What Love Demands

There was no doubt in my mind at all about what Bruce was, from the first minute my friend Andy Stroud introduced him to me. I knew perfectly well that he was a Market Street hustler, but that fact didn’t deter me. He was one of the most disturbingly, fascinatingly sexual young men I had ever met—with an olive complexion, dark brooding eyes and curly coal-black hair. I had to have him…

It was 1966. Late summer. I had just finished a season of musical stock in Berkeley, playing the Starkeeper in Carousel, Percy in The Boy Friend and Maxwell in Call Me Madam—all with top Broadway or Hollywood stars. It had been exhilarating. The strenuous rehearsal and performance schedule, with all that singing and dancing, had taken ten pounds off me.

I was in prime condition, trim and feeling great. I had bought some wild new clothes and had a healthy suntan, acquired from a few days on the beach at Carmel.

In short, I was ripe for adventure, and when a vigorous male says he’s ripe for adventure, what he usually means is—he’s on the look-out for some action in the sack…

My friend Andy had clued me in about Bruce. “He’s just your type, Doug—dark, exotic, sensual as all hell—“

“Stop. He sounds delicious. You’ve got me drooling already.”

I had hung up the receiver of my telephone and gone to meet Andy and Bruce at a cafeteria near Powell Street. We made small talk for a few minutes and then Andy withdrew, leaving me alone with the attractively virile young guy…

I saw no reason to waste time with preliminaries. “I guess Andy introduced us for a reason, Bruce,” I said, laughing. “He knew I’d dig you. So how about it? Will you come home with me?”

There was no discussion of money.

In my studio apartment Bruce sat beside me on the red Victorian love seat. I kissed him. His arms went around me tightly and I could feel the hard muscled firmness of his fantastic young body. I unzipped the fly of his jeans. When my fingers squeezed his hard, throbbing cock, I gasped. It was so stiff I could scarcely get it out of his jockey shorts. When I managed, finally, it stood out from his groin like a bar of steel.

His dick was immense. It was one of the fattest, thickest, most beautiful pieces of male meat I’d ever seen.

“My God!” I breathed, trembling. “What a cock! What a lovely, lovely prick—I’d like to photograph it with my Polaroid. Can I take some pictures of it?”

“Sure.” Under sleepy lids, his eyes smiled at me. He was quite accustomed, I was sure, to receiving compliments, even homage, to the fabulous organ between his legs. “Sure,” he repeated, shrugging, “you can photograph it. Like this, or with my clothes off?”

I took two shots of him fully dressed, his dark beauty reclining against the lush vermilion of the love seat, his cock standing up stiff out of his pants, erect and hard like Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill.

Then he undressed, with the poise and grace of a professional athlete, while I shot picture after picture of him. I posed him on a brown and orange throw rug, in a high-backed chair, on my green and blue Venetian bedspread—until at last I could contain my mounting excitement no longer and I stripped off my own clothes and climbed into bed with him.

He was a lover not to be believed. It was too good to be true, that anyone that beautiful could also be so skilled in the sack. Beautiful guys aren’t always the best sex partners, particularly with older men. I guess they don’t feel they have to be. Their sheer physical perfection gets them through life, without half trying—but Bruce was different. He carried me on a flight into some celestial sphere. His ardor was unsurpassed. I flew high, and I never wanted to come back to earth.

In the morning, answering my questions over breakfast, he confessed that he had no permanent place to stay, so I gave him a few dollars for eating and cigarette money during the day, and I invited him to come back that evening…

He agreed to live with me.

He hated working the streets, he said. Penny-ante hustling, it was degrading work. It had only been a fill-in for him. Peddling his ass, that wasn’t really his scene. He had had good jobs in his time, had made good money. If he did it once, he could do it again.

If he lived with me, and didn’t have to worry about food or a place to stay, I reasoned, he could take his time about finding decent employment.

I was delighted at the thought of this gorgeous hunk of male meat crashing down with me every night. He too seemed pleased with the idea, and he made love to me—sealing our bargain, as it were—with the ferocity of some new-found passion as he accepted my invitation.

