The Memories of a Dancer
(HANK)
Log Entry. 2003-06-24 Day 1,291.
Fourth shift with the new roustabout, Evans, and the crew seem to be taken with him. He’s impressed them, even me, with his agility and gut instinct at what needs to be done. He works like a dog, and takes initiative. I’ve seen him firsthand hauling trash without being asked, and scrubbing up after jobs. The deck has never been cleaner. Dex has eased off him. No more name calling that I have heard anyway. Sully seems protective as well, always nearby. Evans is receptive to reading gauges, and is spotting early signs of problems like he was born for this job. He’s strong despite his size. Fit. Powerful. Good find. Might use him as my safety man if need be. Might last the entire season if he keeps this up. Will test him to see just how well he can work under pressure.
I fiddle with the pen in my hand and pull out my personal journal. I let out a sigh as I look at the cover titled Pump Maintenance. I snort at the irony of the title of my personal log hidden underneath the old cover of the empty Maintenance log I threw away a long time ago. But I don’t start writing. Not yet.
Alone in my quarters is my retreat. My shift with the crew is done for the day and I can relax with my own thoughts. My body aches the way it always does. Familiar. Comfortable, even.
But my mind won't shut up tonight. It’s on overdrive. This new roustabout has awakened everything I thought I buried. Now it’s all coming back. I look to the journal and let out another big sigh, knowing I should write in it. If anything, to rid my mind of the thoughts and dreams and fantasies I’ve been having.
Of Jim. Our life. And how I’m feeling it all again because of the new kid. Evans.
I breathe out his name aloud. “Noah.”
He’s seeping into my brain, into my subconscious. Him in his black underwear, barely awake. Him dripping wet, after his shower. He even made an appearance in my dreams last night. Only, in my dreams, I didn’t just stare at him. Talk about “pump maintenance.”
Ever since he’d gotten off that chopper. I’ve felt it. A crack. Something I'd sealed up so tight I forgot it existed. I’ve been fighting it for four days. But in reality, it’s been fifteen years.
That's how long I've been on this rig. Fifteen years of salt and steel and solitude. Fifteen years since I packed up my life in New York and walked away from the only man who ever made me feel happy. Who made me feel normal. Fifteen years since Jim died.
Fifteen years since I’ve done anything with another man.
June 24th, 2003
The similarities are frightening. I knew it right away. He had the same eyes. Not the color —Jim's were brown, warm like coffee. But the look. That quiet, watchful thing. Like they could see past the brutish figure and find something worth looking at. Just like Jim did that first time he looked at me.
I smile at what I wrote, thinking about those eyes. Evans has been looking at me every day like that. Right through the armour and the gut and the gruff, and straight into the part I thought I'd silenced. Like he knows I’m in here somewhere. Hiding.
But it’s his build that is pulling me in. The tight, compact body. His physique is a work of art. Smooth, solid, perfection. The graceful way he moves. The strength. The dedication to his form. It’s too much like Jim to ignore. Or forget. Even though I’ve tried.
I fiddle with the pen again, reading back what I wrote before I close my eyes and lay back on my bed, hearing my own sigh again. Jim’s face still appears in my mind and I can’t help but smile. It’s been too long since I’ve allowed myself to remember him. Now it seems I can’t help it.
Jim was a musical theatre guy. A singer. A dancer. Broadway. I remember the first time I met him at a gay bar in New York in 1984. I had just moved to the Big Apple from Galveston for a contract job when I was only 24. Fresh out of school with my mechanical engineering degree. Hired to help redesign a new energy-efficient fire protection system in a few of the buildings in the heart of the city. I was scared shitless. But I was big, so everyone assumed I was confident. More mature. Like I knew what I was doing when I didn’t have a fucking clue.
I took the job in New York City to get away from Galveston. And Bob. My best friend since grade school. Since we were five years old. Almost twenty years of friendship. I told him everything. Well…almost everything.
Yes, I was living a secret in Texas. Many were back then. Bob and I did everything together. Played football together. Went away to school together. Roomed together. Were “straight” together. Planned on getting jobs together. But then trying to kiss your best friend isn’t the best way to test what you’ve known for a while inside yourself, hoping he felt the same.
He didn’t.
I wasn’t your typical gay type back then. I was too butch. Too masculine. Too big. Coming to New York was the best thing I did. I felt like I finally belonged somewhere.
