The one-night-a-week sexy homo rock and roll club that I DJ-ed for and my old friend Pride unexpectedly ended up go-go dancing at as the new boyfriend of the promoter, didn’t last as long as their relationship did, and during that period of time Pride actually seemed oddly tamed. I moved just a few blocks down the street from him, and I would see him and his boyfriend on occasion both dressed for work in crisp white shirts and black pants as waiters. This was highly uncharacteristic of Pride, both holding a job and living the partnered domestic existence, but it went on for some time, two or three years.
During that time I couldn’t help but notice that any time I was out and about meeting more and more people, doing more and more drugs, enjoying wild sex parties with people I had previously found too scary, bonafide residents of the darker side of life, invariably these people would bring up Pride. They all seemed familiar with him, like everyone knew Pride.
Like the night my boyfriend and I were cruising Collingwood together and got picked up by a short kind of menacing Italian guy in a Jaguar who took us to his home in the Castro which was filled with a huge collection of taxidermed animals of all sorts – hawks, mountain lions, raccoons, bearskin rugs, a fox – all staring at us from every direction. We were led to a back room with a sling and a wall of porn videos going where we were expected to endlessly fuck the Italian guy, who turned out to be the kind of bottom who was so voracious it eventually began to render him unattractive. We came to an impasse and he ordered breakfast for us from a nearby restaurant, making some comment about having to appear in court in the early morning.
When he left us alone to go pick up the food, I started putting details together and realized that this guy was the guy who recently had stabbed one of Pride’s close drug dealer friends and that he was just a very insane, hot tempered ex-con. Of course, there were so many signs I should have recognized, one of which was the gothic lettering across his abdomen that said “Co Co County,” which I saw while fucking him. It didn’t occur to me what it stood for; I just thought it was a reference to Chanel and almost said that. On the contrary, it stood for Contra Costa County and was definitely a prison tattoo. We were definitely playing with fire, and soon would be sharing breakfast with the guy on his way to a sentencing for stabbing someone I vaguely knew. We ate quickly. Luckily another guy stopped by and the menacing Italian guy decided to get in one more fuck before his sentencing, allowing us the option to hightail it out of there while he was distracted by the new guy’s ten inch cock. Total bottom.
I ran into Pride shortly after that one evening when I saw him wandering by my house. He told me he had been with friends who shot him up with heroin, which he’d never done before and hated. He was feeling wobbly and thirsty and out of sorts, so I took him in and sat him down and let him gather himself for awhile.
I believe this act of concern always touched Pride, like he found it unusual that someone would care enough about his well-being, and after that I felt much closer to him. He told me he had broken up with his boyfriend a while back and felt all the better in the long run being single. Then he started telling me a bit about his childhood which was fascinating, how at 14 he was discovered having sex with another male, someone a great deal older than him, and at that point in time his family was going through a Jesus freak stage, so they promptly whisked him off to church where they presented him in front of the entire congregation to be saved. They ordered him to redeem himself by asking the Lord for forgiveness and to solemnly promise to never commit this sin again, to never give in to the perverse temptation of pleasures of the flesh. He refused to say he would never do it again, and the congregation began to pummel him with all that sinner, sinner, damnation, burn in hell’s fire for eternity stuff. So upon being handed an e-ticket straight to hell, Pride asked the sweaty speaking-in-tongues-type minister if the other members of the congregation that he had been enjoying those carnal pleasures with – like that man there and that one over there sitting with his wife and yet another few looking nervous in the pews – would be going to hell also. His family rushed him out of the church turned upside down by hypocrisy and lies and never once returned, to the building or the faith. I was astonished and fascinated and loved him immediately. He gave me a warm hug and thanked me, and was ready to head up the hill to his place.
After that I began visiting and hanging out with Pride far more frequently, meeting lots of his friends, buying really good drugs, and feeling like whenever I visited there I was stepping into a different world, a strange world that had little or nothing to do with what was normal and right and good. This was a world where people didn’t hold regular jobs, where youth and beauty were used like currency, and criminal activities were commonplace but always seemed oddly heroic to me. One time I walked in to find a tiny and pushy Filipino drag queen counting out tens of thousands of dollars in stacks of bills on the bed. Another time I interrupted a group of eight people who were all administering big hits of speed via syringe simultaneously while recording the event, or “group hit,” as an outgoing phone message for Pride’s answering machine. It ended with a lot of breathy exhales, some coughs and a female voice slurring out the words, “I’m on fire.”
You never knew what would happen every time the doorbell rang when you were at Pride’s place. Who would it be? A really hot married guy scoring drugs, getting high and wanting to get fucked in one quick efficient visit? One or two of the really tough dealer-types you were always afraid of but found fascinating and sexy and longed to be liked by them? A pair of concerned people walking their blue-lipped, over-dosed friend in for a clean-well-lighted place to be revived? Or an occasional rough-trade looking man who would walk in, notice Pride had company and say, “Get rid of ‘em,” then go into the bedroom while Pride quickly ushered us out saying, “Just never mind… GOODBYE!”
When you saw him next and asked him what that was all about he wouldn’t remember the incident or would say something like “Oh, I got him high and he fucked me really hard.” I’d look at him shocked, worry digging furrows in my brow, and he’d look back with that smile and his eyes sparkling and say, “Wha-it? I loved it.”