The Other Man

What If? by Jeffrey Ricker

Have you ever played what if? You know, where you take one moment or event in your life and ask, what if I’d done the exact opposite? What if I’d turned left instead of right? What would be different now?

The summer of 2003, I pretty deliberately started living out that game. I asked myself, What if I were a big old slut?

Maybe I should back up and set the scene for the train wreck that was the summer of 2003. In May of that year, my heart got a little stomped on. It wasn’t really the other guy’s fault; he wasn’t looking where he was going, and I foolishly put my heart right in front of his feet. This was not the smartest thing to do, but ten years ago I was even more naive than I am now. And let’s face it: the smart thing is not always the most exciting thing.

On its own, the heartbreak might not have been enough to send me into the spiral that soon occurred, but on top of that, I herniated a disc in my lower back that spring. This is why I have since sworn off yard work. (When I herniated the same disc again in 2011, I swore off spinning classes. Apparently, the safest thing to do is nothing.)

But wait, there’s more. I might not have been so freaked out even then, if my doctor at the time hadn’t screamed at me over the phone, “You need surgery! If you don’t get it, you might wind up paralyzed!” After this, I made an appointment for a consult with a neurosurgeon, left my office, and sat in my car and cried for a while.

Did I mention he’s now my former doctor?

So yes, I was a mess that summer. For months afterward, I couldn’t go running, which was the one outlet that had kept me from going completely insane before that. Once I lost access to my endorphin rush, the one release valve that kept everything else from melting down was shut off. And boy, did I melt down. It got to the point where I wasn’t able to do the basic things to function. Days went by where I barely ate. For a while, it seemed like I was living on Aleve and merlot. I got so skinny, co-workers told me the shape of my face was changing.

Who knew depression was the surefire way to reach my goal weight and beyond? And doesn’t it sound like the perfect state of mind to think about dating?

Looking back, I see how ridiculous my reaction was to the situation. I was wallowing, and I knew it. The only thing that surprises me now is that I was at all surprised at the time. But that’s the luxury of hindsight: You get to look back and realize what a complete i***t you were ten years ago, confident now in the fact that you’d never do anything so foolish as what you did back then.

I barely knew the guy who broke my heart, but that hadn’t stopped me from jumping right into the deep end. Too bad the pool was empty. As I soon learned, though, when you wipe out in the deep end, there’s still the shallow end to consider.

This was around the time when I also discovered that online dating sites, which I’d flirted with in the past, were also very useful for arranging booty calls. (Fine, call me slow on the uptake, but this was before smart phones, Grindr, Scruff, and whatever other mobile apps are littering the digital landscape these days. Now you can order up a piece of ass without even getting your own ass off the couch to turn on the computer. O brave new world that hath such wonders in it.)

Online dating was uncharted territory for me. While I wouldn’t call myself a prude, up to that point I’d never given my friends much of a reason to think otherwise. I only started dating guys in my mid-twenties, never very frequently or for very long. (I told myself I was concentrating on my career. In hindsight I can only ask myself, What career?) All of my attempts at dating tended to fizzle out around the two-month mark. For the longest time, six weeks seemed like the hurdle I’d never get over. By the time the summer of 2003 came around, I’d say I started making up for lost time.

I can’t say that I was very discerning in my selections that summer. I had only two criteria: Potential dates had to be within a fifteen-minute drive and be reasonably attractive. Both of those requirements were negotiable, though. I don’t know why I thought dating in that state of mind was a good idea, but it didn’t seem to be much of a hindrance. Apparently skinny and depressed were the qualities a lot of people found desirable.

Oh, who am I kidding? These guys didn’t really care about my state of mind—at least, most of them didn’t. Not that I cared much either. I had a feeling I was being foolish, but when your head says, “Are ya nuts?” your libido answers, “Yeah, baby!” and your heart says, “Leave me out of this; I’m on sabbatical.”

