The Boyfriend Chronicles: Jason
The Boyfriend Chronicles: Jason
November 1999
Early in 1999 I left my graphic design position and the decadent extracurricular opportunities of the phone company for a job closer to home. I was hired by a fitness equipment manufacturer run by a cadre of ultra-conservative, right-wing, soul-saving, gay-scorning, churchgoing Republicans, each with a stay-at-home wife, a minivan and an average of five kids per family (this is not an exaggeration between the five execs whose families I met there were 25 kids, and two of them were still churning ’em out). I felt like Lot fleeing Sodom and Gomorrah for the safety of the Promised Land. I am once again astounded in retrospect at my ability to believe what I chose without regard for reality.
I was convinced getting in on the ground floor of this small company and proving myself by slaving away at a million different tasks for long hours and little pay would gain me financial success and professional status. I was also pretty sure being around all those respectable, spiritually upright people might just whip my wicked soul into shape in the process. If I’ve ever been more wrong, I am blissfully unaware of it.
The details of the outrageous behavior demonstrated by my superiors (and I use that term in its loosest connotations) and the indignities I suffered are another story altogether, but a sense of their impact is necessary to understand how desperate I was for an ally when Jason appeared on the scene. The optimism that allowed me to disregard the first cracks in the sanctimonious façade by which I was surrounded had deepened with the fissures into a desperate, willful ignorance. I tried hard not to notice the hypocrisy of my boss’s smug sermonizing, but my blinders were beginning to slide. Then one long, frazzled afternoon I let slip a reckless complaint in an email to a designer at our partner company, with whom I was attempting to iron out another of my supervisor’s ill-defined directives. I immediately regretted it, clicking pointlessly at the recall button, certain my insubordination would find its way back to the boss. That outcome might actually have proven better for all parties involved, but I guess that’s what you get with hindsight.
I was relieved when Jason responded with immediate and humorous sympathy, his previously strict professional vocabulary slipping into something warmer and more comfortable. I almost kicked myself for not suspecting sooner that anyone employed by the partner company would certainly be cooler and more human than anyone in mine. I replied in kind, setting off a flurry of gleefully mutinous email banter that would have gotten me fired on the spot. From that moment, I lived for any project that might require my cooperation with Jason’s department and gratefully piled those on to my already overflowing to-do list. Our emails escalated as we each tried to outdo the other with clever one-liners and witty repartee, then eventually degenerated into silliness as our comfort level grew. We once engaged in a three-week-long game of Calvinball over email, chasing each with imaginary weapons, penalizing infractions with nonsense punishments and sporadically declaring ourselves the winner. I printed and saved those emails and continue to get a grin out of their unbridled hilarity.
It wasn’t long before email proved an unsatisfying medium for our deepening connection and we progressed to phone calls. His voice was deep and warm, and he seemed genuinely interested in what I had to say. We were intellectually well matched, and our marathon conversations wandered across a broad spectrum of topics. Of course, he couldn’t have been attracted to me physically because he didn’t know what I looked like, nor I him. We both arrogantly believed ourselves superior to judgment based on physical attributes and therefore refrained from exchanging pictures. I am still convinced this was our biggest mistake.
By the time we arranged for him to come visit me over the Thanksgiving holiday, I had unconsciously formed a picture of him in my mind. I couldn’t help it. When he talked about fixing airplanes on a remote island during his two-week tour with the Air Guard, I pictured him on the flight line, ducking under the nose of a jet. When he mentioned coaching a kid’s football team, I imagined him playfully roughing up his charges after a Saturday morning game. When we talked on the phone, I couldn’t help but picture the smile I heard in his voice every time we spoke. I just didn’t realize I was doing it.
It wasn’t until I saw him that I began to feel the bewildering effects of my mistake. The voice I heard was familiar, but the face was that of a stranger, and not one I found immediately attractive. I couldn’t get past the feeling that the Jason I knew was trapped inside this slightly arrogant outsider. If he was nervous, he hid it behind an attempt at wit that came across as tactless barbs aimed at my appearance, my driving and anything else that attracted his notice. I had been looking forward to acting on some of the intimate desires we’d recently begun to confess, but I was put off by both his behavior and the jarring effect of hearing a beloved voice issuing from an alien face.
We did wind up sleeping together during his stay, and although it was more or less satisfying, I was never able to reconcile phone-Jason with the real Jason. Where was that warm, witty, silly guy? As the week wore on, I became more and more impatient to be rid of him. I’m still not sure if it was entirely due to our lack of compatibility or, as I’ve learned from hosting subsequent houseguests, that I’m just not good at having someone else in my space for any length of time. I would venture to guess it started as the first and was compounded by the second.
We tried to stay in touch, but not long after the visit we were dissecting the week’s events over a phone call. We were being brutally honest with each other and when the talk turned to the bedroom, I confessed that he was probably the third or fourth best I’d ever been with. I still laugh at how innocently tactless I was, and how he spluttered in an attempt to be vaguely insulting before he hung up on me. I guess I deserved that.
We never spoke after that, except on a professional basis. I try to be objective about the guy he turned out to be in person, reasoning that the blame rarely rests entirely on one person. Then I examine the bits of conversation I can recall like on the first night when he confessed he was disappointed in my looks and regardless of who’s to blame, I’m not sorry it ended.
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