Somewhere along the way, I absorbed my father’s conviction that summer is over by August. He was a teacher, and so he was already thinking about his new classes by then. That preoccupation of his would brood over any family trip taken in that month and only intensify my own foreboding of another school year, filling August with a faint sorrow for lost time that most people only have to suffer on Labor Day weekend. I always looked forward to being rid of that feeling as an adult, but I think it’s only gotten worse. First, there’s my own kids, heading off to school every year, with all the challenges they have to face; and then there’s our yearly trip to Michigan with Patrick and Tiff.
We all went to college together. My wife, Laura, and Tiff were roommates, and Patrick and I belonged to the same musical fraternity–yeah, I know, it sounds gay already. But it wasn’t: we musicians can guzzle beer and seduce women with the best of them (do you know a woman who doesn’t melt a little at a deep baritone?), and I seem to recall Patrick getting cheered once as he carved a notch in the Woody (don’t ask). But like any gathering of men, it had its undercurrents, and one of them ebbed and rolled in my heart for Patrick.
Trick, that’s what they called him–“Trick and Tiff,” when he first started dating her. Now he’s a project manager with three kids and a tattoo he regrets–somewhere, after marriage and before kids, he found religion, of all things. I mean, Laura and I go to church, too, but I don’t think it would make me feel badly about a tattoo. But then, we’re Catholic, and he’s some kind of evangelical-Bible-something-or-other. It makes him hotter, on some days, to look at him and see the strong, upright family man whom I once blew in May 2005.
I don’t think he actually remembers it, and I did not record it on the Woody. He was as drunk as hell, and I was perfectly sober. He called me “Lyssa” once as I was sucking him, and to this day I wonder who Lyssa was and when she got on his cock. Lucky cow, for him to remember her like that. He came from some small town in Ohio, and I figure she was from there–the one who got away, maybe. Who knows. I once almost asked Tiff, on one of our trips, as Patrick and Laura and our kids were in the surf, if she knew a Lyssa, but then I thought: the answer might be “yes,” and she may not appreciate thinking about her. So I kept my mouth shout, just as I never talked to Patrick, ever, about blowing him.
He tasted like coffee, which was strange and endearing at the same time. I only blew two other guys in my life, Nathan Blechman in high school and some dude my freshman year at college when I was only a little tipsy, and they both tasted like detergent. But Patrick was all richness and cream–and yes, I loved him, and I love him still.
I’m not sure what kind of love it is, but it feels a lot like August to me. Maybe it’s just because I always see him every August now–and honestly, it’s mostly the wives who make it happen; Patrick and I hang out and have fun, but it’s mostly as fellow dads and for the sake of a remembered brotherhood than anything else. He mostly talks about some men’s Bible group he attends in Maple Grove; I still sing in a band of other loser-dads on some weekends, just for fun, but he’s given up music entirely it seems. The point is, we don’t have a lot in common anymore, and he doesn’t even know that we once did one of the most intimate acts any two guys could do.
So every August I sit here, on this rocky beach, looking at his back and those gym-toned buns, his body easing slowly into comfortable dad-hood, and it always marks the start of that old August feeling. I don’t want to blow him anymore, not really; I just want us to stand, together, in the sun, on this beach, perfectly naked, embracing. Seriously, I’d be happy with that, once a year. As it is, I just feel this old, familiar, almost fatherly sentimentality, a faint sorrow for who we were and what we’ll never be.
Incredible writing! Well done.
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