In Galveston, there was a discreet night life for those like us, exploring what we thought was a shameful lust. It was easy when you’re in your early twenties and the object of so much pent-up hidden desire. But you never talked about it. And when I misread a look from Bob, at a party, half drunk and uninhibited, of what I thought was him flirting with me finally, and went to kiss him, it was his words that sent me hunting for a different job to escape as fast as I could.
“What the fuck are you doing? Seriously Hank? I never would have pegged you for a fag. GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME!” I could still see the look on Bob’s face. And the shame that spread up through mine as I tried to deny it.
That’s what I do. I deny it. I run away. I escape.
New York had a better underground scene. The clubs were better, the parties wilder. I was fitting in where I couldn’t in Texas. There were guys who looked like me, out in the open. There were guys who wanted me. There were guys I wanted. Soon I wasn’t underground. I was out. And proud. I was free. Starting over.
Then this 21-year-old short, little muscular guy named James Novak walked into that bar amidst a sea of tall butch bears. “Jimmy,” he said simply when introduced himself to me. I immediately called him Jim. And I was absolutely smitten.
It was one of those leather bear nights at the bar I discovered near my new place. I’m glad I went. I’m glad I dressed the part. At 24, I looked 35. Big and muscled, sporting a moustache worthy of any porn star. I was decked out: leather vest, leather chaps, hat hanging low. I was always big for my size. Always worked out hard. It’s what drew him to me he had said. He thought I was 40 by the look of me. I always looked older. At 14 I could buy alcohol without any ID. In Grade 4 I looked like I was in High School. My mother used to joke when I was born, I was so big I just walked right out of her and held her in my arms.
Jim had spotted me across the bar and had slinked up to me like he already knew I was the one he wanted that night. When he introduced himself and said he was in a show called Cats, I had no idea what he meant. Never been to a show on Broadway, let alone one about a bunch of animals. But after meeting Jim that night, and dancing with him, we found ourselves in the stall together. He fished my big dick out and went down on me like an expert. I didn’t last long in his lips. He sucked the cum right out of me faster than anyone before.
The next night I went to see Cats. I didn’t understand it at all but I was hard as a rock the entire time I watched him dance in that costume. Skin tight. Muscles bulging. His movements. Graceful. Beautiful. I was hooked and went to see it again the next night. I waited for him after the show, with a newly purchased package of extra-large Trojan condoms in my coat pocket. I admit, I was hoping for more than just a quick blow job. He had said he loved my cock that first night. I was hoping he was telling the truth, because I was more than willing to let him at it again.
I used four of those condoms that night. The first, in the alley around the theatre, unable to wait any longer. He had pulled me aside and dropped to his knees, begging to suck my big cock again, telling me again how much he loved it. When I asked him if he liked getting fucked, he asked me if I had a condom. When I showed him the box from my coat pocket, he turned around right there and dropped his trousers. I practically hid his entire body from view by the size of my own when I stood behind him. I slid into him so easily it was like I was made to fuck him. He felt so good. So right. Like he was made just for me. I grabbed his little hips, the curve of his muscular ass moving effortlessly back against me that I felt like I shot my load right through that condom and straight up into his guts. It’s all I thought about, claiming him, making him all mine.
The second condom was unwrapped only an hour later: at my front door. He pounced on me like the fucking cat he pretended to be on stage. We had just walked up the three flights of stairs, but he wasn’t the slightest bit out of breath. As soon as the apartment door was closed, he was on me, jumping into my arms and kissing me so hard that my cock sprang to life again. He opened my pants so fast, taking me into his warm mouth, complaining about the taste of latex that he begged me to fuck him again, right there, against the door. He splayed himself out like an X against it, shoving his pants down, revealing his smooth white ass, the outline of the hard defined muscles made me quietly moan. I wrapped my dick so fast, coated it with so much spit and shoved myself into him so hard that he screamed out like a whore. I was sure my neighbours thought I was raping someone.
I carried him to bed. Stripped him naked, and took my time on him. I explored that body I had assessed during my initial meeting at the bar. I had memorized it as he danced in front of me on stage for two nights in that body hugging costume. Now I licked and kissed every inch of his hairless figure spread out before me in my own bed. I sucked his smaller dick, and fingered his hole to watch him squirm. I’d never been with a guy so turned on by me, so into sex, that it was absolutely life altering.
The third condom went on sometime during the darkness of that night, when I fucked him like a woman, flat on his back, legs open wide, naked like the day we were born. I knew I was hooked then.
The next morning, when he woke up, he wanted to ride me again. He had to leave for the next day’s matinee performance soon, so he wasted no time. Before he left, he sheathed a fourth condom over my already erect dick and rode me like a cowboy until I filled another rubber with more of my sperm.
