Shortly after my fateful first meeting with Pride outside of a Redwood City gay bar, I made the move to the big city, San Francisco, a place I had known would become my home since I was a small child growing up in southern Oregon. I found a place and a job as a cook and bought my first leather jacket, dyed my hair blonde, found a boyfriend, moved in with him, moved away from him, discovered speed, made some fabulous friends, immersed myself in all the punk rock music scene I ever dreamed of, even started writing a regular column in a local gay paper about rock music. In all, I carved myself a neat little adventurous sort of life in San Francisco.
Oddly enough, one of the main cornerstones of all my social interaction turned out to be The Stud Bar, the very place I was too afraid to go in prior to a chance meeting with a 16-year-old who had been there several times and liked it, and prompted me to brave it so as not to be outdone by a teenager. What I anticipated to be like a pit of gay vipers engaging in limitless sexual debauchery, severe drug abuse, danger and dancing, actually turned out to be a somewhat nurturing and friendly place, a place I would later describe as everyone’s living room or the bar where I “grew up.”
I thought of Pride on occasion, usually when being carded to get in. I had tried the number he gave me a few months after we met, but it had been disconnected. Many years later I learned that he was still around when I overheard a notorious chicken hawk, and one of my closer friends, who practically lived at the Stud as well talking about a beautiful boy named Pride. He saw my ears prick up and responded, “He said he knows you.” I asked a few questions about him and wondered why we hadn’t run into each other ever, but by that time I was probably pretty preoccupied with the third or fourth of my seven different boyfriends named Jeffery that I’d be involved with.
If I wasn’t preoccupied with a Jeff then I was often times fascinated with walking late at night around and around and around one block in the Castro with a school, a fenced in playing field, an AIDS Hospice, a Cala Foods and a street called Collingwood. This is where lots of people would go to cruise for dick, both on foot and in cars and only very late at night. It was an activity or ritual that not only addressed the reptilian man-hunt urge of the gay night prowlers, but for me also really spoke to the drugs I was doing and provided an activity to obsess on in a neat and contained way, marching around and around the block repeatedly with my eyes permanently opened wide like a shark taking in the possible prey that circled similarly around the block, seldom stopping, only slowing down for fear of drowning if stationary.
Other nights I likened the heated stroll to tigers running around the tree so fast they turned into butter, then worried if it was politically correct to even know that story. Or the one about the seven Chinese brothers, one of which swallowed the ocean while the others gathered gold and treasures from the ocean floor but they got too greedy and went too far and the skinny one who swallowed the ocean couldn’t hold it any longer and the greedy ones died, drowned in a wave of bulimic control issues and I wondered if the skinny brother was really a sister.
Then I saw a very pretty boy sitting in a parked car, so pretty I risked certain shark death by stopping my constant motion. I stared into the car and the boy almost pointedly ignored my doting presence. I was persistent with my focus, yet trying to look somewhat casual about it. Finally he looked over to me and smiled and I said hi. He reluctantly acknowledged me in a slightly cocky and totally bored manner, and I thought to myself, “Oh great, he’s gonna be an arrogant snot.” I approached the car and crouched down by the passenger window saying, “So what are you up to?”
“Nothing…sitting here.”
“What are you looking for?”
“I dunno. Maybe nothing,” he said in a somewhat curt manner, then stammered and qualified, “Dick, what do ya think I’m looking for? What is everyone here looking for?”
“I’m looking for a deep and meaningful love relationship with the man of my dreams,” I said.
He smiled over my comment and it shook the chill away from the snide and arrogant attitude he had served thus far. He kind of looked familiar for some reason.
“It seems like I’ve maybe met you before.”
He looked in my eyes and said, “No, I don’t think so.”
“What’s your name?” I asked. “I’m Don.”
“Pride,” he said.
“Oh my god, we have met before then,” I said. “It was a long, long time ago.”
He looked at me more carefully and said, “I can’t remember. God, I hate it when this happens, when I can’t remember someone who I’ve been with but they remember me.”
“Well think back. It was outside of a gay bar in Redwood City,” I said, trying to jog his memory. He still couldn’t remember, so I wracked my brain trying to think of other associative details that would bring it back to him. “We just sat in a car and talked and blew each other,” I said. Still nothing. He began to stammer out an apology when it hit me. “I know what will make you remember, it was the night of your sixteenth birthday that we met.”
He paused for a moment and smiled and said, “Oh yeah…now I remember!” Then a look of shock came to his face and his eyes widened and he said, “That’s really weird, because tonight is my birthday.”
“Really? No lie? Wow, so that would make it seven years to the day that we first met. That’s incredible! Kind of eerie too, like it was supposed to happen.”
Pride agreed.
Well, I guess this means we have an anniversary to celebrate. Wanna go to my house and fuck?”
Pride agreed, and thus began our strange and wonderful friendship, but very slowly. After that night I probably didn’t run into him again for at least six months, and I found him to be rather aloof and not very forthcoming with information about himself. I got the feeling right away that he hung with a crowd of people who were pretty hardcore and that he had embraced the darker end of a hedonistic drug culture even more fully and shamelessly than myself.
Certain clues made this apparent, like the fact that he didn’t ever seem to work at a normal job like everyone else yet he never seemed for want of cash or clothes or a place to live. I later learned that in his teens he actually was a model and made two commercials that probably paid very well, as one was for Crest and the other was for Stridex medicated pads. That’s big money and I don’t know exactly where it would have all gone. Who knew?
Pride never really let anyone completely know all about him ever, at least not right away. It had been many months since I saw him last and I was DJ-ing at a new club in the Mission. One night he walked in with my partner in this venture and was announced as the new go go dancer, one of three we generally featured. He acted kind of stand-offish towards me then because he was involved with the club promoter, and I sensed there was a hint of jealousy over the fact that we knew each other previously, so we kept our distance, all the way around.