1999

[Barry]

I've written many letters in my life, many of which were never sent.

I wrote once to the Dalai Lama, when I heard he would be coming to Portland the following year. That's in the never sent category. I decided, who was I to be sending a letter to the Dalai Lama. As it turned out, my mother bought me two tickets to a two half-day teaching he did when he came here. My letter had been to request a personal audience, and, to this day, I feel like I got one, which was shared with four thousand other people.

I wrote one to Alanis Morrisette, also never sent, because she has been my secret girlfriend ever since I heard Jagged Little Pill and realized she was the girl I fell in love with from that Canadian kids TV show I used to watch when I was a kid.

The following is a letter, an email really, which I actually sent. I expect to receive no reply. It's not the reply that matters. It's not even the sending. It's the writing.

Of the folks here, only Doreen Peri might perhaps have an idea of who it was to or what it's all about.


1999

I fell in love with you, is what it all comes down to.

On August 14th, 1999, standing in your kitchen, listening to you talk and looking at you, I fell in love with you.

Falling in love is the only way it happens.

You’ve no idea how strongly the irony of this comes home to me, how poignant it is. That I, a straight man, should fall in love with you, a gay woman has become the most crushingly ironic event of my life. That compounded with the fact that my wife fell in love with you, too, along with the tragedy that though she and I both loved you, and I loved both you and she, and she loved both you and me, you could never love us both, only her.

The dream I had for my life, what I saw as my destiny, it came so close, only to be snatched away in a moment.

I always knew 1999 would be a fateful year for me. When I was six or seven, maybe eight, I was playing out in the yard, down on my knees in the dirt playing with trucks or something, and I was thinking about 1999. At that age, 1999 seemed like the far future to my young mind. We’d all have flying cars by then, and something I thought of as the space camper: you’d be able to go camping on the moon or other planets. I did the math in my head and realized I’d turn thirty-six in 1999. I imagined I’d be married, have kids of my own, be a husband and father, and as I grew and matured I replayed the memory of that moment often in my mind. As I progressed through my teens and into my twenties – early adulthood – and the year itself came closer and closer, I felt more and more that 1999 was going to be special for me, that the year would be significant in my life. Something was going to happen. Something big.

Susan and I started swinging in January of 1999. She had already expressed some bi-curiousness, a result of her explorations on the internet, and she’d already had her first sexual encounter with a woman, someone she’d met in a chat room. I had wanted to be present and involved her first time. I thought it was important I be there. If it was something we were going to explore as a couple, this open relationship thing, then I thought we should set a precedent of togetherness at the outset. Maybe later, if and after we had established a sense of security in this risky new business we embarking on, it might not be so imperative that it only be done with both of us together, as a couple. I was not present that first time because the woman was basically cheating on her husband. Though he and I had met and the four of us had gotten together socially but not sexually, the woman was not letting her husband know what the weekend at the beach with Susan was really all about: her first sexual experience with a woman. As it was explained to me, my being there and physically involved in the encounter really would be cheating on her husband, in a way that having sex with Susan and not telling her husband somehow was not. I was against the whole thing. I liked the man. I didn’t want to participate in deceiving him. I didn’t want Susan to, either, but you know no one ever stops Susan from doing something she’s set her mind to. As it turned out, the woman was not bisexual at all. She was gay. She’d been having clandestine affairs with women throughout their marriage. She and her husband eventually divorced.

After that, Susan and I joined Ace of Hearts and began swinging in earnest. At first, it was okay for me. Not great, but okay. It wasn’t “not great” because of jealousy or anything. It was because I found I could not just jump into the sack with a woman simply because she wanted me to. I couldn’t get it up, in other words. Or I would get it up just fine but lose it in the middle, or keep it up but fail to complete the act. I couldn’t conjure up chemistry that wasn’t there. And I never felt that chemistry with any of the women we met there. It only lasted about five months. By the middle of May, I didn’t even want to go anymore, my masculinity already having suffered too much.

Susan and I, though, were still hoping to meet some single bisexual woman who we both would love and who would love both of us.

Swinging, you see, for us was not about getting more sex. It wasn’t even about getting more love. It was about spreading the love, the intimacy that we had and felt with each other. It is naïve, but we believed what we had with each other was big enough and strong enough to expand to include others. Basically, we thought we could share.

Then Susan met you, when your mother became ill and was admitted to the hospital. I was already reeling from the blow to my manhood at not being able to perform sexually just because I wanted to or it was wanted of me, but when she came home one day and told me she might have met “the one,” as in the one we had been looking for, and then went on to tell me some of what she knew of you, who you were and such, things began to spiral out of control. From the way she talked, her body language, the way she averted her eyes, I knew you were not bi but gay, and I knew she knew, too, yet here she was trying to convince me, and maybe herself, that there was a chance you weren’t. There had been a spark, she said. It was obvious to me that whatever was about to happen, had already begun happening, was something totally beyond my control. Susan wanted to be with you, for whatever reason, and nothing I said or did, I knew, would stop that.

Yeah, 1999 was turning out to be a big year for me. Just not big in the way I had thought.

