Defining Us: The Calvin & Eric Story (69 Bottles) (12 page)

He points toward the living room with his head. “Come, sit down,” he tells me as he polishes off his glass and quickly pours another one. I follow his lead and take a seat on the larger of the two couches, on the far end, and he takes a seat in the chair opposite me. He leans forward with his elbows on his knees and his glass between his palms, rolling it back and forth from his wrists to the tips of his fingers.
 

“Can I ask something else first?” I ask.
 

“Go ahead,” he tells me, but he doesn’t look at me.
 

“Who’s Dr. V?”
 

He gives me a small smile. “He’s my therapist. He offered to let us talk in his office, in front of him, to let him help with this conversation, explain the things to you that I can’t. I don’t know much about the process of the therapy I endured, other than I was forced to watch,” he shudders, “to watch some seriously nasty shit. Mostly anti-gay bigotry, religious nut jobs who talked about being gay being wrong and how being gay means you’re going to hell. Those speeches were usually followed up with movies of men being raped by other men, the ugly side of society, in a nutshell.” He takes a sip of his scotch before continuing, I follow suit. “Watching that kind of stuff wasn’t really where the “process” came into play. If I got turned on, slightly excited emotionally, like my heartbeat or breathing changed, or god forbid I got a hard on, that would get me shocked.”
 

I’m watching him carefully and I can see his eyes glazing over as if he is thinking back to that time.
 

“The shocks started off more like a tickle, then gradually progressed to voltages high enough that it would humiliate me in some fashion or another.”
 

“How so?” I breathe out. He doesn’t look at me, but I watch as he shakes off whatever it is that he was seeing and he looks at his glass.
 

He sighs, “I would often piss myself.”

“Jesus fucking Christ, are you kidding me?” I stand up in anger. “How the fuck could anyone even consider doing-”
 

‘Breathe Eric, please, believe me, it was all legal at the time, though it still didn’t stop me from suing the shit out of them once I was able to get my head straight, but that’s beside the point.” He takes a huge gulp of scotch and I finish off my glass before walking to the counter. I grab the decanter and bring it back to the living room and fill up his glass. “Thanks,” he whispers.

“What else?” I ask as I fill my own glass.
 

He frowns. “Are you sure you want to hear more of this?”
 

“No, but I’m still trying to understand, and I’m trying to see how this all leads back to you being raped.”
 

“I’m getting there,” he tells me before drinking down half of the scotch I just gave him. “One time I was shocked until I not only pissed myself, but I lost all control of everything.” His eyes meet mine.
 

“Fuck, I can’t even imagine what kind of force that would take.”

“I thought that I was dying,” he tells me. “But that was nothing compared to what happened that night and many nights after that. What happened at night were the primary grounds for my lawsuit and the criminal charges that were later brought to the person responsible. The opposite happened at night. I was forced to get hard before he would set about raping me, usually repeatedly….”
 

“Stop, I can’t…” I stand up and start pacing, “I don’t know if I can handle hearing any more about that.”
 

I catch Calvin as he nods solemnly. “Now do you understand why no matter how much I love you, I can’t be with you?”
 

I stop in my tracks and look at him. I don’t know what to say to that. “How am I supposed to respond to that?”
 

“Just tell me that you agree, that you understand that you can’t be with me and walk out the door. Fuck, Eric,” he stands up, “You deserve someone who can love you emotionally and physically. You don’t deserve my baggage and I certainly don’t deserve your love when I have absolutely no way to reciprocate it.”
 

“I don’t believe that.”

“Fuck Eric, damn it, you’ve already seen what happens, three times now. I’ve puked on you twice.”
 

“That wasn’t…”
 

“No Eric, it wasn’t alcohol, either time. That is what my body does, among other things, like locking down, convulsing, puking, sweating, growing weak…those are just a few of the things that happen. The worst of it is the mental disgust I go through after the fact. It took me three years and a lot of cocaine before I could finally get an erection, get myself off, or even have sex with a woman without vomiting all over the place. Even still, to this day, being with a woman still repulses me enough that I have to fight back the bile that rises, but my body and the shame are different now. Usually, I end up feeling guilty because I’ve walked out, waited ‘til they’ve fallen asleep and left or left them half-naked in a bathroom somewhere. I can’t masturbate.” I flinch at that idea. “If I can even manage to get hard, I usually end up in a repulsed pile of goo on my bed with a raging hard-on that I can do nothing about. Let alone even,” he swallows hard, “in the kitchen when you came up behind me…”
 

“You freaked out,” I tell him.
 

He nods, “Ironically, it wasn’t because you touched me.”
 

“Then what was it?”
 

His eyes dart to my crotch and back up. “Shit. Damn it, Cal, I…fuck.”
 

“Stop, it’s alright, Eric. You didn’t know, I’d barely begun to explain anything to you, how could you have even guessed,” he tells me softly before sitting back down.
 

“Now what?” I ask him unwillingly after a few minutes of silence.
 

He frowns and shakes his head. “We go back to the way we were, friends.” His eyes meet mine once again and once again I am lost to them, lost in him, drawn like a moth to a flame.
 

