The Price Of Dick (25 page)

The next day I was so sick I
again, swore the pledge of the sick drunk:
Never again!

I puked. I medicated. I canceled appointments.
Around mid-afternoon I woke to take a call. My mind was all fuzz and fatigue. I wanted to sleep more, but I knew I needed to earn my right to be on the planet. The voice on the phone introduced himself as ‘Alex,’ which rang no bells. My brain wasn’t connecting any of the names of the people who recommended him to me with the detritus floating around in the sea of wine in my head. He then mentioned he was a trainer.

The scrambled bits of data in my brain
unscrambled a little bit. One of the models from the last shoot had mentioned him. He and his boyfriend were looking for someone to do a photo shoot for them. I fumbled for my pad of post-its and scribbled his name and number. I then nose-dived back into the pillow.

Later, during my third resurrection
of the day, I found a voicemail from Dick informing me that he’d be taking his
girlfriend,
Dolores to dinner and a show that night. He said the word girlfriend in the recording with the glee-filled tone of a teenager making his grand public announcement that he had his first date with a girl. That was worth an eye-roll.

Dinner for me was chicken soup and crackers. I returned
Alex’s call, scheduled the two of them the next afternoon to discuss what they wanted to do.

Crawling onto the sofa, I put on a movie and
conked dead away again. Very late that night I was aware of hearing Dick as he crept in, turned off my television and light and went upstairs to his room. He was alone.

The next morning I felt better. I cleaned up, made myself presentable to meet
the trainer, Alex and his boyfriend Jaime. Physically I felt mostly recovered. Mentally, not so much. The turmoil within was still there. The hypoglycemic depression kept it company. Angry and depressed. Not a great way to meet new clients.

I
’d shot a lot of bodybuilders and trainers over the years. They weren’t my favorites. They were big bodies with small personalities for the most part. A smile for them was more akin to making an ape-face, but they paid. So I was surprised when Alex arrived an hour before his boyfriend. He was wall-to-wall smile, buoyant gestures and talkative. He was also a looker.

“
I’m a combination of Filipino, French, and English,” he said to me to explain his exotic looks.

This
fusion of heritages gave him a natural olive tan, large hazel eyes, more green than brown. He was only my height of five eight, but aesthetically proportionate, unlike the bulkiness of many bodybuilders. His longish hair, draped well over his ears and occasionally, one deep blue-black eye. I could spot no facial hair other than the finely arched brows and enviable lashes. He also had the finest ass I’d seen in ages. I couldn’t conceive how he could fit a wallet in the back pocket of a pair of jeans. There was no fabric to spare. He was twenty-one and making me wish I were younger.

He was also one of those rare individuals whom you could meet and in a matter of minutes feel as if you
’d known for a lifetime. We found ourselves talking like old friends about everything. He’d only been
out
a short while. Since just after college. He’d been a fan of my work since he was in his early teens; had many of my photographs as screensavers on his computer. He was one of the few people who actually read my long forgotten book,
The Cover Model
. His knowledge of my work was gratifying.

I can
’t explain why, but as his boyfriend's arrival kept getting delayed, I began sharing with him everything that had happened to me while living with a closeted man. He got all the gritty, grimy details of our long, strange relationship. I thumb nailed every dalliance Dick had with women for the sake of his reputation. I poured out my angst to him. This type of purge seemed to make me feel better. My anger and depression lifted. Alex was a good listener. I wondered if he also had good advice.

When I
’d finished he said, “Simple solution. When he’s not in the room with this girl, go all Jack on her.”

I didn
’t know the term: “Go all Jack.”

He smiled and in a gentle manner so as to not make me feel the twenty years difference between us, explained,
“
Will and Grace
. The character, Jack is the one with the exaggerated gay affectations.” He simulated a couple of the character's gestures and postures in explanation. I got the point. “But don’t ever do it until he’s out of the room since he’s bringing her here in the first place to get rid of those ideas. You don’t have to do much. Just one ‘fabulous’ is enough to get the idea across,” he chuckled.

His smile was like a lighthouse.
Bright and inviting. His solution showed humor rather than malice. He was truly a gentle soul, in my estimation. In the short time we spent together that day, I found myself liking him very much.

“
She’ll wonder for sure why he’s lived with you for so long. And I’d bet she won’t say a word to him because you’re his friend.”

I tucked the idea away as a possibility. We talked as we waited for Jaime. He told me about his training career, his viewpoints on health and eating;
how he liked to share words of encouragement everyday along with his training sessions. He went to work armed with new words of hope every day. Things like ‘Today is a great day to make amazing things happen,’ or ‘Aspire Higher.’