He was beautiful. And I fell in love fast and hard.
I went to see his show once a week at the Winter Garden Theatre for the next little while. I still didn’t get it. But I was there for him. We’d fuck afterwards, back at my place. We started meeting for dinners before he went to the theatre. We’d meet for drinks, and other things, afterwards. Since I called him Jim, he started calling me Henry, my given name, because he didn’t want to be like everyone else and call me Hank. He loved that I was Scottish, built like a huge Highlander, he joked. We were no longer Hank and Jimmy. We became Henry and Jim. A couple.
Within a month we were living together. For three years we co-existed, me working during the day, him taking off at night for his shows. Flexible was the word I would use in my head when I fucked him. To see how much he could take. To see how bendy he could be. To see if he could move as gracefully over me in the bedroom as he did on the stage. I was all he wanted, and he was all I needed as we heard tale after tale of the disease taking our friends, sweeping through the city and the entire country in 1984. I never fucked him without a condom. We were too scared and too smart knowing what was happening in the world. We were told we were lucky. We had each other. Just one partner. And the thought of sliding into my Jim without any latex on floated in my mind as something I longed to do. One day I told myself. When the scare was gone. And I could feel what it would be like to be inside my man without any protection.
But that never happened. He was just as worried and scared and wouldn’t let me. We never tried it. We never talked about it. And then we never had the chance.
My contract ended at exactly the three-year point, without any prospect for future employment thanks to the previous recession. I turned my attention to other job opportunities as the breadwinner. He was still in Cats, but it wasn’t like it paid a lot of money. And we figured the show was bound to end soon.
I visited my first oil rig the summer of 1987 to make some quick, and rather substantial, money. I know the date well, as I was gone only twenty-one days. Twenty-one days was all it took for Jim to miss me too much. When I returned to New York on the 22nd day, Jim was already sick.
He thought it was the flu. Must have caught it from another performer he thought. But two weeks later, he got worse, and ended up in the hospital. The doctors took one look at me at his bedside, and recognized the symptoms. Tests were ordered, and the shame began. More waiting. More questions I was afraid to ask and he was afraid to talk about. My panic set in. Jim could no longer look at me the same.
I got tested as well. I needed to for my own sake, worried in some unbelievable way that I was at fault, knowing deep down I wasn’t. It had to be him. I suddenly didn’t trust him. Didn’t believe him. It was a long process, getting tested back then. It was an embarrassing process, with two visits: the first to draw the blood, and then two weeks later, to sit and listen to the results.
Jim’s results came back first. And confirmed his HIV positive status. It was a death sentence back then. There was nothing more the hospital could do once he stabilized. He had fought of this first round. But we both knew there would be more once his body weakened and couldn’t fight anymore.
When I found out I was in the clear, I cried, breaking down in the office in front of the woman who shared the news.
On an oil rig, miles from shore, surrounded by other men, other straight men, it was easy to remain faithful to my boyfriend. For Jim, living in the heart of New York City, with the other dancers, and the bars, and the nightlife, and the loneliness, the commitment was obviously too much I guessed. He was too beautiful to resist, I told myself. Too many men lusting after that beautiful body and free spirit that I had all to myself. He must have slipped and it was all my fault. I should never have left.
After we had the results, he finally told me who he caught it from. There was only one guy. One time. He confessed to me that his friends from his show tried to keep his spirits up when I left, and took him out as much as they could as soon as I was gone. But he never swayed. Not once. But by the end of the first week, after the Sunday matinee, when he had no plans and no one to go home to that he missed me the most.
He went out on his own that Sunday night, without his friends, without the pressure of being good. To the gay bar that held the Leather Bear night, where we first met. To drink away his loneliness in a place that reminded him of me. Maybe he stayed too long, he said. Or maybe he drank a bit too much. But it was just the one time he told me through tears. And I believed him, and told him I didn’t want to hear anymore.
I never pressed him. Maybe I didn’t want to know the details. He was relieved I think to not have to admit any more. I brought him back to our place after the hospital gave us some drugs for pain, and the massive bill. I cared for him, stayed by his side, held his hand when he was in pain, and watched as he got sick again. And waited for the inevitable.
I couldn’t believe how quickly he showed symptoms from his exposure. I couldn’t believe this was how our lives had turned so fast. I couldn’t believe that I had to sit by and watch the man that I loved grow weaker and weaker, without a hope in the world that he would get better. I couldn’t believe that I had to watch him slowly die.
I never got to fuck that beautiful body again since I left him for an oil rig.