I shake my head, “I can’t do that.”
 

“You don’t have a choice.”
 

“Like hell I don’t, Calvin.” I cock my head at him. “You told me this so that you could drive me away, so that I would find you repulsive and storm out of here, and find it within myself to get over you and we could move on?”
 

“Who wants to be with someone who wasn’t strong enough to fend off an attacker, who wasn’t man enough to…”
 

“Stop right fucking there, Calvin Caldwell, I will not listen to you talk like that.” I round the couch to draw closer to him, moving his glass on the coffee table before sitting in front of him, my thighs on either side of his. “Look at me,” I tell him.
 

“I can’t. I think you should go.”
 

“No, I won’t. Calvin, we all have our own fucking baggage. Yes, I see what yours is and it is quite possibly the worst thing I’ve ever heard and three thousand times bigger than I could have ever imagined, but I’ll be damned if I am going to let that stop me from trying to help you.”
 

“You’re insane. Eric, the only thing that is going to happen in all of this is that I’m going to freak the fuck out and we will never be able to be closer than we are right now. I can’t have that, Eric. I can’t have you being hurt every time something triggers me and I will be damned if I am going to have a sexless relationship with you.”
 

“I want to meet Dr. V, I want the two of us to meet with him, Calvin, I want to help you get over this.”
 

He stands up and manages to skirt past my entrapment. “I can’t just get over it.”
 

I stand up, facing him. “Bullshit, you did it with women. Why can’t you do it with men? The problem with men for you, Cal, is the fact that you’ve had countless women to help you work through your issues, your wall that ‘Hulk can’t smash’, but how many men have you had since the abuse?”
 

“None,” he finally breathes.
 

“That’s my point. You haven’t had anyone to work through this with. You haven’t been able to even try.”
 

“And you think I want to do that with you? Do you honestly think that I want you to watch me puke every time you try and kiss me? Or break into the sweats when I think about you? What the fuck kind of relationship is that, Eric?” I don’t answer him because I don’t have an answer. “That’s my point, it doesn’t exist. It can’t exist.”

“That’s where I think you’re wrong and I want to prove it to you.”
 

Our eyes meet again, this time I see some concern, fear and anxiety buried deep in his soul. “I’m not running away from this,” I tell him firmly. “I haven’t waited this long to just walk away. To just give up on you, on a chance for us to actually happen. Are women really what you want?” I watch as he shakes his head. “Are men?” He shakes his head again. “Then what is it, what do you want?” I ask him softly.
 

He looks at me, his eyes red with tears. “You,” he breathes and my world stops spinning.

“IF it’s me you want, then you have got to let me help you.” Eric doesn’t hesitate.
 

“I don’t know how,” I tell him. “I know in my head and in my heart that you are what I want, Eric. You’ve been what I’ve wanted for a long time. I thought that if I just ignored it, just didn’t do anything about it, that I could move on, that
you
,” I say with emphasis, “would move on and that we would have never had to have this conversation.”
 

“I can’t help how I feel about you,” he tells me in a whisper as he sits down in the chair I was just sitting in. “I’ve tried, trust me.” His voice is soft, almost comforting in a strange way. “I’ve done everything I can to force myself to move on.”
 

I cross my arms over my chest. “No, you’ve tried like hell to make me jealous, and let me tell you, it worked every fucking time. But fighting to make me jealous isn’t getting over me, Eric, fighting to make me jealous is simply your way of forcing me. If you honestly believed that making me jealous would lead you to someone who would magically make you get over me, you didn’t have much success; you still want me.”
 

“And I’ll never stop,” he tells me.
 

“Why?”
 

“Because you don’t give up on those you love.”
 

“If you love someone, you set them free,” I counter.
 

“Is that what you want me to do?” His eyes meet mine and I drop my hands in defeat.
 

“Sometimes yes and other times no.” I raise my eyes to him. “You have to understand that this is deeper than being in my mind, Eric. This is physically something I don’t know how to handle. It defines who I am. Sure, I could get into women and get over it with women, but with men, with you? I don’t know if I can do that.” I take a deep breath and go back to pacing. “Being with a man is exactly what I was conditioned to believe was the utmost form of blasphemy. It’s everything I was conditioned to ignore, to hate.” I’m practically growling by the end. “I can’t just fuck it away. I can just rinse and repeat until it no longer bothers me. There is always going to be something, somewhere, in the back of my mind that tells me that what I am doing is wrong.”
 

I watch as he leans forward with his elbows on his knees. “If it is what you want, how can it be wrong?” His question is innocent and not one that I have an answer for.

“I’m not saying that I believe it’s wrong, it’s what has been ingrained in me. Even after all these years, never acting on the impulses I felt about being with a man, it still makes me sick.”
 

“Has it ever occurred to you that it’s fear that is making you sick and not the desire itself?” he asks.
 

“I’m not sure I’m following you,” I tell him because I don’t know that I get where he’s going with this.

“Well, think about it for a moment. You were raped, forced against your will to do unspeakable acts. Has it occurred to you that your fear is because of that? That you feel like being with a man will be like that?”