I gave him no key to the apartment, however. Not yet. Some sixth sense, some secret part of me, made me play it cool with him. It wasn’t that I distrusted him; he had been honest with me, so far as I knew. I had no reason to think he would steal from me or anything like that. Still, I proceeded cautiously.

He had no key, as I’ve said, so he couldn’t get into the place unless I was home. I would tell him a time to come to the apartment, and I would be there waiting for him.

This system worked fine for a few days. Then he began to be late. And then one night he didn’t show up at all.

I imagined all sorts of things. Had he left town, just skipped out without telling me he was going? Maybe he had spent the night with a trick. Visions of him in bed with another man rose up to haunt me.

By this time it should be obvious, I was hooked on him. He was a dream-lover come to life.

I was afraid. Maybe I couldn’t hold him.

When he finally appeared at the door the next night, he made no apologies. He didn’t explain where he had been, and expressed surprise that I had worried about him.

“Jesus, Bruce,” I said, “where the fuck were you?”

He looked at me rather sorrowfully. “I don’t want to hurt you, Doug. Look—the kind of guy I am—maybe it’s not right, the two of us together…” So, scared off by my possessiveness, he left me. Our “marriage” had lasted a week.

He called me a few times after that, though, and came to see me. We had sex once or twice, and it was just as mind-blowing as it had been before. Then one night he asked if he could borrow a suitcase. A “friend” wanted to take him to Las Vegas for the weekend. He said he’d call me and return the suitcase when he got back.

It was more than a weekend before his call came, however. It was a year before I heard from Bruce again.

A gay affair, I think, is a bit like Chinese food: it tastes delicious and it fills you up—but it doesn’t stay with you very long.

Particularly if too much possessiveness sets in between the two lovers.

Knowing their own nature, the desire for variety and the thrill of new experience, why do homosexuals stake such claims on one another and place such importance on physical fidelity? Can’t there be a kind of spiritual loyalty between lovers—something which transcends and lasts far beyond mere desire—which will automatically hold them together?

I was thinking seriously about the question between the time Bruce left for Las Vegas and when I next heard from him.

Loving, somebody once said, is making allowances. Now I decided that what a real and lasting love demands is something more than just patience and understanding. It needs a voluntary granting of freedom to one’s partner—a willingness to let him enjoy other experiences…

I came home quite late one Saturday night after the bars had closed, and the telephone was ringing as I entered the door of the apartment.

“Hello?”

“Doug? This is Bruce.”

“For God’s sake.” An image of curly black hair, sensuous lips and a throbbing cock rose up in my mind. “Where are you? Are you here in San Francisco?”

“No. I’m up in Washington, near Seattle. I just got to thinking about you and decided to call.”

That made me glow. It pleased me that, after a year, I was still enough in his thoughts that he would want to call me. “What are you doing in Washington?”

I could hear jukebox music in the background, but it was after two o’clock in the morning and the bars in Washington would be closed, too. He couldn’t be calling from a bar. Yet he sounded as if he’d been drinking…

“My dad’s up here, you know. He’s been pretty sick.”

I remembered he’d told me that he’d been born when his father was seventy years old. That made the old man about ninety-six by this time. Bruce had also mentioned several times how much he loved the old guy…

“I’m sorry to hear your father’s sick, Bruce.”

“Well, he might not last much longer. I thought I’d better stay with him awhile, since he’s so sick.”

“Of course. Are you planning to come back to San Francisco?”

“Oh, sure. Someday. You’re damned right.” He laughed. “I’ve still got your suitcase I borrowed to go to Las Vegas. I’ve got to return it to you, don’t I?”

“Don’t worry about that.”

“How’s everything? I mean, how are things going with you?”

“Fine. I’m doing a little writing. I’ve sold a couple of novels and a few articles to the magazines.”

“Did you ever sell that book—that manuscript you showed me—the one about the hustler?”

