"Straight-Acting"

This is the fourteenth installment in a series of short essays inspired by the 22 Trump cards, featuring original artwork by Greg Erskine (Click and scroll down for large version).


I met Earl late one night in 2003 when I was cruising gay chat-rooms on the Internet. Within minutes we figured out that we lived just one block away from each other -- we were typing from less than a hundred feet apart. In the spirit of adventure, he jovially invited me over for a beer. Whatever sexual strings might be attached were not discussed, so I figured I had better be prepared for nearly anything. I wrote down his address on a scrap of paper and left it on my pillow where my roommate could find it if I never turned up again. Three minutes later I was with Earl in his apartment.

He was as handsome as his photograph, a dying art in the world of online hook-ups. He was my age and seemed, in the parlance of hook-up culture, “straight-acting.” Over beers he talked to me a lot about law school and the time he spent studying abroad. He was so warm and engaging that I wasn’t alarmed in the slightest when asked if I “wanted to take some pills” with him. He was just being a good host, I reassured myself. When I demurred he merely shrugged and set to work crushing up the mystery pills with a paperweight on his desk so he could snort them. Already considering the evening’s social experiment a success but not wanting to push my luck, I yawned and made a gracious exit.

Earl and I hung out several more times in short succession, usually over drinks at a local bar. His easygoing nature made it unclear whether he was even remotely attracted to me, and naturally I was reluctant to find out otherwise, so I didn’t push it. When one of my emails and then the follow-up message I sent a few weeks later both went ignored, I figured I had my answer, along with a reminder that chance friendships have their own hyper-accelerated natural life-spans.

Not long ago I met a gentleman at a bar who was from Savannah, Georgia. “I used to know someone from Savannah,” I told him. “Maybe you know Earl?” And that’s how I found out that my old friend had been dead this whole time, nearly six years.

Earl, I learned from my new friend at the bar, came from a prestigious Savannah family for whom a gay son would have been a crushing liability. Well aware that there were eyes and ears and mouths even in New York City that, in one way or another, had connections back home, he was compelled to keep an extremely small and tidy closet. He surrounded himself with beautiful women and straight male friends, publicly dating the former whenever necessary and hiding in plain sight among the latter. Earl avoided making homosexual friends, and had only officially “come out” to one or two people in the whole world. I’d just happened to end up small-talking with one of them.

One evening in 2004, not long after he and I had met for the last time, Earl fell off the roof of an apartment building on the Lower East Side. It was one of those huge parties where people go up to the roof to smoke, and since everyone smokes, everyone is on the roof, laughing and screaming at the skyline and having the time of their over-indulgent young lives. There is drunken horseplay. In rare cases, I have heard, it is possible for a young man, even a second-year student in a prominent law program, to misjudge the true distance between two rooftops, to decide that he could easily leap from one to the other, to inadvertently cast himself into the alleyway like one more crumpled, empty wrapper.

I vividly remember a dream I once had in which my great-grandmother showed up at a family wedding, but refused to come all the way into the chapel. She paced back in forth in the foyer wringing her hands and protesting tearfully that no one had remembered to invite her. It was true, no one had, because she’d been dead for nearly a year. Upon waking up I realized that it was exactly a year ago, to the day, since I'd attended her funeral.

From that morning on, I always sort of assumed that people have a way of unconsciously keeping tabs on one another, even across unpardonable distances. During this encounter with a stranger in a crowded bar, during which our forgotten beers warmed in their bottles, I felt the subtle strings of that web winding around me again. To this stranger I was an important find -- I was proof that Earl had at least been secretly exploring, reaching out over the squalid Internet in the wee hours of the night, making contact, perhaps even having sex. I was evidence that Earl had lived, in some small way, as himself.

For me, there was only a grief gone stale before it could even be felt. Walking home that night I wondered if I’d ever remember anything about Earl except those messages I’d sent over the years, shout-outs no eyes had ever seen. Or the occasional fruitless searches on sites like Facebook -- fruitless because the person I was looking for had long since ceased to exist. It had been so easy to let it go after a few cursory attempts; to release Earl to what I assumed was a busy, illustrious life. If I’d been just a little more curious, I’d have had no trouble finding the page set up by his family to memorialize his “tragic accident.”

It’s hard not to grow bitter, reading those two words repeated over and over in comments posted years ago by people who had never known, would never know the truth. Tragic accident. As if the only the fall itself had been tragic, independent of anything leading up to it. As if some accidents could not be predicted with terrible accuracy by those in possession of more facts.

I wish I’d known them myself when it could have still mattered. But I must admit it was nice of Earl to circle back around anyway, after all this time, to let me know in his way.