Life’s Work

My first relationship began when I was 15, and lasted more than three years. Kourtney was a whip-smart, plucky blond who was an objective catch. She pitched softball and earned the nickname “Rocket” for her cannon of an arm. She sang “Unbreak My Heart” at a school talent show and moved people to tears. She was valedictorian of her class, an honor she worked tirelessly towards every day I knew her. After dating for a year and a half, we lost our virginities to one another in my bedroom on a Saturday night while “Linger” by The Cranberries played in the background. When high school ended, we went to different colleges, but continued dating. I was standing on the balcony of my friend Matt’s dorm when Kourtney called and told me she’d met someone else. She hung up the phone, and I dropped to my knees and cried for a solid 30 minutes. I genuinely loved her, but I knew the end was inevitable. In my heart, I was gay (or at least bisexual) and I desperately needed to explore this uncultivated side of me. So the next day, in October 2006, I kissed a man for the very first time.

When summer came, I moved back to New Orleans from Lafayette and got a job waiting tables at a Mexican restaurant called Cuco’s. One night after closing, I went to a gay bar in the French Quarter with my friend Lesly. From the balcony above the dance floor, I noticed an incredibly cute boy in a blue polo who was fending off a shirtless dude in acid-washed jeans. I bolted down the stairs and pushed my way through the crowd to find him. “Do you need some help?” I yelled above the music. “Yes please,” he said. “Pretend to be my boyfriend.” Then three days later, I asked Chad to be my real-life boyfriend. Chad was the first guy with whom I had sex, and for me, nothing had ever felt more right. I was definitely gay, and truly in love with this person. But when Chad stopped taking his anti-depressants, he decided he didn’t want to be with me anymore. The week Chad dumped me, my parents and siblings were at the beach and I was home in New Orleans, being looked over by my godmother. She could tell I was devastated about something, so she phoned my mom and told her something was wrong. So my family cut their vacation abruptly short and drove back to New Orleans immediately. That night, I told them I was gay. It was my nineteenth birthday.

In the fall of 2007, I moved back to Lafayette and met a guy named Jason through mutual friends. Jason was working on his Master’s Degree at Texas A&M, which put 300 miles between us. Even though he was a few years my senior, Jason was a virgin, which surprised me because he was very good looking albeit woefully idiosyncratic. I can admit this now, but at the age of 19, I was not ready to be in an exclusive, long distance relationship with anyone. And over the course of several months, I cheated on Jason with a number of other guys. Then, Jason moved back to Lafayette in early June 2008 and I broke up with him almost instantly. I believed I couldn’t take the pressure of having my older, successful, loving boyfriend move to the town where I’d slept with other men behind his back. Of course, he found out about everything and it took years to earn back his trust and friendship. I’m proud to still have him in my life.

During that summer, my best friend Trey and I worked every freshman orientation. Trey was an orientation leader and I hosted pep rallies on behalf of the University Program Council. We had a weekly tradition of going out on the night of orientation to The Keg, a hotspot for underclassmen to get obliteration, and picking up freshly orientated homosexuals. One night, only days after I ended things with Jason, this guy walks through the door of The Keg and I turn to Trey and say, “That is, without a doubt, the hottest guy I’ve ever seen in my life. Too bad he’s straight.” Trey looks at me like I’m crazy. “He’s not straight,” he says bluntly. “He was in my group today. C’mon, I’ll introduce you.” His name was Barrett and we dated for three years.

Even though our relationship spanned a sizable chunk of time, I’m not going to say too much about him. We were a toxic pairing, and with him, I learned firsthand about the human capacity to hurt and be hurt. I also learned about our capacity to be so madly in love that you can’t think straight.

The day we broke up, I went to a going-out-of-business party at a downtown gay bar. It was here that I met Ronald Eyer, mere hours after my three-year relationship came to an end. Ronnie drove in from Lake Charles for our first date and we had sex before dinner. A few days later, I woke up to use the bathroom and felt an intense burning sensation emanating from the tip of my dick. I called Ronnie and screamed at him through tears. “I liked you a lot!” I yelled. “And you gave me an STD!” A trip to the ER revealed a simple UTI, so I immediately called Ronnie to apologize. He soon after dropped out of McNeese and moved out of his fraternity house — just to be with me, his first boyfriend, in Lafayette. Ronnie moved into a studio apartment near mine and I got him a job waiting tables with me at Johnny Carino’s, a casual Italian restaurant that served dishes like “Spicy Shrimp & Chicken” and “Sicilian Firesticks.” We worked together, ate every meal together, and had sex as often as possible. He was nothing like anyone I’d ever dated before — tan, rail-thin, simple, and country — but I loved his East Texas accent and the way he filtered the word through his infinite sense of wonder and amazement. It lasted eight months before his mother suggested he move back home. I was heartbroken when he told me, and demanded we break up immediately. So he left my apartment and then left for Hitchcock, Texas a couple days later. A week after that, I received an envelope in the mail with a Hitchcock return address. When I opened it, a silver ring slid out and fell into my palm. When I held it up to the light, I noticed that it was engraved with the words, “The First, The Last.” He was going to ask me to marry him.

In Ronnie’s wake, I finally started taking stock of my dating life. Since I was a sophomore in high school, I pretty much always had a partner. And in the pockets between boyfriends, I’d managed to continue casually dating and fucking. Ronnie was the nineteenth person with whom I’d had sex and my fervent opportunism didn’t suggest he’d be the last. But in terms of serious relationships, I felt like the first era was behind me. I started to see each relationship as an episode, with a definitive beginning and ending. Though Barrett and I would continue having sex after Ronnie left, he was still a character from an earlier season. A few years ago, when Jason and I spent an entire Saturday night walking the streets of New Orleans and snuggling on a bench overlooking the Mississippi, it felt like a guest starring role on a very special episode.

I started my blog, ExboyfriendMaterial.com, and wrote essays about where and how these relationships began and ended. I never saw the point in kicking anything into the long grass, so I kept everything. People think true beauty is in nuance, but sometimes, beauty is obvious. It’s a wide-angle shot of an endless landscape. So that’s the way I started seeing myself with other men; it was the moments in bed just before he wakes up and [at the exact same time], it was days folding into months, folding into years.

This morning, waking from a dream, I realized I am single. I’ve been single before, but the difference between then and now is the palpable intuition that something else is right around the corner — beckoning me into some new, doomed union. But I don’t feel that. I don’t feel anything at all.

While most people compartmentalize the past in years, I define personal history by my relationship status. Since Ronnie, I’ve had seven serious relationships: Kyle, Cody, Nick, Jacob, James, Andy, and Jeffrey. If you’ve been keeping track, that’s 12 boyfriends and one girlfriend — spanning 13 years. Each relationship can be spun into an infinite narrative and reduced to a single sentence. And for the first time in my life, I feel like I’m standing on the last period of an ellipsis. 

Half of me wonders who will love me next, but the other half thinks I’m being selfish. I’ve made love my life’s work, and I’m not unsatisfied with what I’ve got to show for it. I’ve got all these photographs and totems and memories. A bottomless ocean of memories in which I often find myself at night, when I’m alone in bed, sinking. Drowning.