What Becomes of the Brokenhearted

by E. Lynn Harris

  One summer, Larry’s then eleven-year-old son, Sean, came up from Little Rock to spend the summer with his father. Sometimes when Sean didn’t want to sit backstage, Larry would drop him off at my apartment, and since Sean wasn’t a baby, I would Sean-sit, instead of baby-sit.

  The last time I saw Larry, he seemed in great health and spirits. He was in the national touring company of Dreamgirls and it was playing in Milwaukee. I drove the ninety miles from Chicago to see the show, and then Larry decided to come back to Chicago and spend the night because he could get an easier flight to Little Rock from there. Larry’s father had taken ill and he wanted to get home to see him. The next day, while driving to the airport, Larry told me not to give up on my standards and hopes of finding someone who would love me for me. He told me I was too nice to not have love in my life. That was our last conversation.

  I didn’t return to Little Rock for his homegoing service, because when I called to get the time of his funeral, the receptionist at the funeral home told me she had gone to high school with Larry and that he looked so bad she didn’t recognize him. I didn’t think I could handle seeing Larry that way. I wanted to remember the smiling face I saw when he waved good-bye as he walked into the American terminal at O’Hare Airport the last time I saw him.

  I was beginning to face the fact that it was going to become harder to ignore death and AIDS. When the disease first appeared, many in the black gay community thought it was affecting only white gay men and black men who dated white men. I knew that couldn’t be totally true, because I never knew Willa to date white men. It also dawned on me that for as much as Willa flirted, I rarely remembered him being involved in a relationship or even a one-night stand. He seemed like more of a voyeur than anything when I met him.

  ANOTHER STEP TOWARD HEALING some of the wounds of my childhood was a return to my faith. One Sunday morning, as I thumbed through the Chicago Tribune trying to decide where I would go to brunch or what movie I would see, my phone rang. When I picked it up, I heard the voice of a good friend, Deborah Crable. She was the host of the nationally syndicated Ebony/Jet Showcase, an African American entertainment program. I had met Deborah during my first months in Chicago at a party to which one of the few blacks living in my building had invited me. Deborah and I became fast friends, but since she traveled a lot she hadn’t noticed that I had dropped off the social map. The only time I went out was when Troy returned to Chicago to visit.

  “When I woke up this morning, you were on my mind,” Deborah said.

  “I was?” I quizzed. I didn’t understand why someone as popular as Deborah would be thinking about me.

  “Yes, you were, and I got someplace I want you to go with me,” Deborah declared.

  “Where?” I asked, thinking she had discovered some new restaurant with a great brunch.

  “Church,” she said.

  “Oh, I would love to, but I already made plans,” I lied.

  “Well, change them. I’m not going to take no for an answer. I’ll pick you up in front of your building in about fifteen minutes.” The next thing I heard was a dial tone.

  I looked for my phone book and found Deborah’s number. I had to call her back and tell her I wasn’t going to nobody’s church. After several rings, her answering machine picked up.

  I jumped out of my bed and started to put on some jeans and go downstairs and tell her that I couldn’t go, but instead, for reasons unknown, I showered, then picked out a suit I could still fit into since I had picked up the thirty pounds I had lost plus an additional twenty.

  A half hour later, I found myself on a crowded pew in the packed Apostolic Temple of Faith Church on the edge of Hyde Park. The church was rocking, with its large choir and friendly members. The dynamic Bishop Brazier preached and moved like a human tornado. I found myself mesmerized, weak in the knees, and my body felt warm.

  I had always identified myself as a Christian. When I was twelve, I had joined and been baptized at the Metropolitan Baptist Church in Little Rock. I later joined the North Little Rock Church of Christ, which my Aunt Gee and her family attended, mainly because I wanted to please my aunt and not because I believed the teaching of the non-music-playing Church of Christ. In college and in Dallas, I had returned to my Baptist roots.