“Sleep With The Devil? No, I never sold it. It’s still in my trunk—gathering moths.”

“Wow. That was almost like my own life, that story. I really liked that book.”

We talked for a few minutes and then he hung up. He wanted to keep in touch with me, he had said. Would I mind if he gave me a call once in a while?

That was the beginning. During the next two years I heard from him irregularly, but always late on a Saturday night. It got so that when the phone rang at two-thirty or three o’clock—actually on a Sunday morning, it would be—I would know instantly who was calling. “Good morning, Bruce,” I would say, picking up the receiver. It got to be my automatic greeting.

He was always half-drunk, he always sounded very warm and affectionate, and he always promised he’d be coming back to San Francisco very soon.

During this time I had other affairs, of course (sometimes his calls would even interrupt a session with another lover), but the image of Bruce stayed fixed in my mind. His exotic butch beauty really haunted me. I believed him when he said that someday he would return to San Francisco, and I looked forward to seeing him again.

I believed, too, he would someday return to me as a lover. We had little in common on an intellectual level, and our backgrounds were entirely different—yet there seemed to be some cosmic force which attracted us to one another, which drew us close and held us together.

Then in May of 1969 he called to say that his father seemed to be better now, he had bought his ticket, and would be arriving in San Francisco that Friday night. He hadn’t been drinking this time. He sounded serious. “I’d like to write a book,” he said. “A helluva lot of things have happened to me. I could write a wild book, Doug. How about it—do you think you could help me?”

I gulped. It never ceased to amaze me the way some people talked about writing a novel or a collection of short stories, as if there were nothing to it, as if it required no training, no background or technical knowledge, no preparation or practice—and above all else, no special skill or self-discipline. Now here was an attractive guy I dug like crazy, asking me to help him turn out a novel based on his personal experiences—one, two, button my shoe, just like that. “Well,” I said hesitantly, “I suppose I could try. I could try to help you, Bruce.”

Mary and Shirley, two good Lesbian friends, had been invited to spend that Friday evening with me. I told them Bruce was coming. “At least I think he’s coming,” I said. “He’s been talking about coming back to San Francisco for so long, I won’t really believe it until he calls from the airport to say he’s finally arrived.”

He did call, almost the second I finished saying that to them. He grabbed a cab, and a half-hour later he was at my door. The girls were very sweet. They exchanged polite amenities with Bruce and then said good night, leaving him alone with me—for the first time in almost three years…

I opened a bottle of pink champagne and filled two silver goblets. Bruce and I sat beside each other on the red velvet love seat. He had kissed me lightly as he came in the door (feeling no embarrassment or shame in front of the girls), but as yet there had been no other physical contact between us.

I put a hand on his knee. “Bruce, I can’t believe it,” I said. “After all this time, and all those crazy phone calls, you’re actually here.”

“I couldn’t leave my dad,” he said. “You understand that, don’t you, Doug? I had to be sure he was all right again before I took off. But now I’m here—and there’s only one thing I want.”

“What’s that?”

“To make love to you,” he said. He took me in his arms. “I’ve been thinking about it. All that time up in Washington, I’ve been waiting.”

He kissed me. Instant fire spread through my veins. I felt a sinking sensation in my stomach. His tongue shot into my mouth. I moaned. I felt his hand fumble at my fly. My cock was a steel bar in my pants. “Jesus,” he murmured. “I want that—”

It was almost an exact reverse of the first scene Bruce and I had ever played together, here on this same sofa. Then, I had been the seducer; now, I was the seduced.

“Bruce,” I whispered, in ecstasy as he pulled my drooling dick out of my pants, “I’ve really missed you, baby.”

Now he was staring at my cock. “I’ve thought about this for nearly two years—I’m gay, you know. I made up my mind about that while I was gone.”

Then suddenly he was down on me. His thick soft lips encompassed the wet head of my sex muscle. He traveled the length of it. I shivered and I felt the mounting tension in my loins. Some reflex started a jerk, a quivering in one of my thighs. I looked down and saw Bruce’s head, greedily eating me—the beautiful dark curls of his hair hiding the sight of my prick. “Ah, Christ,” I said. “Ah, Bruce. It’s great, baby—do me. Do me.”

