Earl made love to me on Thursday, August 16, 1977. I remember the exact date because it was the day Elvis Presley died. We found out watching TV in Earl's bed, our arms entangled together with a pink rose colored bed sheet draped over our sweaty and cum stained loins. Elvis was dead we were told.
We stared in silence at the screen filled with images of thinner rock idol in days gone by. I was no big Elvis fan, so his death seemed just another passing event. What I always remember from this day was not a dead Elvis but what Earl and I did. It was the first time a man-made love to me. It was just a month after my wedding.
I had met Earl two years before in an acting class just after I graduated from college in California with no idea of what do with myself. He was 32, I was 24. Earl had watery pale green eyes that always seemed to be on the verge of tears. With a bushy mustache and short cropped brown hair with strands that lapped over his right eyebrow, I couldn't help but think that he looked like a distant cousin of Adolph Hitler. All he needed was a swastika armband and brown shirt to complete the family resemblance.
Earl ran a dry-cleaning story and said he had always wanted to act but wasn't really good at it. He said he took acting classes to be creative. I think he did it to pick up men.
I hooked up with my then wife around the same time. She had dark hair and a buxom figure that attracted the constant stares of men Earl knew about her, but she did not know about him.
Up to this point, I was searching for an identity as well as a career. Both seemed to be vacant, empty lots. My identity, sexual or otherwise, could only be listed as unknown.
"You're like me," Earl told me one day after class as we sat in my beaten-up spruce green Toyota Corolla.
"What do you mean?"
"You're sensitive. You're kind and ...."
"And what?"
"You're like me," he said.
I would often follow Earl to his place in the Hollywood Hills, off Topanga Canyon Boulevard. It was a two-bedroom house with a row of windows in the front looking out over the downhill landscape of manicured brush and imported Eucalyptus trees. We sat and talked and drank vodka tonics and sloe gin fizzes. We talked art and acting and life. I did feel I was with someone that was... like me.
I don't know what I felt toward Earl. It wasn't love or lust even. I wasn't even attracted to his body, a simple, unadorned piece of muscle and bone that was thin and mostly shapeless. But just knowing someone wanted me kept me going to his house.
"Come on. You like men, don't you? Admit it. You like men. Men can give you more than any woman," Earl would say.
I didn't like certain men. I didn't like beer drinking males drowning in a sea of testosterone. I had nothing in common with them. I didn't call women pussy or cunts. I didn't whistle or tell them to sit on my face. I didn't count aloud how many women I fucked. I hadn't fucked that many, anyway.
I also didn't like men who listened to Judy Garland records or drooled over Liza Minnelli or collected pictures of Marilyn Monroe with her white dress air blown above a New York subway grail. I didn't call another man 'honey.' I didn't like men who stared at me too long with soft blue eyes.
I never chased men. I chased women, and some of them chased me. What I did know was that being hunted felt better than hunting. If there was anything I wanted, it was to be among the hunted.I knew Earl wanted me. I played with him like a coquettish tart plays with an incensed john. I egged him on with each long look I gave. I promised him everything with those looks. I gave him nothing.
He wanted me to leave my wife.
"Come live here with me," he said, even though we had never touched.