  But on this Sunday, something happened to me that had never occurred in church. I don’t know if it was something the bishop said, but I felt as though he was talking only to me. I found myself standing up, my hands stretched in the air with tears rolling down my face, repeating, “Thank you, Jesus. Thank you.” Then I felt my knees go limp, no longer able to hold my body, and I collapsed in the pew alongside Deborah. On that day I felt the Holy Ghost and knew that Jesus was real. I realized that He didn’t expect me to be perfect and He might even understand the gay thing. I knew if anybody could save me from the pain and loneliness, He could. I was ready to give Him a chance.

  WITH THE REDISCOVERY of my faith and thrice-a-week therapy, I thought I was on the road to recovery. I returned to work after being on sick leave for six months. My boss was surprisingly sympathetic. He shared with me that he had a close friend who had suffered from depression and was supportive of my recovery. Since I had been receiving my full salary and spending little money on food and entertainment, I had a nice little savings account, so to celebrate my return to the world I traded my BMW for a new Mercedes.

  I joined a health club and hired a handsome, former pro football player to help me get my body back in shape. Three months later, I was planning a weeklong trip to Jamaica to celebrate my new body and attitude. Then I made the mistake of inviting Mario. I felt like a new person, and I thought this would give Mario one last chance to realize what he was passing up. Sadly, I failed to realize that I could always use things like trips and gifts to get his attention. When I first invited him, he was hesitant, but I convinced him the trip would do us both some good.

  The first three days of our trip were pleasant. Mario seemed happy to see me and my new body, even though he barely touched me. He chose to sleep in the spare bedroom. When we reached the resort, the one-bedroom suite I had reserved had been given to someone else, and a nice Jamaican lady thought she was doing us a favor by upgrading my reservation to a two-bedroom suite.

  We were like two friends on a trip, spending the day eating and swimming and then retiring to separate quarters. I guess I could have lived with that until the fourth night, when I was in Mario’s bedroom and I noticed a postcard on the desk addressed to David. Again, reading something not addressed to me was going to cause me pain. There it was in Mario’s handwriting: David, Having a great time in the sun. Wish you were here. We’ll have to do this sometime soon, Love Mario.

  I WENT BALLISTIC, smashing my hands into the wall. Suddenly I saw blood splash from my fist as I started pulling pictures from the wall. Tears rolled down my face as I screamed at the top of my lungs, “How long am I going to let you fuck over me?” For about five minutes I shouted obscenities like “You faggot mutherfucker. I hate you.” I called him names I had only thought of when he’d made me angry before.

  Mario had a look of shock on his face, and I, too, was startled by my fury and resentment. It was one of the few times in my life when I wanted to hit another human being, to make him hurt the way I was hurting inside. It was the first time I used the term faggot to hurt another gay person.

  The next morning, I left about one hundred dollars on the kitchen counter and headed to the airport without saying good-bye, giving up the three days of hotel time I had previously paid for. I headed back to the cold wind of Chicago with my hand covered in a bandage.

  When I arrived back in Chicago, powerful hail the size of ice cubes was pelting the city. I arrived at my apartment, dropped my luggage at the door, put on a Whitney Houston CD, and began to cry again. Just as I was preparing to pull off my clothes and open a bottle of wine, I heard a knock at my door. I lived in a doorman building, so I figured it must be one of my neighbors, and I was not in the mood for neig
hbors. When I looked out the peephole, I saw my trainer Brad at my door. The health club where he trained a lot of his clients was located in my building, which meant the doorman didn’t have to announce him. I opened the door, my eyes red from crying, and just looked at him with a What are you doing here? look.

  “How was your trip?” Brad asked.

  “Don’t ask,” I said. I wondered why Brad had stopped by, since I had told him I’d be gone for a week. I had assumed Brad was straight from the way he was always talking about women and from the attention women paid him at the club. I had put on my tired old straight act by telling him that I was going to Jamaica with an old girlfriend. All I had to do was remember to change Mario to Maria, and I could share with Brad what a rotten bitch Maria was and get sympathy from my handsome trainer.