I shot what felt like a gallon of my creamy juice down his gullet. He swallowed it, making little gurgling noises, as if he couldn’t get enough of it.

For two days we did little else but eat, drink, sleep—and of course, make love…

Then it was time, I felt, to start being practical. “Bruce, what are your plans? What do you want to do?”

We were at the kitchen table, having coffee. He looked at me in surprise. “What do you mean?”

“Well, I mean—are you planning to look for a job?” We were in delicate territory. I knew I’d have to be very cautious. “I love having you here with me,” I said. “I do want you to live with me, as my lover. But I don’t want you to live off of me. Do you understand? That wouldn’t be healthy for either one of us.”

He stared at me. He didn’t speak. Idly, he stirred the cream in his coffee.

“I don’t mind paying the rent,” I went on. “I have to pay that, anyway. And I don’t mind paying for our food, or nights on the town, or even a vacation trip occasionally.”

He smiled. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

“But I don’t want to have to give you spending money—bus fare and coffee and cigarette money. I couldn’t respect a guy who just—lived off me entirely—and it wouldn’t be good for your self-respect either, Bruce, to do that. In the end you’d wind up hating me, or at least resenting me, because you were so dependent on me. People do need people, Bruce, but they should never have to depend on each other too much.”

“I guess you’ve been thinking a lot about this.”

“I have. But there’s something else. Maybe this is going to sound corny, and I don’t like to lecture you—“

“You’re a teacher, aren’t you?” he said, grinning. “Go ahead—lecture me.”

“You shouldn’t be idle. You should be doing something with your time. It’s not important what you do—I mean, that’s not the most important thing—you could go to school, maybe, or just hold down a part-time job some place. Otherwise, you know what will happen, don’t you? You’ll be back on the streets again, and I will worry about you then!”

“I’d like to write,” he said. “I was hoping you’d teach me how.”

There it was. Maybe it was the main reason (the conscious reason, anyway) that he had come back to me. “Bruce,” I said gently, “nobody can teach another person how to write. Maybe I could offer some suggestions to you, and help you learn. You have to understand—it’s mainly a voyage of self-discovery. You have to travel the route by yourself.”

He seemed puzzled. A frown appeared on his forehead. “Well—how do I begin?”

I poured us both a fresh cup of coffee. “I’ll tell you one thing you have to do if you want to be a writer. It may seem terribly obvious to you when I say it, but you’d be surprised how many would-be writers don’t recognize it.”

“What’s that?”

“You have to write. If you want to be a writer, you have to write.”

“What?” He was laughing, puzzled.

“You have to write. Every day. Writing is a craft, you know. It’s a job. It’s work. You have to discipline yourself to write so many words every day, whether you feel like it or not. You can’t wait for inspiration to come, you have to make it come-because books don’t write themselves, Bruce. They really don’t.”

He assured me that he was serious about this thing. He would look for some other kind of work, he said, if I wanted him to, but his mind was made up—he wanted to write.

“Then write,” I said. “Take the time to write a few paragraphs every day, good or bad. Bring them to me and I’ll look at them. If I can, I’ll criticize them and try to help you with them.”

Each morning I left for school and Bruce set out for Golden Gate park with a pad and pencil. He would write, he promised, and when he had something down on paper he’d let me look at it.

We went to movies in the evenings, and watched television and made love. We visited my friends. I had made plans to go to summer school in Mexico; while I was gone, I suggested, he could get himself settled in some kind of a job, and when I returned we’d move to a larger apartment.

Bruce was a quiet sort. He didn’t talk much, but little by little I found out some things about his past life. He had been married at twenty-one, he said, to a girl from a rather well-to-do family. His father-in-law owned a small fish cannery and had wanted Bruce to go into the business, but he had balked at that. It seemed to him that they had been trying to tie him down, his wife and in-laws, and after a couple of years he just took off. He had loved his wife, and he had a small son, but he left the family flat… He had had a couple of minor brushes with the law. He also had a drinking problem. Not long ago he had awakened to find himself in a hospital.

