Cynical and Southern: The Boy I Once Loved Is Homeless And HIV Positive
I’ve been making wishes all night. I’m conflicted and if there was a time machine sitting in front of me I’d sprint towards it and dive in. Give me that December 1996 feeling one more time.
I’d been living in Atlanta for two months and it was going terribly. The weight of my internal thunderhead clouds was only slightly distracted by the same two things that have always distracted me. Boys and music.
This time around it was an epic twenty song album I was recording and a 17-year-old boy imprisoning my brain. He was the umpteenth heterosexual that would cuddle with me at night and inspire me to write songs that probably annoyed more than flattered. Nearly a decade and a half later my eyes mist as I think of the morning he made me a vegan breakfast from scratch. This boy I was falling in love with cuddled with me the night before and now he was cooking for me. I was not used to boys treating me well. He may have been straight but I was hungry for this intimacy I was receiving.
As my friendship splintered with this boy I lost my shit and left Atlanta. My friend Shauna swooped from New York and rescued me. We sped up I-75 with her B-52s on the stereo and my combat boots sticking out the window. Although my heart was broken there was a sweet liberation in this flight. And as the years kept escaping I never forgot about that sweet straight-edge vegan boy from Atlanta that drove me to madness.
Over the last five years I managed to track down and reconnect with all of the ghosts of my past with mixed results. I never found the straight edge boy from Atlanta. It was as if life’s chalk board had erased him entirely. I kept searching.
It was when I wrote an essay about him on my website that people started to come forward. The news wasn’t good. After I left Atlanta he got involved in drugs and traveled west. He has spent the majority of his life since I knew him living homeless on the streets of San Francisco.
A year ago I tracked him down while he was visiting his parents in Alabama. The phone conversation was short and evasive. He was a phantom.
This week I was emailed again by one of his old friends and informed that he has AIDS and is still homeless. I am sitting in a silent, air conditioned, comfortable apartment as I write this. I want to break windows and scream and get in my car and drive 3,000 miles just to find him and put my arms around him. I wonder if he knows how much he was loved? How much he still is loved? Fuck.
He always romanticized homeless people. Back when we were friends he would pal around with homeless men and let them sleep in his rich parent’s house. It was almost as if he was predestined to lead the life he ended up living. I sit here oozing with this motherfucking guilt and remorse that I was not there to rescue him from the life he chose himself.
Was there ever a moment he wished he was still in his parent’s kitchen putting butter on my toast?
Every homeless person you see on the street is someone who has fallen through the cracks. Maybe somebody somewhere loves them. They are somebody’s daughter, ex-husband, uncle, grandma, or former best friend. If you see a boy with dark hair and beautiful lips somewhere on the streets of San Francisco, please hold him. And please don’t let go until I can come hold him too.
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Beautiful and tragic.sometimes all we can do is remember and love.
Now THIS, Jeremy—this article was worthy of you. Well done: you’ve beautifully evoked that universal experience of “the one that got away” and touched on that profound sense of responsibility, lust, longing, and despair that swirls up in us when we have that awful realization that we no longer have any say in the life of someone we once loved.
Loss is the trickiest part of love: finding a place in the hollow pit of our stomach for the memory of all those who’ve gone—it’s a difficult skill to master. The best advice I can offer to you in the meantime is to heat up a glass of milk, press it to center of your chest, and let the warmth seep in while you think about those you do still have. Focus on the love around you: it’s what will sustain you in the end.
Thank you for sharing this.
I’m only nineteen and after i read this it almost made me want to cry, bacause other gay people i meet today could find their way into this situation, i also would like to know, he is doing better after he visited with his parents or is he still in San Francisco?
Well, that brought tears to my eyes. I’m amazed at how writers are willing to bare their souls like this. Thank you for the gift of such an intimate look into your heart. I’m so sorry for the loss and remorse you must feel. He was his own person, he made his own choices. You are not responsible for his life. You are not to blame.
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