  Brad had the body of life. He was 6′3″ and about 215 pounds, with the legs of an Olympic track and field runner. He had played college football and run track, participated in the Olympic trials as a hurdler, and even played one year as a wide receiver for the Los Angeles Rams.

  Brad informed me he didn’t know when I was returning, but since it was raining so hard he decided to see if I was home, so that he could hang out until the rain subsided. We drank wine, listened to Whitney’s mellow voice, and talked about sports. Before I knew it we had finished a liter of some cheap wine I had found in the back of my refrigerator.

  The rain didn’t stop; in fact, it seem to pick up force. So when I became tired from the long trip and the wine, I informed Brad I was going to bed.

  “Hey, man, do you think it would be okay if I crashed here?”

  “No problem,” I said. “I’ll get you a pillow and blanket and you can sleep down here on the sofa.”

  “Where do you sleep?” Brad asked.

  “In my room,” I said as I pointed toward the stairs that led to my bedroom.

  “If it’s cool with you, then that’s where I will sleep,” he said.

  I didn’t try to dissuade him, and the body-by-God trainer slept in the bed with me. Nothing happened during the night, and the next morning there was the bumping of knees and the touching of toes, but no sex. I figured he had simply had too much to drink.

  Three days later, Brad showed up at my apartment after the gym had closed. Again we drank wine and listened to music. But this time when I announced it was my bedtime, Brad followed me like a puppy dog, and when I reached the top of the stairs I could feel the heat of his body behind me. When I turned around to face him, he stuck his tongue down my surprised mouth.

  The next morning, Brad assured me that he was not gay. He told me that I was the first man that he had ever kissed besides his father, and that he loved pussy more than anything in the world. I had heard this story before, so I knew how to respond—by assuring him that our night of passion was a secret that was safe with me, and I, too, was into women and fucked around with men only on occasion. I couldn’t wait to get to therapy and share this escapade with Dr. Willer.

  Dr. Willer had advised me against taking the trip with Mario. Nevertheless, he was quite shocked when I told him with faint emotion what had happened and that I had little interest in discussing it. He also thought it was good that I was thinking about someone other than Mario, but he warned me that someone so unsure of his sexuality might not be good for me either. I assured him that I would never fall in love with someone like Brad, but at least I had wonderful sex with someone who seemed to enjoy sex with me.

  I’d met guys like Brad before and knew the drill. You enjoyed the sex and never let love and romance enter the picture. Besides, beautiful Brad was a tremendous boost for my damaged ego, and before I knew it, Brad had moved in with me.

  He did it slowly, by leaving a pair of jeans at my place, and then maybe a T-shirt or warm-ups. When his underwear started showing up regularly in my laundry, I realized he was more than just my trainer. Brad still had a girlfriend. I learned he was staying with her when we met, and he still spent the majority of his free time with her. In the beginning, this arrangement didn’t bother me.

  Brad took my mind off Mario. It excited me that a handsome jock who didn’t associate with the black gay world found me interesting and attractive. Depression was still a part of my life, but now it seemed to come in soft waves—waves I hoped to erase with my newfound faith, romance, and Dr. Willer.

  I reentered the social scene with my handsome roommate. At his suggestion, many of my friends and his girlfriend believed he was my cousin. I started to entertain at home and went to church at least twice a week. I was feeling so much better that I even reduced my therapy to one day a week. On the surface, it looked as though I had made a full recovery. The tears in my sessions with Dr. Willer disappeared and were replaced with laughter.

  ONE FRIDAY EVENING at happy hour, I ran into a tall and striking young lady who remembered me from my IBM days. We struck up a conversation and she told me about the exciting new job she had gotten as a regional manager for a large software company. Right before she left, Vickie slipped me a card and said, “Give me a call and let’s have lunch and talk about you joining my team.”

  Even though I was happy with my sales position, I was intrigued. Of course, I was familiar with the software giant Vickie was going to head in Chicago. She said what I wanted to hear: Working for a black boss, I wouldn’t have to put up with the endless skinning and grinning necessary to have a good relationship with white male superiors.

