Apartment 409

Before I met Beau, I never wore a mustache.  I think once, in graduate school, I shaved everything off except for my mustache and sheepishly showed my bff, Ibby, where upon she flew into such a hysterical cackle that I retreated back to the bathroom to cower and cry for about an hour.  I've always been incredibly sensitive.  I can cry at the drop of a hat watching an AT&T holiday commercial from the 1980s, yet I sometimes don't know how to react when, let's say, my beloved grandmother passes away.  A totally one of a kind director, who once wrote me a recommendation letter, described me as a little bit more than tall and odd.  Yes, when I read it, I cried, selfishly yes, but ridiculously truthful.  I immediately imagined myself as the tallest person on earth, with a giraffe-like neck and little oddities sprouting from speckled fur.  I have a habit of beating myself up endlessly with the preverbal baseball bat.  In fact, I made one during my educational theatre master's program, with all the insults I call myself on a daily basis.  Mike, the professor, was so impressed he asked to keep it to, you know, show other students who would one day take the course.  Or maybe he took it because he was trying to save me from myself.  Without the bat and insults, could I survive the rest of my twenties in tact?  I did make it to 30.  Actually 35.  This picture was taken in August of 2014.  I was living in New Orleans with the love of my life, Beau.  We met on Scruff on a Thursday and by the next week, we were heading to New Orleans to start a new life.  I had never done anything so risky in my life.  Say goodbye to my family, to run off with a virtual stranger who I don't know from Adam?  Yes, sign me up.  I couldn't get out of Houston fast enough.  Moving to Houston from NYC in 2012 was one of the bumpiest landings I had ever had while flying and my life basically skidded through the bayou towards endless peril ever since.  Ever since I was a child I have managed to avoid death at all costs.  In early childhood, I fell into a raging river.  I was ripped down the overwhelming currents and managed to cling to the smallest root of the flimsiest tree which ultimately saved my teeny tiny  life.  In 2012, I was a public school theatre teacher, with stellar credentials looking forward to a bright future as an educator in the arts.  By 2014, I was shooting meth into my veins on a daily, double daily basis, had become gay escort to keep my veins filled with meth, and was homeless, living out of hotels.  But then I met Beau.  He opened me up to the idea of love.  I had long before told myself that my days of love were over.  I had, in fact had my Seven Year Itch with Richard, the impeccably dressed and dashing Native American/Italian mutt who basically raised me as a gay infant into gay adulthood.  I look back at pictures and think, God, what did he see in me?  I was such a child.  Yet, at the time, I thought I knew it all.  You couldn't say a damn thing to me when I was 21.  I was a total asshole, and many a night do I reflect back over the course of my young life and cringe at the thought of some of my grossly ridiculous and insensitive antics.  For those, reading this, who knew me in my early twenties, if I was still in a twelve step program you would be getting an amends.  But since, I've abandoned the idea of community for a table for one, you'll have to settle for this:  I have never been sorrier for anything in my life.  And I mean that, from the bottom of my broken heart.
But Beau put a shock collar on my lifeless-hooker corpse.   He like most of the men in my life, was from the opposite side of the tracks.  He scared me a little, but when he jumped into the passenger seat of my Mini Cooper that hot Thursday evening in July, I had no idea how the course of my life could go from bad, to worse, to "oh, my fucking God, pull over, I want to die, shoot me now."