Bad Love, Mad Love

My online search for casual carnality or more was really picking up. Email conversations with several interesting people actually near or in Durham were flowing.

On AOL IlikeFrailGuys got a “Hi” from someone in Raleigh. Since he was twenty years my junior I asked if he’d noticed my age. He had, didn’t care. (I would learn that Charles preferred the company of older people even in friendship.) After very little conversation he gave me his home phone number.

Charles voice was like manna in the wilderness: the pure, unadulterated sound of a very nelly southern gay boy. You know those loud, bitchy queenish guys that irritate most people? They are a vanishing species. And I’ve always loved them dearly. Knowing well the childhoods that forged their personalities I never begrudge them their ways.

I’d never met anyone more outrageously femme than Charles. Even the blind and deaf could tell his affectional orientation. Others gave him dirty looks. My eyes were filled with desire.

Charles and I started spending as possible together. Far too soon - I was so strongly smitten - I asked him to share my life.

I had a great living situation. My best friend and business partner charged me half the month’s property tax as rent for sharing his huge house. But it was too cramped for a couple. Charles wanted a house, what else was there to do but buy one?

Moving into this small shack near the Northgate Park of Durham was the beginning of Hell. Our sex life became minimal.

Foolishly I thought I could handle all of Charles problems. A sufferer of crohn’s disease he had to take special pills just to eat. He took antidepressants and various medications to moderate his bipolar tendencies.

Bipolar mood switches became common and steadily increased. Waking up at 2:00 a.m. and finding him in the yard rearranging his rose garden became normal. As did being yelled and screamed at. Thanks to the powers of tolerance acquired from my momma I’d just wait for him to calm down and apologize.

When he said someone had stolen his keys I called the locksmiths even though it was after working hours and had the house and both of his cars rekeyed. When I found his keys under something I just shrugged my shoulders. Accepting his erratic ways and wackiness was something special I thought I could give him.

Charles was a liturgical organist. I’m an atheist but still made him a present of a reprint of the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer. Eventually outlandish behavior cost him his job: $700 a month for six hours work. He would never get another. He kept ‘losing’ money. My golden age comic book collection went on eBay to keep the bills paid.

Charles I learned was the only person I’ve ever met who shouldn’t smoke pot. Marijuana triggered the worst bipolar craziness. But weed would prove a comparatively minor problem.

That he’d grown up with so much physical pain I’d expected gave him a tolerance for it. No. Charles couldn’t stand the least discomfort He started buying vicodin from a neighbor woman. Eventually percocet from the neighborhood vendors.

If I’d come home fifteen minutes later one day he would’ve died from percocet overdose: he’d been eating them like candy. Foolishly I thought that would wise him up.

Instead he started sniffing heroin. Then injecting it. One morning I couldn’t wake him up. I dialed 911. He’d almost drowned in his own vomit will in a heroin induced coma. Refused admittance because I wasn’t a blood relations I spent almost two days wondering if he was brain dead or crippled. I thought that would cure him.

Then came crack. I’ve known drug addicts and alcoholics. Crack addiction is so much worse that it has to be lived with to be truly understood. He would wake me up in the middle of the night to badger me for money. Once while touching me intimately he took money out of my pants. &c.

Eventually being near Charles would cause me to shake. Life felt worse than worthless: it had become undesirable.

I gave Charles an ultimatum: go live with a certain friend and get treatment or I’d leave. He did but kept relapsing.

Once I discovered his crack addiction it slowly seeped into my mind how often I’d been liked to. He’d invented nonexistent friends, gone out to eat but really to a drug dealer.

My love was finally crushed out of existence. All the pleasure I’d once taken into catering to him, caring for him soured. My passionately romantic nature had been subverted.

Sadly Charles never meant to be evil. Part of him was always the naοve little boy. But I’d come to feel like - of all things - an abused spouse, a battered wife. Finally I did what sanity demanded and told him our relationship was dead. No longer could I wait in hope his addictions would be cured.

Idiotically loyal I did my best to remain his friend. To help him. Even though he used the mortgage - we jointly owned the house - against me. The age of miracles temporarily resumed when I got him to agree to let me buy him out. (I had more money back then.)

Months later having agreed to let him spend a night on the couch I awoke to find his body on the floor. He’d died. Multiple opiates had finally resulted in an overdose from which I wasn’t in time to rescue him.

Much both happy and terrible is omitted from this summary. That nightmare doesn’t haunt me anymore. But the legacy of my time with Charles is financial ruin, diminished health and crippled sexuality.

There are times when it is better to have not loved at all.