B & G

Chapter 1Brent That first year at the university was certainly full of milestones, events that changed my life in wonderful ways. I had my first full-time teaching appointment. After three years at Columbia, I was back in Ohio. I met lots of people and made new friends including, especially, Gabe. Although it was certainly lust at first sight when I met Gabe, I’m sure I had no inkling of what was going to happen between us. It was about a week before the fall semester began. I was moving into my office as a new assistant professor of music history at the Conservatory of Music of a not-too-large university in Ohio. The Dean of the Conservatory had shown me the office when I was there in the spring, and her secretary had just reminded me of the room number, so I was walking down the hall, listening to the cacophony that pervades all schools of music. It wasn’t as loud as it would be after classes began, but obviously several of my colleagues were practicing. As I approached the door of my office, I saw him. He was attaching a name plate that said, “Dr. Brent Collins, Music History.” Since I was walking down the hall and he was facing the door, I first saw him in profile. Though he was almost exactly my height, he was more muscular and probably outweighed me by twenty pounds. His khaki pants were stretched tight over his package and butt. His profile was perfect. Classical, I’d call it. He gave the screwdriver an extra twist and turned toward me. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I need to get in there.” How was that for a great opening line? His smile nearly knocked me down! He had perfect white teeth, short, dark brown hair, incredibly intense blue eyes, a neat ‘stache, and a cleft in his chin. At some level I registered that embroidered on his khaki shirt was Gabe Sutton, Sr. Electrician. “You’ve got your hands full. Let me get the door.” He whipped out a key, unlocked the door, and stood back so I could go inside. After I had stepped in, he reached inside and switched on the lights. I put the box on the desk and turned, offering him my hand. “Hi, I’m Brent Collins.” He grinned. “Yeah, I’d sort of figured that out.” My c**k lurched at that very moment, and he was to have that effect on me nearly every time he smiled at me. “I’m Gabe Sutton.” It was my turn to grin. “Yeah, I read that,” I said, nodding toward his chest. Great chest, by the way. “Aren’t you a bit overqualified to be attaching name signs to doors?” “Right now, just about every available body is doing that. The signs for the new faculty just came in this morning, so everyone is helping out to get them in place.” I couldn’t think of a thing to say next. Did I mention he was wearing work boots? I love a hunky guy in work boots. “Well, professor, I’ve got to keep moving. It was nice to meet you. I’m sure we’ll be seeing each other, because the heating/air conditioning system in this building has always been recalcitrant, and you have a particularly touchy thermostat in this office. Just call Buildings & Grounds and ask for me if you have any problems, okay?” I stuck out my hand again, and he took it. Hoping he wouldn’t notice the tent growing in my shorts, I told him I was glad to meet him and I was sure I’d see him again soon. I watched as his butt went out the door, turned left, and disappeared. I waited a few minutes for my d**k to deflate. Recalcitrant? I thought. Pretty fancy word for an electrician…I kept going back to the car for more loads until the boxes were all in the office. As I opened them and put their contents in drawers and on shelves, I kept thinking about Sutton. My reaction to him had been positive, strong—and dangerous. I grew up in a small-town suburb of Cleveland. I was an only child. We had a normal family, not a lot of money, but comfortable. I knew I was gay at the age of fourteen, I guess, but I was smart enough to know I had to hide it. It wasn’t the kind of thing I could tell my parents, and I didn’t have any close friends except my buddy, Scott Bream. I knew if I told Scotty, that would be the end of our friendship. He was always making cracks about fags and cocksuckers and fairies. I got good grades throughout school. As a sophomore and junior, I went out for basketball. Junior year I got to play some, but I was definitely a second stringer. I wasn’t tall enough, for one thing. And I guess I wasn’t all that great as a player, either. I was really more interested in music. I played French horn in the marching band in the fall and in the orchestra the rest of the year. My father, who’d always worked out and taken good care of himself, dropped dead of a coronary embolism at work the summer between my junior and senior years of high school. He seemed fine when he left in the morning, but he never came back. He and I had never been especially close, but he was a good father, and I loved him. He left an insurance policy for mom and one for me. Hers let her pay off the house and have something left to live on, so she wouldn’t need to go to work if she didn’t want to. Mine left enough to pay most of my expenses for college. Scott was a good friend through all of that. He was into the dating scene, and I wasn’t, but he managed to spend time with me. We’d swim, or go to the movies, or just hang out. I had a major crush on him, but I knew he wasn’t like me, so I never told him, tried never to let him know I was gay. As I said, Scott was my only close friend, but I had a lot of people I thought of as just friends. I enjoyed the band trips and things of that sort. And I never let on to anyone about my gay urges. Or I thought I hadn’t. Apparently, however, I wasn’t as careful as I should have been about checking guys out in the locker room. It was senior year, maybe the second day after we’d resumed basketball practice. I was one of the last guys out of the gym that day. As I was walking toward the old Stratus dad had helped me buy, they jumped me. I never saw them coming. In the dark parking lot, a bunch of guys just beat the s**t out of me. But before I passed out, I heard voices calling me a fag and a cocksucker. I woke