So on August 14th, 1999, sixth anniversary of our first date, Susan and I come up to your house to have dinner and all three of us talk about this “thing” developing between you two. Susan arrives in the afternoon and I come up later, after I get off work. When we hug, her hair feels wet against my neck and I’m immediately suspicious but suppress it. I want to keep an open mind, make no snap judgments of events still unfolding around me. And I’m also still hoping against hope that maybe all three of us can have something beautiful together, what I’ve always dreamed of and thought of as my destiny. It is 1999 after all, the big year, when something’s supposed to happen.

You show me around your house, including the back, where the hot tub is. I ask about it, get you to lift the cover. Steam escapes and my suspicions seem verified. You’ve already done it, had sex together. It’s over, done. There is no hope. But I clamp down on that, too. I could be mistaken.

It was some time later, as the three of us were getting dinner together, that I fell in love with you. You were saying something and I turned to you. You smiled at me a little, and I suddenly saw you as much younger than you were then, maybe seventeen or eighteen. I saw you as a young woman cherubic, angelic, beautiful and goddess-like. You see, up till then and to this day, this is how I always see Susan. I see her not so much as she appears on the surface but as she is on the inside. I see her shining, radiant inner beauty. I sometimes wonder what she really looks like, if she appears to others as she does to me. I know that most photos of her look nothing like the way I see her. The point is, in a moment that night in your kitchen I saw you that way, too. It seemed to me then that this was right, that it was supposed to happen. If the three of us were to have anything like I’d envisioned, of course I would see you the same way I saw her. In the years since, I’ve wondered if maybe I just made it happen, unconsciously willed it because I wanted to see you that way. I don’t know which the ultimate truth is. Perhaps both? I do know that I wanted to love you, and that Susan wanted me to love you, and I think that both of us wanted you to love me, too, even though we both knew and pretended not to that you never would or could.

And, of course, there was the later part of the evening, after dinner, when we all got in the hot tub together. You asked if we had brought suits. We had not. You seemed uncertain, but we all got in naked together. We played in the water like guiltless children. It was wonderful, like a dream. Then I laid my head back on the rim and had a bad thought, a truth that just came to me. Like the beautiful dream I had always envisioned, my destiny, I was naked in a hot tub with two beautiful women, also naked, “…and both of them would be having a much better time were I not here.”

Nothing was ever the same for me after that. No matter how much Susan loved me, no matter how much I loved you, nothing would ever be the same, never could. Nothing I had ever dreamed would come to be. Because when we met “the one,” she was the wrong one.

So that’s what happened. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. It’s the truth, and the truth makes a very good story, the best, in fact.

I fell in love with you in your kitchen on the evening of August 14th, 1999.

We three all know what happened after that. We know the beauty and the ugliness, the joy and the sorrow, the ecstasy and heartache. You don’t know what I went through in the five years following. I don’t know the details of what you went through. I only know a part of what Susan went through: the part that I witnessed. I know she did love you. I know she never stopped loving me. I know I did love you and still do in some way. For me, love is not something to be let go of or gotten over. The best I can hope for is to move on. What I don’t know is if you ever loved me. During that, for me, agonizing time, I used to cry inside my head that if you just loved me you wouldn’t be doing what you were doing. But I don’t know. I never will. I just wish you had. For if you had loved me as you loved her, as I love her and loved you, as she loved you and loves me – if that had only been possible, everything now would be all so different. Not just for me, for all three of us. Everything then and now would have been and would now be so different.

It’s become the tragic irony of my life that in 1999, a year I always knew would be huge; I met and fell in love with a woman who never would or could love me back.

I just thank God, Goddess and the Universe that Susan stood by me while this happened. And that I stood by her, too.

Ten years later, against all odds, we’ve both moved on together. Our love, as well as our marriage, survives. Susan says she never even thinks about you anymore, but I don’t believe that. I’m sure she still must from time to time. And I, too, still think about you, quite a bit, probably too much, considering, because for me love is a fire that, once started, never dies. At best it just burns lower down, and I move on.

Susan and I have both moved on. And even though you and I were never together, never shared anything but pain, frustration and heartache, I miss you. I think about you and experience regret. I miss what might have been. But mostly what I miss is the vision of that cherubic, angelic, youthful, beautiful face you wore that night in your kitchen in 1999, even though I know you wore that face for her and not me. This is the memory of you I will carry with me all the way to the grave, and beyond. All the rest I leave behind as I move on.


Peace,
Barry

[Barry]

Something I forgot to mention about that year, 1999...Skip Snyder, the best boss I ever had, died that year...on my birthday, the same night I tried to kill myself, if I must be brutally honest.

He was 52. He'd been struck by a car two weeks before. He was home from the hospital and said to be okay. But he got up one morning and tossed a blod clot. It lodged in his lung and killed him.

He had plans for me and I had plans with him. I still miss him to this day. He loved this song...
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Peace,
Barry

[Steve Plonk]

Remember in your heartache, when you feel you'll run out
of air--even then, you may petition the Lord with prayer.
Oh, John Prine's song "Angel from Montgomery" rules!
God bless and keep on chooglin'!! This life's a tire swing,
having it's ups and downs. Wait for the upswing when swinging
down. Wait for it...there it is...

[Barry]

Thanks Steve. Means a lot. I appreciate it.

Peace,
Barry