Jim (Part 1)

This is just a rough draft of part of a story I've been working on. Enjoy.

JIM (Part 1)

Jim was in his mid forties. He had short soft hair with a slight receding hairline. A few pounds over weight and just slightly taller then myself, at the time exactly 5'9. I know this because I was obsessed with becoming 6'4 and I measured myself against the walkway from our living room to our dining room every day. 6'4 is what I saw to be the perfect height for a slam-dunk in basketball, and therefore the perfect height to make my life complete. Jim was approximately 6'0, too short for professional ball, so I didn’t pay to much attention to that. What I did notice was the way his wrist would snap when he was speaking and telling stories about his daughters. I paid attention to the gold hop earring that hung from his left ear, and the rainbow bracelet he always wore, which never matched any outfit. You see, Jim was the quintessential small town gay man, so of course to play his role in society, he was a hairdresser. I knew Jim was gay before I even knew what gay meant. I found it strange, odd and assumed he was the only one in my town and possibly the surrounding 100 miles. If there was another one within that distance, surely they knew each other and were planning to move in together. I decided that the best way to figure out exactly what being gay meant was to start with the internet and search around. This was in the days of the 28K dial up modem that seemed lightening fast and was not available in my home. So my next step was to find the public library. They had a small computer room filled with white Gateway computers that took up half the room. There were 6 computers in total and usually always full. That is unless you ran from school at exactly 3pm and took the shortcut through the local Doherty Hotel parking lot. It didn’t take me long to find a site called gay.com and discovered that there were other people like that closer then you'd think. Not that I'd be into that sort of thing, but I needed to see pictures, in case I happened to see one on the street. I was going to need to be able to identify them and see if they possibly knew hairdresser Jim. Basically I was on gay sites to find Jim happiness, not because I wanted to know anything about that type of, I don't know, thing. Behold, there were plenty of other gay people in the area. And for the most part, they all resembled Jim. And, one was Jim. How could Jim have a profile on this site? Jim had a wife and two daughters, possibly three. What if they saw this profile, this outright admittance to a homosexual lifestyle, what would they say? And further more, why hadn’t I noticed the two boys behind me from my school looking over my shoulder and seeing that I was on a big screen with gay.com splashed across the top is purple text? Quickly I got up and left, I would have to continue my expedition later. Leaving the library I couldn’t help but feel as if everyone in there knew what I had been looking at and was ready to throw stones at me. I grabbed the new copy of Rolling Stone on the way out to somehow regain my masculinity. Either way, I couldn't stop myself from thinking,” wait, you have a wife? Which means you have had sex with her, at least 2 or 3 times?!" As a gay man, how the fuck does that work? Does she know he is gay? When did she find out? I mean, he is gay, which means sex with other men, right? Of course, I never asked these things to him, I did the next best thing; I asked my best of the month, Bethany. Bethany's mom owned the beauty saloon, so clearly she would have all the answers to anything I could possibly ask. After school Bethany and I would walk to the saloon, where her mother would growl at us until we would agree to take the garbage out, for a small fee. Enter Jane, tall (but not tall enough for the WNBA) skinny, sleek black hair that hung straight to her shoulders. Jane always had a cigarette in her hand and another one ready to be lit. She fell somewhere on the fashion line of between Morticia Addams and Donna Karen. Morticia for the clothing, Donna Karen for the nose. Her voice was scratchy and deep, possibly from the smoking. But I assumed there was something else in there, possibly a demon waiting for her to stop tanning long enough for him or her to escape. Jane was also and most likely married to a gay man herself. Maybe him and Jim were good for each other? Jane’s husband lived downstate in Detroit for a good portion of the year with a male roommate and would commute back up to our small town for the weekend. I don’t necessarily think that made him gay, in all honesty, as much as I loved both Bethany and her mother, there is no way I could spend 7 days a week them. I’d spent a few nights at their house and it was essentially the Bethany and Jane Shit Show. Bethany and I finally grabbed the garbage after a good twenty minutes of negotiations, and sneaking two cigarettes for the long 1/2 block walk to the dumpster. In between inhales I would ask Bethany all my questions, the main one being, they are still married!?!? What was I really asking? Was I the original George bush fighting for the sanctity of marriage? Bethany explained that the wife had meet Jim boyfriend and she knew everything. Well, WTF, he has a boyfriend? Why am I spending so many hours logged in at the goddamn library trying to find him the perfect man? I'd been cheated, lied to, and as soon as I finished that Marlboro ultra light 100 he was going to have a piece of my mind. Bethany then went on to tell me, "Jim is bi-sexual, he likes men and woman. Don't you know anything?" As I angrily puffed away I thought, "well apparent-fucking-ly not!" Before I had time to ask for more details on this "bi-sexual" thing I was told to go home. Bethany had an audition in Detroit the next day, she was very tired, I was stressing her out, and she needed to rest her voice with tea. I understood that Bethany was a star in training and I had to respect that or I would never be invited to her mansion in the Hollywood hills when she hit it big. Wherever the Hollywood hills were. I'd have to wait until at least two days later to let Jim know that I didn't appreciate being lies to and that I could handle the truth. I was 13, my parents had gotten a divorce and my father didn't even have to be gay. Why couldn't he just sign the papers and not drag this country into sin!! That night I went home and screamed along to You Oughta Know in his wife’s honor.