“It scared the shit out of me,” he confessed. “I didn’t remember a fucking thing. I was completely wigged out—d’you know what a creepy feeling that is, Doug, not to remember what you did on a three-day drunk? They had me in the hospital to dehydrate me. I was like a junkie, going turkey. I had the chills and the shakes, and I puked when there was nothing there in my gut to puke up… The doctors told me I’d better kick the habit. The bottle would do me in someday, they said, if I didn’t kick it.”

One of the reasons he had come back to me, he admitted, was because he sensed that I was strong enough, determined enough, and one of the few people he had met who cared enough to help him stay on the wagon.

I laughed. “I’ll never be your drinking buddy, that’s for sure. Your jack-off buddy, maybe, but never your drinking buddy. The sauce is not for me. A couple of cocktails at a party and I’ve had it—so you’ve come to the right man, baby.” I put my arm around him affectionately. “Sure, Bruce, I’ll help you kick the bottle. That’s easy.”

One afternoon I came home from school and saw his notebook lying on a table. He hadn’t taken it with him that morning. Feeling a bit of a sneak, but too curious to resist a look, I opened the tablet to glance at what he had written.

There was perhaps a page and a half of scribbled notes, incoherent and disconnected. That was all he had put down on paper in nearly three weeks…

Poor guy. I smiled a little sadly. Bruce was finding out, as have so many men before him, that there is a great difference between a dream and the realization of it. The gap is a wide and painful journey.

On Sunday we had lunch at Fisherman’s Wharf and browsed through the shops at Ghiradelli Square. He had seemed more than usually pensive that day and finally, as we sat on a fence looking out over the water toward Alcatraz, he broke a long silence.

“Doug—when you’re writing a book—how do you think up all the things you want to put in it? I mean, how do you decide what the book’s going to be about?”

“What the story is going to be about, you mean?”

“Well, yeah. I guess so. I guess that’s what I mean.” He paused, frowning, searching for the words to express himself. People walked by us on the sidewalk; it was a warm sunny day, but we were oblivious of the passersby. “How do you figure out what’s going to happen in it? Like, I want to write my own story, see—but a book’s gotta fill up a couple hundred pages, doesn’t it? How do you do it—I mean, think up all that dialogue and stuff?”

I smiled. I knew what an inner struggle he was going through. His notebook had contained just a few vague ideas. He was finding it a hard job to get started.

“My problem, Bruce, has never been what to write about, but what not to write about. My God—the world is such a fascinating place, and life is so complicated and mysterious! There are stories and themes for stories all around us. A writer just has to open his eyes and look at them.”

He still seemed puzzled. “You mean you write just about things which have really happened to you?”

“Oh, no. Not entirely. I didn’t say that. Some of what a man writes is out of his own experience, of course, but a lot of it is what he has observed or imagined—and there’s a process of selection involved, too. Events in a novel have to be arranged, so that the totality of them has some larger meaning, adds up to some significance.” I touched his shoulder, patting it affectionately. “I’m talking about good writing now, not just hack work. Assuming that what we both want to be is good writers.”

He shook his head. A great sigh escaped him. “Wow! I didn’t realize this thing was going to be so tough.”

“There’s a saying in Spanish. Si quieres tener un bote grande, tienes que remar muy duro. If you want to have a big boat, you have to row very hard—anything worth doing takes time and effort. Nobody ever said that writing a book was easy work, Bruce.”

He was very thoughtful as we walked home that afternoon, and that night he tossed restlessly in his sleep.

A few days later I was invited to a cocktail party. A friend was leaving the States to live in Mexico, and we were bidding him buen viaje. I asked Bruce to come to the party with me.