Guess which one talks the loudest? The dumbest one, of course. That’s how you end up getting it on with more guys in one summer than you have in your whole life up to that point—which still isn’t all that high of a number. In hindsight (and maybe because the memory is the first thing to go), few of the guys I met that summer remain particularly memorable.

There were a couple exceptions.

First, there was the Ballcap Guy. I swear, I can’t remember if he even took it off during s*x. I also can’t remember his name, either. Sad, I know, but I don’t really remember many names from that summer. I recall them from details, like the built guy with the hairy chest and a beard—as in a girlfriend. The guy with the cat. The tall one who came over in the middle of a thunderstorm and then couldn’t get it up—must have been afraid of lightning. There certainly wasn’t any lightning inside my house that night.

But back to Ballcap Guy. I’m assuming there was a bald spot hidden underneath the hat, but I can’t remember. Likewise, I can’t remember what the arrangement was between him and his partner. Ballcap Guy never elaborated, except to say that their relationship was “way open.”

I’d never encountered that phenomenon before, the open relationship. For some reason—let’s hear it for naiveté—it had never occurred to me before then that such an arrangement was even possible, or that it could work. “Open relationship”—what did that even mean, anyway? Cheating without consequences? What were the ground rules? What did my participation make me? I suppose there are some people who can make that work, although I seriously doubt I’d ever be one of them. Does that make me a hypocrite?

There were a couple things that made carrying on with Ballcap Guy complicated for me. One, it turned out he and his partner were friends with a lesbian couple I knew. I really didn’t want it getting around that I was, well, getting around. (Ten years after the fact, I guess I’ve found that it doesn’t bother me as much as it used to.) At the time, I worried about them thinking less of me—and if I was worried about that, clearly I had some problems with what I was doing.

Not enough to stop doing it, mind you, but still.

I didn’t say any of this out loud, of course.

The third problem wasn’t really an issue with Ballcap Guy, but with me. Having a lower back issue often made s*x a comedy of errors. My injury was healing, but I lived in fear of doing something that would make it even worse. So s*x involved a lot of props and extra instructions, none of them the sexy kind: “Put this pillow under your back. How about if I lift your leg so…Okay, maybe if you move instead of me. Ow—no, not my back, my leg.” Why they put up with this from me, I don’t know. If nothing else, at least the situation offered me a preview of what s*x will be like after I’ve qualified for AARP. Assuming I can still even have s*x by that point.

Eventually, there was only so much of Ballcap Guy’s dirty talk I could take, so I moved on. After him there was the one I’ll call the Green Giant, because he was tall enough to make me (at six feet) feel short, and, well, I was a bit of a “ho ho ho” that summer. We made contact on the now-defunct Out in America—really, if those dating/pickup sites were honest in their marketing, they wouldn’t say “Meet your next boyfriend” so much as “Meet the next guy you’re going to shoo out of your house at three in the morning after you’ve had your way with him.” In this case, I was the one being shooed. I remember the site I used the most often had checkboxes for what you were looking for—friends, dating, a relationship, or whatever I can get. If I remember right, I checked the last box. As I said, my standards were high.

The Green Giant sort of broke the curve though, because he was quite the catch. I’d seen him out and about before and had always found him attractive—tall, fair skin, a disarming smile. His boyfriend worked out of town most of the year, and while the cat’s away…Well, I guess he and the mouse had an understanding. He sent me a message and we made plans to get together.

St. Louis is the biggest small town you’ll ever encounter. The gay community is similarly compact. It makes it difficult to meet people who don’t already know or have slept with half of your friends. Six degrees of separation is more like two, and when you think of all the people you’ve had s*x with who’ve had s*x with other people you know, it makes you want to take a Silkwood shower.

Because of this, it came as no surprise to me to discover that the Green Giant and I had friends in common. I found this out before he and I hooked up, when I went to a party at a friend’s house and boom, there he was sitting in the living room. I didn’t ask if the other nice-looking tall man with him was his partner. (As I discovered later, it was. Lucky guy, both of them.)

