The Boyfriend Chronicles: Bruce
The Boyfriend Chronicles: Bruce
Summer 1999
The summer I turned 25 I got an offer from a friend of a friend to fly shotgun in an airplane race. Stu owned a small, single engine plane and needed someone, “light, smart and quick” to co-pilot it for an annual race event. He offered to pay all my expenses, so I jumped at the chance. After a practice run the weekend prior to the race, I felt confident enough in my ability to read a sectional, manage the stopwatch, and program the GPS to think we had a chance at winning a prize. I guess in a sense I did win, but poor Stu’s expectations went significantly less fulfilled.
The night before the race the other contestants all gathered in the bar at the hotel, and I realized there were no strangers in the group. Apparently airplane racers are a small, tight-knit crowd of funny, raucous, adventurous people, and I had the time of my life getting to know them. There were a few married couples, but most of the teams were made up of men who’d escaped from the family for a weekend of fun. There were one or two single guys, but they were all too old, too young, or too sexually ambiguous to spark my interest, so I tucked away my ‘date self’ and just had a good time.
The day of the race dawned hot and clear, and the morning weather briefing saw the night’s revelers magically transformed into serious aviators intent on winning. The flight office lobby was a mess of sectionals, checklists, and groups of people strategizing over cups of free coffee. The race route formed a triangle, with the easternmost point a boomerang around a coastal lighthouse, and each leg of the race broken into short jaunts from one airfield to the next. There were five or six refueling stops in all, and when we all met up at the fourth stop, a new member had materialized on one plane’s crew. I never figured out how he got there, but I found myself sharing a table with a tall, good-looking man in his late 40s or early 50s who bore a striking resemblance to Scott Bakula. He was both interesting and interested, and at each stop we picked up our conversation without missing a beat. I discovered he was intelligent, well-traveled, single, and building a house in southern Georgia. He invited me to come down and help him decorate it, and I laughed a little, unsure of whether he was serious.
That evening found us once again in one another’s company, wandering the hotel grounds long past sunset. We talked for hours and when he kissed me, my skin lit from the roots of my hair to the tips of my toes. He whispered hot sentiments against the curve of my neck about the responsiveness of my body and I answered by letting his hands roam unchecked under my peach silk tank top as we rode the elevator to his floor. He pulled me into his hotel room where he shattered every ill-conceived, half-baked idea I had about casual sexual encounters. His passionate whispers and expert touch coaxed from me reactions of which I never thought my body capable. His lovemaking was foreign to me, slow and sensitive, completely different from the frenzied, breathless grappling I was accustomed to with guys my own age. The greatest wonder is that I didn’t get any more emotionally attached than a 48-hour romance warranted, a complete departure from my normal, moony-eyed devotion.
We exchanged email addresses and phone numbers, and tried over the next few months to arrange to see one another again. Obstacle after obstacle intervened, and I haven’t seen him since. We’ve caught up over email once in a while, and he sent me a picture of his latest home renovation project in late 2004. That was the last I heard of him.
Bruce was good for me in many ways. There is a lot I don’t know about him considering the hours we’ve logged on the phone – he even refused to reveal his actual age, explaining, “It’s just a pointless number” — but for some reason it never mattered. I accepted Bruce on his own terms, no small feat for the completely egocentric little tart I was back then, but he accepted me without question, too. He was a liberating, eye-opening experience for my relatively sheltered young self, and a remarkably untarnished memory. It wasn’t a ‘happily-ever-after’ ending, but those are rare (if even real), and frankly, a ‘not-unhappily-ever-after’ ending proved just as satisfying.
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