It was very gay. There were fifty or sixty people there, all types from the homophile community—young and old, butch and femme, girl and boy. The party began in the basement of a large house in the Mission district, flowed out into the street, and filtered into the rooms upstairs…

We hadn’t had much to eat that day. After a couple of screwdrivers both Bruce and I had a pleasant glow. Several of my friends gave Bruce an approving eye as my new lover, and a couple of guys I’d never met eyed him with something more than just approval.

I wasn’t worried. I knew he was a beautiful man, and that the gay boys would always stare at him and perhaps try to put the make on him. I couldn’t help that. At this party he sat quietly beside me and I was sure he remembered that he had come with me and that he would leave with me.

A bleached blond character, dressed in black leather (and with the inevitable keys jangling at his belt), licked his lips as he stared at Bruce’s crotch. “You’re very lucky,” he said to me.

“And so am I,” Bruce said promptly. Without hesitation he kissed me squarely on the mouth. “Doug is a pretty fantastic guy, you know. Talented, intelligent—and a helluva good lay, too.”

That settled Miss Leather Girl’s hash. Pronto.

As time went on, however, with the drinks flowing and so many people milling around, it was inevitable that Bruce and I would be drawn into different conversations, and into different circles. After an hour or so, when I looked around, Bruce was nowhere to be seen.

I didn’t panic. He was an adult, I reminded myself. He was twenty-six years old. He knew how to take care of himself.

What’s more, I trusted him.

Finally, however, most of the guests had departed and Bruce had not returned from wherever it was he had gone. I looked outside the house, then went upstairs to see if I could find him.

“So what happened to your friend?” said the blond leather boy, who was also something of a faggot bitch. He grinned at me, enjoying himself hugely. “You know the friend I mean, don’t you—the one who thinks you’re such a helluva good lay?”

“Cunt,” I said, smiling back at him. “If you really want to know, he’s gone home—which is something you wouldn’t understand, sweetie, because you’re such a girl of the streets you probably don’t have a home.”

For all I knew it was true. Maybe Bruce really had done as I said. Maybe he had gone home. I called a cab and got to the apartment as fast as I could.

He wasn’t there. There was nothing I could do. It was useless to fuss and fret about it. All sorts of pos- siblities occurred to me, of course. I imagined a hundred different things which could have happened to him—but my only choice was to sit and wait until I heard from him…

A couple of hours later he called. He was getting a cab, he said, and he’d be home in a few minutes.

He was contrite and apologetic when he arrived. He had been stinking drunk from so much vodka and had blacked out. He couldn’t recall what had happened, but when he came to his senses he was in bed with some guy in his apartment on Russian Hill. “The cat was chewing on my cock, for Christ’s sake. I pushed him away and got out of there—fast.”

I said nothing. I was determined to be understanding. I would not, I told myself, get mad and accuse him of anything which was really not his fault.

He passed a shaking hand over his forehead. “I’m sorry, Doug,” he said miserably. “I’m sorry.”

“Forget it.” I could see that he was not only upset but still a bit drunk. “You’d better go to bed and sleep this thing off.”

The following couple of days were somewhat trying. I have never seen anyone suffer such a hangover. It was agonizing and it went on and on. Liquor did something to Bruce’s system which made me understand why the doctors had told him to stay off the sauce. At first he simply retched, although his stomach had long since vomited all it contained. Then he began to tremble. I did my best to comfort him. He wouldn’t let me call a doctor. He quivered and shook. When at last I got him quieted enough to sleep, he broke out in a sweat. The sheets on the bed were wringing wet from his perspiration. “God,” he said, waking up and moaning. “It’s not worth it. Jesus Christ. It’s just not worth it.”

He couldn’t eat, of course, and naturally during those few days we had no sex.

Finally I got him to take a little beef bouillon and he was able to keep it down. We didn’t really talk about the party and what had happened that night. All my efforts were bent on getting him back into some kind of condition.

It was a good week later, with the horrible experience at last behind us, that he brought the subject up for discussion.

We were having dinner at a restaurant on Polk Street. “You didn’t say anything,” he said. “Were you mad at me that night—because I went with that guy to his apartment?”