I did my best to stay on the other side of the room for the whole evening, though we did say hi eventually. I mean, what do you talk about in situations like that? “So nice to see you, and I’m really looking forward to seeing you naked when we have our booty call next week.” Sadly, I don’t think Miss Manners ever established guidelines for situations like that. I can just imagine: “When encountering a potential trick in an unrelated social situation where his boyfriend/husband/judgmental best friend is also in attendance, be polite, gracious, and express interest in his likes and dislikes. In mixed company, those likes should not include references to bondage, groups, or BDSM.”

I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me that eventually I would run into guys who wanted a little something on the side. According to statistics cited by the Kinsey Institute, between 20 and 25 percent of men engage in extramarital s*x at least once during their marriage. Other studies put the number between 30 and 60 percent, which seems like too wide a spread (so to speak) to be statistically meaningful. And those are just the straight ones. Gay men? I know married couples who mess around more than some of my single friends. No matter how you look at it, there’s a whole lotta home wrecking going on.

I certainly never expected to be a home wrecker myself, but that’s another thing that surprised me: No homes were wrecked in the making of my summer of sin. Each time I got involved with someone in a relationship, it was without consequence—for the couples involved, at least. This threw me for a bit, especially the first time I came to the Green Giant’s house. It wasn’t a hustle-me-up-the-stairs-then-out-the-back-door thing. We had a drink, sat in his living room, and talked for a while. The house was comfortable, not too overly put together like a lot of gay men’s houses. This one felt lived in—the vacation photos of the two of them around the living room added to that sense. So when we set down our glasses and made our way upstairs, it seemed a bit…surreal.

Situations like that can wind up being a three-way, even when the third person isn’t there. At least, that’s the way it was for me with the Green Giant. I couldn’t put out of my mind for very long that there was another person in his life with whom he probably did the same things he did to and in and on me. In fact, there were a few other persons, since I wasn’t the only one he was sleeping around with. And when his boyfriend was out of town for weeks at a time, he apparently did the same thing. I couldn’t say his boyfriend was ever completely out of my mind except when we were having s*x. The rest of the time I found it difficult to mentally multi-task.

When the Green Giant said he wanted friends with benefits, though, he really did mean friends. We talked about writing; he got me tickets to a show; he invited me to dinner with a group of friends of his. He even tried to fix me up with someone—of course, he said it would be nice if a three-way came out of that arrangement. (Neither scenario, the date or the three-way, came to pass.)

That was the problem, of course.

“f**k the pain away,” some of my friends told me. Well, they couldn’t say I didn’t try. Thing is, when you put your clothes back on and say good night, you’re still there in your own skin, and nothing has changed except you probably need to take a shower when you get home.

When I left the Green Giant’s home early one morning, I couldn’t help but wonder, If there are no lies involved, and no one is cheating, am I the only one involved who’s deceiving himself?

I wondered if I would be ready to give up the casual s*x I’d been having a lot of during the summer if any of those men or someone else entirely became the focus of my interest. Clearly, though, that wasn’t going to be the Green Giant. Finally, I told him I wanted to drop the benefits but still be friends. It turned out that worked just fine and was much less awkward than I expected it would be, even when I did finally meet and get to know his boyfriend—who’s now his husband. So I can’t say things didn’t work out well in the end for them.

Eventually, I also stopped being a slut. Since running was out of the picture for a while, I took up swimming to get my endorphin fix. Doing laps in the pool was less of a logistical problem than sleeping around, and the exercise was good for my heart in more ways than one. I also started dating a guy that fall. It didn’t last for very long, but after him, I met the guy I’m still with eight years later. And no, our relationship is not the least bit open. Clearly, I’m too selfish for that.

So maybe that summer I learned I wasn’t as flexible as I thought I might be. (I’m speaking metaphorically, of course.) Even so, I learned that I could wade in the shallow end of the pool longer than I thought. But eventually you have to either head for the deep end or you have to get out, towel yourself off, and stick to dry land.