“
Words have power because they become thoughts,” he said. “So many people go through life only concentrating on the negatives. They use sarcasm instead of humor, they complain rather than correct. Everything begins with the thoughts we allow to come from our mouth into the world. We give birth to our day’s destinies.”

I
’d studied his face as he talked. There was no doubt about his sincerity. I could have listened to him all day long. I could have stared at him endlessly. He had a purity that was indefinable.

His boyfriend finally arrived. I had
the opposite reaction to Jaime that I had to Alex. He was a very appealing person to look at. The All-American blond with coiffed hair, blue eyes, and just enough scruff to give him a masculine appearance. He had an average athletic build, but an Olympian-sized ego. He carried himself in a manner suggesting most of us were several rungs beneath him on the ladder of life. He was all about status, designer sunglasses and clothes, expensive shoes, a BMW. My guess was his parents gave that to him as a birthday present. He dropped names like rabbits dropped pellets. The two of them seemed odd as a couple. The only things they seemingly had in common were their good looks and athleticism.

They, meaning Jaime, wanted to do a shoot that could be used as a personalized holiday card. Hallmark was too
pedestrian for his taste. He also had ideas for all the photos he wanted. A pose of them leaning on the BMW in front of his parents' mansion in their exclusive neighborhood. I called these photographs the Look-at-what’s-all-mine-and-not-yours shots. Shallow people with deep pockets paid for them. I held my nose and took them. I took a couple photos of them in the studio to see how they photographed together. Alex had a much darker complexion. I suggested Jaime might tan up a little before the shoot to minimize the difference.

After they left,
I stared at the few pictures I’d taken of them. I couldn’t take my eyes off of Alex. He radiated a kind spirit, causing pleasant feelings in me. I loved looking at his eyes and smile. They made the woes of my day feel somehow smaller.

As I crawled into my bed, head hitting the pillow
while still thinking about him, I realized I’d lost my dreams of love. I was soon to be a forty-year-old man who had never kissed for love. I’d gone into a relationship with a friend when I left home. I loved him, but I wasn’t in love with him. He made me feel secure and gave me a sense of home, place, and identity. After him, every time I kissed, it was overwhelmed by the blood-suck of lust. I’d forgotten what it was to dream of someone that I cared about, who would care equally about me. I’d had those dreams when I was young and just discovering that I was gay. Like everyone else, I had wondered: who would be my dream guy? Who would be the one who swept me off my feet? Who would make me believe in the Happily Ever After? Then time went by. The Prince never knocked on the door. I’d given up on love. I fell asleep feeling jealous of Jaime for finding the Prince that time had made me forget.

I was prepared to go all
Jack
on Dolores when Dick brought her by the condo again. They’d just been out climbing one of those indoor rock walls according to his text message and were stopping in for lunch. Why they couldn’t hit a fast food place was beyond me. It would have saved me the maniacal, frantic run-through-the-house pickup routine, along with a spin-around shower to soap off a layer of workday sweat.

I changed my mind about the
‘going all Jack’ on her after I met her.

She wasn
’t tall; probably came to the top of Dick’s shoulders. She was undeniably loud. She talked and laughed like she couldn't hear herself. Her laughter was deeper than a Tabernacle Choir baritone. From a man it would have been manly. From a woman, it was downright butch. She was blonde and freckled like a redhead who lied with peroxide. Her nose was small and sharply upturned like a ski slope. She wore hot pink short shorts with nothing underneath so if she bent over you got the full Female Anatomy 101 course. She was uniformly classless and obnoxious. She would talk to Dick in a falsetto baby voice when she wanted something from him. “Can you bring me a glass of wa-wa, sweetie?” I found her wretched in almost every way.

There were so many beautiful, sweet, intelligent and classy women in the world who would have loved to go on a date with a man as handsome as Dick,
and probably use him, as he would be using them, too. I don’t know how he always managed to find the complete opposite of those positive attributes in his
girlfriends
. I figured it was all a part of his design. To be greater than, more beautiful than, more intelligent than... He liked fawning. I’m sure he welcomed comparisons to a choice like Dolores.

It was clear from the start
that she didn’t appreciate my presence in the same room with them. I was tolerated because I was his friend, but I was very much in her way. After our initial introduction, she dismissed me like I was a puppy under-foot. I’d only see the bobbing ponytail on the back of her head. If I tried to be friendly and add to a conversation, she ignored me by talking directly and only to Dick.

So, like I said: I was prepared to go
all Jack to give her some helpful clues...until I met her. Then I thought: Dick deserves a woman like this. And she deserves what’s in store for her. It was a providential pairing. Two mean people on a tangled path headed for a nasty end.