“Look, Bruce,” I said, “you don’t have to apologize to me for that night, or explain anything to me about it. Of course I didn’t like what happened. But it’s happened. It’s past us now. Let’s forget it.”

He nodded slowly. A faint smile appeared on his lips. “You’re a very understanding guy, Doug. Very patient.”

“Hell,” I said, snorting. “Don’t idealize me. I’m probably the most impatient man you’ve ever met. The point is, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking these past few years and I’ve come to some conclusions. There’s an old play called Claudia—did you ever hear of it?”

He shook his head.

“Well, there’s a line in it I’ve never forgotten. Loving, one of the characters says, is holding dose with open hands. I think that idea has a lot of meaning for people who are gay and who move in a gay world.”

He pondered that. “Loving is holding close with open hands,” he said, parroting me. “I suppose that means letting someone you love have his freedom and not closing in on him—and that way really holding him. Right?”

“Right, Bruce.”

He was pleased that he’d been able to figure it out. “That’s pretty damned deep,” he said. “And hard to do.”

“It’s hard for two guys to stay physically faithful. It’s not man’s nature to be physically monogamous. I believe that now. We can be spiritually true to each other, though. We can have sex with a hundred others and still come back together, if what’s between us is real and right.”

He looked deep into my eyes. “You make me very happy when you talk like that.”

I laughed. “Who knows? We’ve got a lot of good times ahead of us, Bruce. Maybe we can even find pleasure in three-ways. A lot of gay lovers do.”

In bed that night we lay in each other’s arms. “You’re a fantastic person, Doug,” he said, kissing me. “I just hope—hell, I hope we make it, you and me. The trouble is,” he went on, haltingly, “I’m kind of fucked up—“

I laughed. “I’m not exactly an uncomplicated man myself, Bruce.”

A few days later he proposed a new plan to me. “I’ve been thinking. While you’re in Mexico, I could be doing some kind of work up in Washington.”

“What kind of work?”

“It’s seasonal. Picking lemon leaves. You know, those leaves the florists use—when they sell flowers? I can make fifteen, twenty dollars a day doing that, with a guy I know for a partner.”

“That sounds good. Then, in six weeks or so, when I get back from Mexico, I can fly up there and join you. I’ve got an aunt in Portland I should visit, anyway. We can fly back down here together.”

“Yeah.” He seemed to hesitate for a minute. “There’s another guy I know—here in San Francisco—he’s opening up a gym. He says I can work for him, instructing. Planning programs for weight lifters, and stuff like that.”

“Is he gay, this guy?”

“Well, yeah. Yeah, he is—but he’s a good guy. I don’t have to sleep with him or have sex with him, just because I’m gonna work for him.”

“Of course not,” I said quietly. “Well, why don’t we think this over? We’ve got a couple of weeks before we have to make up our minds… By the way, school is out next Friday. How would you like to take a trip to Monterey and Sam Simeon? The Hearst Castle is really a fantastic place to visit.”

That idea appealed to him. He made no more mention of the prospective job in the gym. I bought a round-trip ticket to Seattle and back for him. He was booked on Flight 523, taking off a couple of days before I was due to leave for Mexico.

We went to Monterey and San Simeon and had a ball there. He was tender and sweet and loving. I didn’t see how things could ever be any better between us. Life was very good indeed.

The night before his flight to Seattle he seemed restless and fidgety. In bed he began to perspire. The sheets were wet.

I was alarmed.

“Bruce—is something the matter?” I knew he hadn’t been drinking. “What’s wrong, baby? Tell me. You’re sweating like a horse.”

“It’s just—flying, that’s all. I hate it. It scares the shit out of me.”

I took him in my arms and tried to comfort him. He was like a little kid, snuggling up to me the way he did. I explained to him how safe plane travel really was—how few accidents or crashes there were, comparatively speaking. “Actually, according to statistics, a lot more people are killed in cars and buses than in plane crashes, did you know that?”

