While largely fiction, the following story is based on a once very real friendship between two very real living men -- one of them being myself -- who drifted apart for no good reason. The names have been changed, but I am "Drew," the driving force in trying to rekindle the friendship. Please don't reprint it, in part or in whole, without permission.
PART 1
The ice in my second drink was pretty well melted, and I stared at it wistfully as I sat alone in a popular neighborhood piano bar in Montgomery, Alabama, where my friend Vince Paulson and I used to meet several times a month in our early careers. We had been friends for a long time by then, but those little get-togethers were like icing on the cake for me -- a way to unwind after a long day of work with someone who had always meant so much to me.
Now it was 30 years later and those get-togethers had long since ended. I glanced self consciously around the bar as I sat there in a booth by myself hoping -- but not expecting -- that Vince would join me once again. Other patrons were starting to make me uneasy by their obvious desire to sit in a booth with their friends. I could see it in their oblique stares -- why was this man taking up so much space when a bar stool should have been enough for his sorry behind?
I'd been there since 5:30 p.m. -- a time when the bar had not been busy, but -- more importantly -- the time when Vince and I used to meet there so many years ago. Around 4:30 in the afternoon at work I would frequently get a call from him.
"How about it, Drew? Got time for quick one after work?"
Not having anyone to go home to, I would of course always say "Yes," and an hour later we'd be nibbling happy hour snacks and drinking a beer together, comparing notes on our new jobs, and reveling in each other's company. There was hardly anything we didn't talk openly and honestly about. We had grown up together and had shared just about everything -- except the one thing that I had wanted from him most of all.
By 6:30 he would be gone and racing home to his new bride in the suburbs and I would be going back to my empty apartment to read a book or watch "Wheel of Fortune" and "Jeopardy" while I ate my dinner alone -- usually nothing more than a pot pie or a frozen entree that I had pulled out of my freezer and stuck in the microwave.
I wanted to hate Anne, but I couldn't. She was the sweetest young lady I had ever met, and she never seemed to resent the time that Vince spent with me. In fact, I knew she even encouraged it, because she told me so. She knew of our long history as friends and her new husband's need for at least one good male friend in his life. She seemed to instinctively know how much we needed each other.
What she didn't know -- and neither did he at the time -- was how utterly heartbroken I'd been when I had to stand up next to him the day he married her -- forcing a smile, listening to the tender vows they made to each other, and wanting so desperately to be standing in her place.
Vince and I had been friends since we were six years old and living a half block from each other in Montgomery's Oak Park neighborhood. We both had brothers who were much younger than we were, so we kind of adopted each other as "brothers" at a time when we were too young to realize that most young boys weren't so devoted to each other as we were.
For years we did everything together that little boys do. Well, almost everything. I knew every inch of his body from sharing baths together during our frequent sleepovers, YMCA swimming classes, and our mutual disdain for clothing of any kind when the weather got hot -- which was much of the year in Montgomery. As we got to be around 10 and would get chances to be alone with each other, we would often strip off and hang out in our rooms naked. We didn't care -- we found it fun and daring. As I got older though, I found it more than that, especially when we would spend the night together that way, as we did so many times without our parents knowing.
Eventually, as erections started to happen around the age of 11, we got (or I should say Vince got) self conscious and decided we shouldn't do that anymore. I was disappointed in that, but I kept it to myself, not wanting him to know how much his smooth little body fascinated me. I started to realize that Vince had not only been witnessing my erections but had inadvertently been the cause of most of them.
By the time we reached 13 or 14 we were still close friends, but I was noticing that Vince had a wider range of interests than just me. We always went to the same schools, and in high school Vince started noticing a pretty young girl named Anne, whom he started dating. I would try to get interested in girls and even went out with a few, including occasional double dates with Vince and Anne, but my heart wasn't in it -- I wanted to be in the front seat with him. I yearned for the closeness of my friend as I felt him drifting away from the intense friendship we used to have.
Vince was growing into a very handsome young man -- tall, lean, and blessed with a gorgeous mop of coal dark hair, he turned a lot of heads. Like me, he was no jock -- he was sensitive, intelligent, polite, and soft-spoken at a time when most young men our age were anything but.