Over six months I watched him wither away in body and in soul. I watched him get skinnier. I supported his decision to quit the show. I held his hand during the painful nights. I paid all the hospital bills and covered the cost of whatever drug we could get to keep him as comfortable as possible. I stayed by his side despite the betrayal. I never let him see me waiver. I never let him know the pain it caused me.
In his final week, when he was so thin and so weak, he told me the details. Like it was a confession. As if he was trying to rid his guilty conscience. Or calm my own.
The guy from the bar, during the Leather Bear night. He gave in because the guy reminded him of me: tall, built like a truck, wide like a mountain, dressed in leather. Right down to the porn star moustache and leather cap. It was like I was there, he said. Jim was drunk, and so lonely, and missing me so much that he approached the stranger. He was a stud, forward, dominant. And before Jim knew it they were dancing. And then making out on the dance floor. A lot. Then again in the bathroom stall, before Jim sucked him off, just like he did to me that first night we met. Jim went to leave, already feeling guilty he said, but the guy followed him out. To the back alley. Jim couldn’t resist, he said. They made out again. And Jim let that big, muscular twin of mine fuck him in the back alley behind the bar. Urgently. Passionately. To feel like he was with ME he said. Only this man didn’t have a newly purchased package of extra-large condoms with him. And they were too far gone to stop and think. Too turned on to be safe.
It was just the one time.
His admission was to relieve my questions, to provide details so I would know after he was gone. Instead, for me, the guilt seeped in. I blamed myself for leaving to take this job. I blamed myself for being gone. I blamed myself that he found someone identical to me to feel alive again without me there for him to give him what he needed.
I swallowed it all down and stayed by his side. I didn’t expect him to go as fast as he did. It was just after New Year’s, 1988, when I brought him back to the hospital against his protests. He was writhing in pain too much. The meds didn’t seem to work. I was scared, and didn’t know what to do. Pneumonia they said. That’s what took him. But I knew the real story. His poor little body couldn’t fight it anymore. Direct complications from the HIV virus he picked up only six months before, from the word we all feared: AIDS. Fast and stupid and cruel.
I held his hand when he died. Paid for the new round of bills. Wiped myself out financially. And couldn’t handle the silence afterwards.
I was only 28 years old and had just watched my partner die.
I wasn’t strong enough to stay in New York. I needed money. I needed to run away again. Just like I did with Bob. I found fast work on another oil rig called the Northern Pioneer, as a roustabout, during the start of that year in 1988. I needed to escape Jim’s absence, to escape my pain, to escape the blame.
I buried it all so deep. I stopped looking for another man. Stopped wanting. I went back to being Hank. The Northern Pioneer became my self-imposed punishment. Where I belonged. Alone.
This kid—Evans—reminded me of that first moment I first laid eyes on Jim. His build is similar. Compact, yes. Precise even. Jim came up to me, knowing what he wanted, going after this mountain he wanted to climb. But Noah Evans moved off that chopper like he owned the ground. His stature seems more powerful than my beautiful dancer. He’s got a confidence that seems to pierce right through me. Like he knows me. Most new roustabouts look at me and see a monster. They flinch. He just tilted his head back and met my eyes. Steady. Strong.
I put the pen down again and reread my last paragraph. It's stupid. I know it's stupid. He's a roustabout. I'm the Driller. There are rules, written and unwritten. I've spent fifteen years working on this rig, working my way up to be the boss, building walls high enough to become an impenetrable fortress. I’ve never once wavered. Never once been drawn to anyone, ANYONE since Jim died.
But the way he moves. The way he looks at me. The way his voice doesn't shake when he says my name. I look at the page with my pen in my hand.
It's like Jim reached across fifteen years and tapped me on the shoulder. Look, he's saying. Look at him. I’m sending him to you to make up for what I did.
My pen wavers. I don't want to look. I don't want to feel.
But in the past four days I’ve already given in twice to jerking myself into a frenzy, feeling the enjoyment of exploding over SOMEONE once again. And for the first time in fifteen years, I don't want to fight it.
He'll be in the mess hall soon. I'll sit in the corner, alone, and I'll watch him without meaning to. I'll tell myself it's just curiosity, just vetting the new guy. Evans.
But I'll know the truth. I want to feel something again. Haven’t I punished myself enough?
I keep writing that line. I put the pen down and I stand up suddenly, forgetting to put my Log Entry book away, forgetting the Pump Maintenance book lying beside it, because all I can think about is seeing him.
I have to go to the mess hall. To see him.
Evans.
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