“Yeah. Sure. I know that’s what they say. But in a car or a bus, if there’s an accident, at least a guy’s got a chance—”

The next morning I took him to a pancake house for breakfast before I put him on the limousine to the airport. He was still nervous and his eyes had a faraway look in them. I made small-talk to take his mind off what was worrying him.

His hand shook so much he could hardly guide a match to his cigarette. “You’ll probably think I’m nuts,” he said, “but at the airport I’m gonna take out flight insurance. Five thousand each to my dad and my wife and kid—and five thousand to you.”

“Bruce—“

“Then if anything happens to me—you gotta promise-will you write my story someday? I guess I don’t have the talent to do it myself.”

“Of course I will, baby,” I reached across the table to touch his arm. “But nothing’s going to happen to you, Bruce. Believe me, there’s nothing for you to be afraid of.”

So we said good-bye. I promised to write to him from Mexico. He promised to call me on the night of August 15th, after I had returned to San Francisco. Then I would fly to Seattle and we’d come back home together.

The mail arrived two days after Bruce left, just as I was leaving to catch my own flight to Los Angeles and on to Mexico. There was a letter from the insurance company, mailed the day he left. At the airport just before boarding the plane he had taken out a policy for twenty-five thousand dollars in my name.

I was startled, of course. Only then did I realize the extent of his fear, the horror of his inner agony. (He must have decided to increase the amount of my policy at the last minute.)

I looked forward to our reunion. I really loved him. I wanted us to build a good life together.

In Mexico I enjoyed myself hugely, as I always do. I sent Bruce postcards from Guadalajara and Mexico City, and I sent him a picture that a friend had taken of me on the beach at Puerto Vallarta. I didn’t expect any answers from him. I knew he wasn’t the letter-writing type…I returned to San Francisco happily anticipating his call on August 15th.

There was a stack of mail waiting for me in the apartment—a pile of newspapers and magazines, and a large bundle of correspondence. There was a letter from that insurance company.

I read its contents with shocked disbelief. The wording was formal, politely sympathetic but cold. Flight 523 to Seattle had crashed somewhere near the coast of Oregon on June 26th. A policy had been registered by one Bruce Lassiter in my name. If I would be kind enough to reply, with proper identification—

I sat stunned. It couldn’t be true. He was dead. And it was all my fault. He hadn’t wanted to fly, but I had persuaded him how safe it was.

When I called my friend Richard in El Cerrito, I was still numb with incredulity and grief. “Dick,” I said, an ache in my throat and with the tears running down my cheeks. “I was still here when he crashed. It happened before I left for Mexico—“

“You can’t blame yourself.”

“I didn’t even know it,” I moaned. “Oh, poor baby—poor Bruce! I sent him all those postcards and that picture and he never received them—not any of them—‘*

I managed at last, after crying a little, to get a grip on myself.

“It sounds like a terrible thing to say,” Dick began hesitantly, “but maybe it’s for the best. You were happy together for a while—but it couldn’t have lasted.”

“Why not?” I was on the defensive. “Why do you say a thing like that?”

“Well, forgive me, but—you don’t think that boy really loved you, do you? You were a father to him, that’s all. He was just looking for somebody to take care of him—and eventually he would have found someone else, a man with more money.”

Dick had met Bruce a couple of times and I suppose he thought that qualified him to evaluate and give an opinion of our relationship.

“I don’t want to speak unkindly of anyone who’s just passed away—but he was only a hustler, Doug. You knew that from the beginning, didn’t you?”

I hung up.

Yes, I knew it. I knew Bruce had been a hustler. Damn right I knew it. And maybe once a hustler, always a hustler. Maybe he never would have changed. As I thought, however of the love and happiness he had given me—not to mention the money I was going to collect from the insurance company—and how little, really, I had given back to him, how many ways in which I had failed to help the poor guy, to comfort and guide him, I couldn’t help but wonder, as a wave of sadness engulfed me: in my relationship with Bruce Lassiter, who had hustled whom?