  My boss at the time, Myron Weintraub, was white and Jewish, and he was probably one of the fairest men I had ever worked for. Myron didn’t make me feel guilty about the time I spent on sick leave with my depression, and he seemed to think that I could do no wrong when I was operating with all jets going. Even though I was not open with him regarding my sexuality, I think he would have handled it with class. He seemed interested only in results and sales. Myron was right: When I was feeling a hundred percent, I could sell the devil fire.

  Vickie was not going to take no for an answer, and she wore me down with expensive lunches and tours of her company’s new downtown office, telling me if I was first on board I could have my choice of office and territory. When she asked me how much my base salary was, she promised to make an offer that would include a twenty-thousand-dollar increase. The job would require travel, which would include New York City, where I felt I was ready to return. I missed Randy and The Group, even though they’d already made three trips to Chicago once I started to feel better.

  So against the advice of my big-brother mentor, Richard, I took the job. Richard felt that I owed my current boss and company some loyalty since they had stood by me during my illness. He also warned me that my black female boss might be a nightmare if she found out I was gay. When I told him she was married and wasn’t like that, he again warned me that black women, married or otherwise, didn’t take kindly to gay black men who looked and acted like me. Troy encouraged me to consider the position, since it was a big jump in pay. I didn’t tell him what Richard had said. In the end it was my decision to make, and as difficult as it was to tell my boss, I resigned. I wasn’t quite honest in my resignation. I told Myron and the company president that I felt my depression was returning and I didn’t think it was fair for me to request sick leave again. I almost changed my mind when Myron told me he would rather have me at fifty percent than a lot of salespeople he had interviewed at a hundred percent.

  The first weeks at my new job went smoothly enough. I had a beautiful office, an expense account, and I was working for a black woman who thought I hung the moon. During those early days, Vickie was always inviting me out to lunch or for drinks to discuss sales strategies. I thought this was odd, because one of the things we had discussed in early conversations was our disdain for after-hours meetings over drinks and dinner. I was interested in getting to the health club and home, in the hope that Brad might be there. He was dating and seemed to be smitten with a beautiful young actress/model in Chicago who would later become nationally known. I told myself that
was cool with me, because I wasn’t interested in falling in love but I also wasn’t willing to give up the passionate sex life we shared.

  I was working hard on my new job. I was the only black salesman out of six whom Vickie had hired, so I wanted to be better than the rest. I was at work every morning before 7:30 and often worked on weekends. Some evenings I would call Randy and talk for hours, or Richard, and tell him how well it was going. When I brought up my life at home with Brad, Richard cautioned me to be careful what I said on the office phone. He reasoned that as a manager he sometimes monitored the calls of his salesmen to see where they were spending their time. I told him I wasn’t worried, that Vickie was cool.

  When I had been two months on the job, things changed. I was preparing to close my first big sale with a public utilities company in Minnesota. I had made several trips and appeared poised to bring in the first significant sale for the new regional office. I was so focused on closing the sale that I turned down an invitation from Vickie to join her and some of the other sales force for dinner after work. In the coming days I found Vickie’s attitude toward me chilly. At first I assumed she didn’t want the other salesmen to know how close we had become during the interview process. That was cool with me. But the week I was to return to Minnesota to close the deal, Vickie called me into her office and said, “This situation is not working for me. I will pay you two months’ salary if you have your desk cleared out before the end of business today.”

  At first I thought maybe she was playing some cruel joke, but I soon realized from Vickie’s stoic face that she was not playing. When I asked her what I had done, she repeated her opinion that the situation was not working out. I was shocked and devastated. I started to plead with her not to do this, but Vickie’s face and cold attitude didn’t change one bit.

  I returned to my office near tears and threw my few personal belongings into my briefcase and went home. I immediately called Richard, seeking his advice on whether or not I should take her offer of severance or get a lawyer. At first he took an I-told-you-so tone, but when I broke down in tears, he became more sympathetic, advising me to take the money and run back to my former employer.