of $8.25/hour, I was thankful for the rare increases in income like this comp time.
I was cruising my Internet stomping ground, the M-to-M Forum on America Online and came across the ad of a guy in Providence who was into computers and thought it might be fun to contact him. From his profile I saw he was in his early 40s and considered himself overweight so I made it clear that I wasn’t interested in dating or anything, just friendship. He emailed me back and said he was cool with that so we arranged to meet at Borders in Cranston.
There was live music there that night, some folk singer with a guitar I think. It was nice and made for a very comfortable relaxed environment. John was already sitting at a table; he saw me and waved me over. We shook hands greeted each other and started to chat, in what we would now call RL (real life). You got to remember, this was still in the infancy of the Web and the M-to-M Forum of AOL was really nothing more than a dedicated and monitored IRC with BB and E-Mail services included.
I don’t know what sign we had designated as identifying each other but it wasn’t by face recognition since this was before the days of exchanging GIFs or JPGs of each other. Yes, those image formats were around and if you were patient, you could download them. But AOL didn’t allow uploads of personal images yet and in any event it was rare to have a binary copy of a photo of yourself then. It would require you to scan the image (virtually nobody had scanners yet) and then upload it to an FTP server (I think AOL did allow storage space on their FTP servers, but it would have been at exorbitant rates, for sure, with the average PC hard drive space back then of around 100 – 200 MB)
I could tell right away that he was attracted to me but I made it clear that I was only interested in friendship so he visibly struggled with suppressing his horned up self and ogled my crotch a little less often. I could also tell that he was likely manic-depressive and he openly divulged the fact that he was on the new social-anxiety drug Zoloft. Being in the mental health field and well-familiar with MDD I wasn’t turned off by this trait, it intrigued me to see this in someone intelligent and “normal”, as opposed to the folks I dealt with at work.
John and I would come to be good friends, going to Borders, out to eat (which he loved to do and I was starting to get back into), to arthouse movies on the East Side, to computer trade shows. John even got me interested in attending, for a while, a support group for Catholic or former Catholic gay men run by and primarily attended by a non-canonical brotherhood.
But as the season crawled on into the doldrums of a typical long and bleak New England winter John and I started seeing less of each other. I had taken on, again, part time work at DialAmerica in Warwick and had little leisure time now, plus, John’s home-based computer reseller business started failing, mainly as a result of his inability to get new clients due to his social-anxieties. As he became poorer, his health suffered since he couldn’t see his doctors or buy the prescription meds, so he became more and more withdrawn. By the Holidays he could hardly speak without severely stuttering and spent most days at home in bed.
So it was, by the new year, I was alone again and had to face my inner demons by myself. Fortunately I was able to stave off the urges and remained true to my commitment to abstaining from alcohol. But the food issue was making a return and it would take a whole new commitment to fitness in early ’95 to turn it back around.