Party of One: A Memoir in 21 Songs - Dave Holmes Page 0,28

told him to show up—and he was just as breathtaking as before, in a plaid, oversized Abercrombie & Fitch flannel. I greeted him with a red Solo tumbler and offered him “house cup” privileges, which allowed him to sail through the scrum around the keg, and we sat on the back of my couch, looking over the crowd and getting to know each other.

I told him I was in love with him roughly four minutes into this conversation.

I believe in love at first sight. I also believe that if you make someone repress their desire for love and companionship and sex for years and years during the time they need it the most, their hearts are like single cans of beer bouncing around the trunk of a car, and when someone comes along and fishes that can out and opens it, it makes a great big mess. Your first plausible shot at love feels a lot like your only plausible shot at love, and the longer you wait to have that first shot, the harder it is to tell them apart. Jeff and I were too young and inexperienced to know the difference. We thought we were in love and we kissed everywhere we were alone. Our rooms, elevators, stairways. Jeff came out to his roommate and a handful of friends. We were learning how to do this. Together.

We spent more or less every night in my bed, just holding each other. Nothing more. We were both afraid to go any further. Or I was, and he didn’t want to. I didn’t know. I didn’t care. We were in a bubble, just me and Jeff, and everything was perfect. It felt like being out of control, and I loved it.

Here’s how in love I felt: Michael Bolton’s “Said I Loved You…But I Lied” was a hot one on the radio at the time, and I bought the cassette single. (The lie he teases in the title is that when he said he loved you, what he was actually feeling was more than love. Super-love. Extra-love. Bolton has been in the love bubble. Bolton gets it.)

The thing about bubbles is that they pop. After around three weeks, Jeff pulled his head out and realized that when two guys—especially when one of them is the one gay person on campus—are suddenly inseparable, people talk. There were suddenly two out gay people on campus, and without deciding to be one of them, Jeff had become one of them. The thing that had made him too nervous to attend a double-secret support group meeting only three weeks before was suddenly something everyone might actually know. Also his boyfriend was a needy person who called fifty times a day and waited for him outside of class. Jeff did the only sensible thing and broke up with me.

He called me up and asked if I wanted to take a walk around campus, which is something we had done at his suggestion the day before, and I said sure, because all I wanted to do was spend time with him. And up on the landing of the administration building that overlooks the campus, he stopped and said: “Look, I’m sorry, but I can’t do this anymore. I just can’t. Do you understand that?” I said that I understood that, which I didn’t, and that I, too, had been thinking we should cool it a little bit, which I hadn’t. I said, “I know things are hard now, being here in this place, but I think we’re good. You and I are good together. Maybe later? Maybe when we both graduate and we’re out of here?” He was telling me it was over, and I was telling him I could accept that, as long as we could keep going. He said maybe, and we both knew he didn’t mean it. I hugged him goodbye and I hopped in my car to go back to my apartment, and on the drive back, it hit me that he had called and asked to go for a walk around campus yesterday because he had wanted to break up with me yesterday, but he’d lost his nerve. That’s the part that made me have to pull my car over and catch my breath.

At the next double-secret gay support group meeting, which I could not attend, because I could not face Jeff, two of the field hockey women revealed that I had broken our agreement and spoken to them outside of the meeting