The
nightly gag-fest began with the two of them spooning on the sofa to watch zombie flicks. They’d spend their time smooching and playing touchy-feely before he’d take her home. I tried to ignore it like most guy friends would do, but it was so overt and over-the-top that I found myself just going back to the office to be free from the retina-searing visuals. The woman had a home of her own. She didn’t have roommates. There simply was no reason for me to have to bear witness to their foreplay. They both knew that. They could take their act to her home and bother no one. I found their rudeness infuriating.

If Dick believed her presence would be a
way to end suspicions of anything between him and me, he misunderstood this woman's motives completely. The minute she met me, she was determined there wouldn’t even be friendship between us. She wanted him all to herself. No sharing with friends. Her neediness and insecurity was off the charts. If he’d been smart enough to discern that she offered him no benefit beyond the heterosexual snapshots she provided for speculating co-workers, he’d have dumped her before any more damage was done to our friendship. That didn’t happen.

By the second month
, he’d call to let me know she’d be staying over on the weekends. I reminded him that I liked to book my shoots on the weekends, and that a woman in residence would be an interference. He ignored me. I reminded him that he could stay with her at her place during the weekends and it would present less of an inconvenience to our business. He brought her anyway. He cooked her breakfast, lunch and dinner. He waited on her hand and foot. He no longer bought groceries to share. He bought groceries for them. I was left to fend for myself. If someone asked me how fast is the slide into hell, I’d have told them as fast as you could lose faith in a friend.

I stayed locked in my room or office during her entire weekend stays. I only came out to grab food, or booze. I needed horse-blinders to block their juvenile shenanigans from my sight. I
’d not only been thrown into his closet, I’d been locked in it. He took perverse pleasure in my discomfort. He was paying me back for excluding him from the shoots. The hateful spiral of tit for tat made downward loops faster than a Kamikaze pilot.

While I was finding more things to dislike in him, he was finding more things in common with her. He took her horseback riding out at the ranch. They shot their guns on the target range. They took fishing trips. He was incorporating her into every facet of his life as he
’d done with no
girlfriend
before. He'd found himself a regular ole tomboy buddy in this one. She was the man of his dreams, minus the one bit that actually made her a man. The truth was, the more he was not around me, the better I liked it. The grey cloud of unhappiness only came through the door with him. When she walked in with him, the darkness was multiplied exponentially. It disappeared with them when they left.

I knew what those dinosaurs felt like those millions of years ago at La Brea. They wanted to live but they stepped into a damned mess that was dragging them down. A depression gripped me. I didn
’t want to face people who disgusted me. I locked myself away to work and I drank until I passed out. I wanted to wake up and have it all be gone. I let myself go as Dick spent money lavishly on his new girlfriend, parading her in front of anyone and everyone he thought could benefit his reputation. He left condoms hidden in his pockets for me to find so that I’d know he’d manned-up and was doing all the right things to make her believe he was the studly Prince he portrayed. I wondered what handsome male movie star he was imagining on her face; or more likely, the back of her head, to accomplish this feat?

This was
one more way of flipping me off because I wouldn’t include him in my shoots. It was taking its toll on me. I’d never felt worse. I couldn’t look at the sad, bloated man in the mirror. Was that really me gaining weight and getting flabby? I didn’t know what I hated more; the horrible life inside my home, or its physical effects. One thing I did know was that I could take control and do something about one of those things.

I
’d thought about him enough the past few weeks, but now I had a legitimate reason to call Alex. I not only needed to get into shape; I needed a friend to talk to. Someone to help my feet find firm ground again. Alex was the only person I’d connected with since Pat had passed away. It took three attempts before I could finally make myself call him. I was nervous. I felt I had no right to ask anyone to listen to my problems and help me correct my self-inflicted physical damage.

He was happy to hear from me. His voice was bright, full of life. I smiled just to hear it. He
’d wondered how I was doing, said he had hoped I’d call. He inquired about my roommate and his pretend girlfriends. It was nice to feel like I had someone on my side. I told him what I wanted to do, to get back in shape. Asked how much it would cost me? I wasn’t rich. His answer was for me to meet him at the park so he could walk his dog.

It was a brilliant midsummer afternoon when
Alex arrived at the park with his brindle pit bull. A male named Dali, after the Spanish surrealist. The trainer’s hair was longer, he looked leaner. He wore a white tank and a pair of yellow running shorts. His white running shoes had yellow laces to match. He was a man born to cause heart flutters. While most of us would hide from the harsh light of the sun to disguise our imperfections, its rays landed on him as if he were its canvas. His skin glowed, his hair had the luster we seem to lose with time. His gait was that of a happy child. He was being yanked along by an even happier pit bull. Dali was fully grown, but only a year-old pup who still had a tremendous amount of play in him. He was ready to do more than walk. That’s what Alex asked me to do with him and Dali. Walk the park. Eight miles of it.