Our friendship seemed to get closer once again as we decided to room together in Tuscaloosa for all four years of college. Being a year younger, Anne had another year of high school in Montgomery, so I more or less had Vince to myself for our freshman year at UA. I say "more or less" because he would make frequent trips home on weekends to see her. She joined us as a student at UA the following year. Vince and I still spent a lot of time together, but he was with Anne more and more as I wallowed in self pity in our room waiting for him to return.
Did I ever tell Vince exactly how I felt about him? Well, no. When you've grown up together you don't have to talk about your feelings of friendship -- you just know. But what he didn't know was that I was totally in love with him.
I tried once to talk to him about my mounting awareness that I was gay as we sat talking in my parked car one night, but he pooh-poohed it as just something I was going through. He thought he knew every nuance of my being, but he didn't. Even as I pounded on the steering wheel and I tried to express my frustrations over my attraction to males, I could see that he clearly didn't want to talk about it. So I backed off and let him change the subject.
After we graduated from UA, we both found good jobs back in Montgomery, and Anne transferred to Huntingdon College there to complete her degree and be close to Vince. He spent a lot of weeknights with me then and reserved his weekends for her. It was fun while it lasted, but the sound of wedding bells on the horizon put a definite damper on it.
The day they finally tied the knot was the worst day of my life, and I cried my heart out before and after the ceremony. I managed to hold it together during their wedding so as not to embarrass them or myself as Vince's best man. To this day, I still don't know how I did it.
For a year or so afterward, we still got together for lunch or for a drink after work, but it wasn't the same. Our relationship had changed -- he was now a married man and I wasn't. Eventually, I couldn't take the status quo anymore and took a job in Indianapolis, nearly 600 miles north, to try for a fresh start.
On my last night in Montgomery, Vince and Anne had me over to dinner at their small upstairs apartment. He walked me back down to my car at the end of the evening. We never had had a hugging relationship, so we quietly and stoically shook hands as I struggled to keep my emotions in check. He smiled and held eye contact but didn't let on if he was hurting like I was.
I got in my car, and he leaned over and put his arms on the bottom of the open window and said a final good-bye. I drove away but had to pull my car over when I was out of sight of him, and I let go with great wracking sobs that left me emotionally drained for days.
We didn't have e-mail back in those days, so I would write letters to Vince often and in a not too subtle manner let him know that I wanted and expected replies, which -- much to my deep disappointment -- never came. He wasn't the kind of guy who liked to write letters, and I had to accept that eventually. I did visit them a couple of years later when I was back in Montgomery, but the light had gone out of his eyes. In a private moment I had with Anne, she told me that she had been begging Vince to write back to me, without success. I never understood why, and it honestly broke my heart. After one or two more tries, I gave up and decided I had to go on with my life without him.
Thirty years have gone by now, and we're in our early 50s. I married once, but it didn't last very long. I finally came out and had a few short-term male relationships after that, but no one held a candle to my beloved Vince.
I have no family in Montgomery anymore, so I've had little reason to come back. But that night a few weeks ago I sat in the same bar where Vince and I used to hang out when our friendship was still strong. Through an online search I found Vince's current address and -- after many years of not trying -- decided to make one last-ditch effort to reconnect with him. I had nothing left to lose. I told him in a letter that I would be where we always used to meet and named a date and time and invited him to join me.
I ached with expected but profound disappointment as my second drink of the evening disappeared. I reluctantly decided to give up and leave -- Vince had stood me up.
Several patrons looked like they were ready to pounce on the empty booth, but as I stood I saw a tall silver-haired figure in my way.
"Excuse me," I said, giving the man only a brief glance before trying to walk around him.
"Hello, Drew."
My heart thundered in my chest as I realized who it was.
"Vince!"
Smiling, I raised my right hand to greet the friend I had been waiting so long for, but he didn't take it. Instead, his arms went around my shoulders as he drew me into the first hug I had ever received from him, and I melted into it.
A booth-hungry couple tapped me on the shoulder and asked, "Are you leaving, sir?"
I turned to them and said, "No, I don't believe I am," and slid back down into the soft seat as my old friend slid in beside me.
"I'm so sorry to be late, Drew, but I had a meeting at work that ran long, and then I had trouble finding a place to park. I'm glad you waited for me."
"That's okay, Vince. I wasn't really expecting you anyway. It's been a long time."
"I know. I'm sorry. But I really was glad to hear from you. What are you drinking?"