up in the ER. I was on a gurney, being wheeled back to the examination cubicle from X-ray, and I hurt like hell. Mom was in the cubicle bordering on hysterics. It was all pretty confusing after that. A man in a white coat took Mom away to talk with her, a hunky guy in navy blue scrubs told me I wasn’t going to die and that as soon as the X-rays were read he’d give me something for the pain, and there was a guy there I’d never seen before. Another guy in a white coat told him to go back to the waiting room, that he’d have to wait. They finally got things sorted out. I woke up the next morning to find they’d moved me to a room. Mom was there sleeping in a recliner. The nurse, a woman this time, brought me some juice and broth and told me a policeman wanted to see me. It was the stranger in the cubicle from the night before. I explained to him I hadn’t seen any of the guys who attacked me, but I knew there were several of them. He wanted to know if I had any idea who they were or why I was attacked. I told him I didn’t have a clue. He also told me that Coach Jackson had found me and used his cell to call 911, but that he hadn’t seen the guys who did it. As it turned out I had two cracked ribs and a bruised spleen. They let me go home the next day, but I was pretty helpless for a while. I did see Coach Jackson when I started back to school. I thanked him for helping me. I had learned later that he came to the hospital and waited there until he found out I was going to be all right. He wasn’t happy when I told him that I wanted to drop basketball. “Look, Collins, I understand you’ll be fit to play eventually. I don’t know why you got beaten up or who did it, but I hope you won’t let the bastards scare you into quitting. For your own sake, if not for the team, I think you should hold your head up and come back to practice as soon as you can.” I told him I didn’t think I could do that. He reluctantly accepted that and warned me to watch my back. I was grateful to him, though. The team really didn’t need me. He just wanted me to come back as a matter of pride. My pride, that is. But no way was I going to let myself in for that sort of thing again. While I was still in the hospital, the principal called a special assembly and made a lot of noise about how what happened to me simply wouldn’t be tolerated. He said the city police were going to increase their drive-bys, and urged everyone to go places in pairs, especially after dark. After I quit the team, there were no more hassles, but Scott told me he knew why I was beaten up. He said he was sorry about what happened to me, but that he knew why. He accused me of betraying him and said we couldn’t be friends any more. I pleaded with him, but he was adamant. He said he wouldn’t tell anyone I was gay and that he’d be civil when we saw each other at school, but I was to stay out of his life. Scott kept his promise. I don’t think he ever told anybody I was gay. But word got around, maybe from the same guys who’d beaten me up. A lot of my former friends distanced themselves from me. Devastated, I finished out the year and began to think about college. I took a weekend job bagging groceries at a supermarket, just to help with the college expenses. And it wasn’t as if I had anything else to do on weekends. When I graduated, I was in the top five percent of my class, and I was in the National Honor Society. I got a scholarship to Oberlin which helped augment what dad had left me. Even so, I worked summers during college with a lawn-maintenance company. That helped me keep in shape, and I always came back to campus in the fall with a great tan. While I was at Oberlin, Mom began dating a great guy she’d met at church. He was a widower, and they seemed to hit it off. They were married just a few weeks after I graduated from college, and that August they moved to Seattle. He was an engineer and took a job with Boeing. I had enough of dad’s money left so that, with a teaching fellowship, I could do grad work at Columbia. Even though I was doing my doctorate in music history, I continued to take lessons on the horn, and I was able to play pretty regularly with one group or another. New York was, of course, a great place to be for a music lover, and I ate it up. I couldn’t afford the price of theater tickets very often, but I did manage to see a few things. The same with the Met and the New York City Opera. And Lincoln Center! I spent most of my spare cash on concert tickets. With all the great performance groups in the city, who wouldn’t? All this time since I was beaten up, I had been practically asexual. I’d told myself it simply wasn’t worth it to risk that happening again. In college I was pretty much a loner, except to go places with other music students as a group. Oberlin had a lot of gay students, and it was a reasonably good place for gay people to be, but my sexuality wasn’t anyone’s business. Same in grad school, except that there I was too busy to have many friends. Again, some of the other Columbia PhD candidates and I went to concerts or would grab a coffee or a glass of wine together sometimes and talk. We talked music, of course. Favorite composers, favorite pieces, and favorite performers, mostly. Again, there were lots of openly gay people there. You’d think I would have opened up, relaxed, but I didn’t. I told myself I was going to stick to research, playing, and teaching, go to all the concerts I could, and just not think about s*x. Lots of cold showers, and all that. You can imagine how well I kept that resolution. I thought of s*x daily, and my hand became my closest friend. So that’s why I said earlier that Gabe Sutton was dangerous. He was so attractive, all my resolves about keeping to myself were on the verge of melting into the precum that was wetting my boxers. I told myself he could be eye candy only, that I could enjoy the view, but I must never approach him. Besides, though he was friendly, charming, he looked very macho. I doubted if he’d attack me if I came on to him, but he might very well spread the word about the new guy in music history, and I didn’t want that.