We hit the path at a pretty good clip. Dali set the pace. I did my best to keep up
, but lost my breath a couple times and had to pause to catch it. Alex and Dali doubled back to find me and wait until I could rejoin them. I was surprised at how out of shape I was. It was embarrassing, but Alex was reassuring. We took the better part of an hour and a half to walk the full eight-mile path. I was bathed in sweat, completely exhausted. But what mattered was that I’d done it.

It
felt good to be out of the house. The tension Dick brought into it now made it feel like a prison. I was constantly ducking and hiding from Dolores and him.

Alex
sensed I needed to talk. We sat on a bench in a small, enclosed field reserved for dogs and their humans. Being an odd hour of the day, we were the only ones there. Dali, unleashed, took off on a galloping exploration of the area. He looked like a pit bull turned greyhound, romping until he was ragged. Tongue lolling, he finally rejoined us at the bench. Alex gave him water from a bottle. He lapped it up with a doggie smile on his brown lips.

I took this time to unload my emotional baggage on the trainer. He listened politely. I knew he could tell my stress level had changed from
high to off the charts since we had last spoken. I talked rapidly, angrily. I finished by telling him the most recent incident where Dolores, while alone with me, suggested it would be nice if I went to my room and left the two of them alone together for the evening.

“
She tried to send me to my room in my own house,” I exclaimed with the same feeling of disbelief I’d experienced when it occurred. “I tried to tell Dick what she did later, and he took her side.” I shook my head. “He doesn’t care. I won’t play his game and it pisses him off. I won’t let him participate in the shoots because I can’t trust him, so he forces this woman into the middle of my life, to the extent that I can’t do my job. I used to be able to tolerate his games, but then he singled me out as the cause of all his problems.” Enumerating all the things I had gone through in one sitting like that made it seem so much worse to me. Like I’d been blind to a speeding truck headed right for me.

“
Hell, meet hand basket. I can’t stand him anymore,” I blurted out.

The pressure had built
up in me to the point that I couldn't contain it any longer; I cried. I didn’t know until that moment how much Dick’s false life had robbed me of my own happiness. “He’s damaging everyone and everything around him with his farce. Including me.
Especially me!
And he’s taking joy in harming me. It's like he’s trying to teach me a lesson about what happens when I don't bend to his will.”

Alex
handed me a napkin from his pocket. I’d sobbed it wet in seconds. I didn’t even know those tears were in me. That I’d been holding them back. Dali looked up at me; licked my hand, then lay back down and went to sleep.

“
I don’t understand him anymore,” I said. “The name-calling. Why would he do that?”

“
Because he’s miserable,” Alex said. “It sounds like your ballet model set something off in him. There’s an ancient proverb that says the most vicious lie you can tell is the one to yourself. I think he resents you because you’ve never had to do this; to lie to yourself about who you are. And you could leave right now and live an open life that no one would say a thing about. He can’t, and probably never will. So he has to make you feel bad for abandoning him in his game. You have to feel sympathy for any man stuck that deep in the closet. He’s living a half-life.” He shook his head. “I couldn’t do it. It would be like living in an emotional tornado.”

I looked around to make sure no one could see a grown man
’s tear-streaked face. The park was nearly empty.

“
He’s made me so unhappy I dread every morning I wake up now,” I confessed. Indeed, my first thought every morning was
please let him be gone
, and then,
please don’t let him bring her here today.
The whole day was lived in fearful anticipation of having to be in their company.

Alex
looked at me dolefully. I couldn’t believe the colors in his eyes. “There are two things I’m glad for in my life,” he said. “One is that I minored in psychology and two, I have a mother and grandmother who are Buddhists. Both come in handy as a personal trainer to help me understand people and motivate them. And I know what you need to know.”

I needed to know
what he meant by that. I asked him to share it with me.

“
It’s the old saying, you can’t see the forest for the trees.” His expression was kind. Dali looked up at me and, I swear that dog mimicked the kindness on his human's face. “You can’t see yourself because of him. He’s made you focus only on him. Like he is the most important thing in your life, the most important thing you need to be concerned about. He’s taken the spotlight away from what he doesn’t want you to see: your own talent and importance. This is how someone like him works. The world revolves only around them.”

What Alex said was not untrue
. I worried more about what Dick was doing and what I had to put up with because of him, than anything related to myself or my own needs. My business had been neglected because of him, of trying to work around him. I drank because of him.