Follow Carmen, a young and deeply closeted gay teenager as he navigates the 1980's and 1990's yearning for love and trying to find where he fits in.
This story is rated M because it contains elements of death (including children), homophobia, religi...
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Over the course of the next few months I got to know quite a bit about James and Derrick. Not long after I met them they moved into an apartment in Dartmouth, just down the road from me, so it was quite convenient for us to hang around now.
James, as I had expected, was all ego. He thought he was God's gift to gaydom, and he made no efforts to hide this thought. He would lose his mind if he thought he had a hair out of place. Naturally, I took advantage of this to bug him. He'd ask something like "Do these pants make my ass look fat?" and I'd answer "No, it's your ass fat that makes your ass look fat."
This was all in fun, of course – the guy didn't have an ounce of fat on him, for God's sake, but I always loved his reactions. I also was discovering that James was not as faithful to Derrick as I had thought. He was always telling me stories about his conquests. Part of me was sickened by this, but part of me got grim satisfaction from knowing that I would never, ever, be one of those conquests, and that it was driving him crazy.
Derrick, on the other hand, was one of the best looking men I had ever known, and yet he did not realize this. His hair was indeed naturally burgundy, and his dark skin came from his aboriginal roots. He was almost exactly my age – his birthday was on 23 December, mine was on Boxing day, so he was three days older than me – a fact that I never let him forget.
As attractive as he was, he was so used to living in James's shadow that he was convinced he was unworthy of anyone's affection. He seemed to know that James was cheating on him, but his self esteem was so low that he put up with it, thinking that he was lucky to be James's boyfriend. I wasted no opportunity to let Derrick know that he was wrong about himself. Even Mel would join in here, saying things like "See? I've been telling you this for years! You're better than this!"
Unfortunately, one of the side effects of his low self esteem was that he was an alcoholic. I had not really noticed it that first night we had met, but he was a prodigious drinker, and once he got one drink into him it became his goal to get as drunk as he could, as fast as he could. He would get sloppy drunk every weekend.
Still, there was nothing that would separate the two of them. James stuck with Derrick because he needed the stability and the place to live (Not to mention money: Derrick worked full time as a butcher, James had never worked a day in his life, instead drawing government disability for his supposed mental issues that prevented him from working). Derrick stuck with James because he was convinced, by none other than James himself, that he would never do any better.
It was a very sad situation, and as much as I wanted to help Derrick see his own worth it was James who finally put an end to it, when he announced that he would be moving to Los Angeles to pursue a career in acting. Derrick didn't want to go to LA, so James simply said "Well, with or without you, I'm going". He had never set a date, but the fact that he would eventually be leaving was hanging over them like the Sword of Damocles. It wasn't a matter of 'if', but 'when'.