We ordered a round from the busy waitress and settled in for some serious catching up. He did look glad to see me, but something about his demeanor made me sense that something wasn't quite right.
"Well, how have you been, Vince? How's Anne?"
Vince looked down at his drink and spoke so softly that I almost couldn't hear him.
"It's been rough, Drew. I lost Anne five years ago -- breast cancer. I still can't believe it. She was a wonderful wife to me."
"Vince, I'm so sorry -- I had no idea or I would have been here."
"I tried to contact you, but I didn't know how. I lost the last address I had for you, and you weren't listed in the phone book. I would've asked your folks, but I didn't know how to reach them either."
I was beyond stunned to hear this. I thought I had been ignored for all these years, but here was Vince telling me that he had needed me at least once and had actually tried to reach me.
"You did? I wish I'd known that. My parents left Montgomery a long time ago to be closer to me. They had health problems and I lost both of them several years ago."
"I'm sorry to hear that, Drew. They were always very nice to me when we were growing up. Where's your brother now?"
"We lost Derek in Iraq during Desert Storm 20 years ago. I have no family left."
"Wow -- I had no idea. Did you ever marry?"
"Yes. I married a woman named Beverly back in 1986. She was nice enough, but we knew within a few months that we'd made a mistake. We didn't really know each other well before we agreed to marry, and we just had too many differences to overcome."
"Any children?"
"No," I said. "You?"
"Anne and I had a son, Adam, born in 1984. He's still here in Montgomery and has a wife and two youngsters."
"So you're a grandpa," I said with a smile. "That seems hard to believe for some reason. I still think of us as 20-somethings. You still look good."
That was an understatement. Vince had gained a few pounds, but he had needed to -- he had been too skinny. At 53, he still had a full head of hair, but the black had prematurely turned to silver. As we talked, his dark eyes began to sparkle like they used to when we were young, unlike the last time I had seen him. His long slender hands gripped his drink. I remembered them like it was yesterday.
"You do, too, Drew," he said, glancing away. He'd probably never said anything like that to a man before. I soaked it in like someone who was starved for attention -- because I was.
Apparently embarrassed by his own candor, Vince changed the subject quickly.
"Would you like to get some dinner, Drew? I know a place not far from here, if you still like Southern cooking."
I thought of all the wonderful meals I'd enjoyed growing up here and had missed Up North in Yankee country -- the fresh seafood, the sweet barbecued ribs, hot bread with every meal, green vegetables that seem to only exist in the South, and even the grits, which I think I missed most of all.
"I'd love that, Vince. Finish your drink, and let's go."
My head was buzzing now after three drinks -- I seldom have more than one at a time. I desperately wanted to take Vince's arm as we strolled down Dexter Avenue but knew that neither he nor the passersby in this conservative Cradle of the Confederacy would think it appropriate.
We settled in for a dinner that made my mouth water and brought back memories of happier days in my hometown. Over the next two hours we talked about our careers, our families, the homes we had owned, and everything we had missed out on in the past 30 years.
Finally, Vince asked me how long I'd be in town. I told him where I was staying and that my plans were indefinite. I had a week off from work and had planned to do some sightseeing in the South before I headed back to Indianapolis.
"Would you come and stay with me for a few days, Drew? I have a big ol' house that's felt pretty empty since Anne died. I could use the company, if you don't mind."
"Thanks, I'd like that. I've paid for tonight's room, but I could stop by your place tomorrow night. What time do you get off work?"
"This is Friday, silly man," he teased, in his soft Southern drawl that had somehow always soothed my soul. "We have the whole weekend ahead of us."
We parted for the evening, and I made my way back to my hotel while Vince went home. As I stripped off my clothes and jumped in the shower, I smiled as I thought about the weekend ahead. As tears of happiness mingled with the shower water, I couldn't remember the last time I had felt this alive.
(To be continued)
Thanks for reading this far. If you're enjoying my story and would like see it continue, please let me know. I answer every e-mail, but I don't accept invitations to link to social networking sites. Please put "Vince" in the subject line so I know your message is not spam. Thanks!
To see a clickable list of my other Nifty stories, please click on the "Authors" tab on the Nifty site. Then scroll down and click on "Damian" (but note that "Damian Chandler," just below my name, is a different author). Damian (nvtahoeus@yahoo.com)