I didn’t know it then, but Chris was every stereotype of gay.
It was the summer between junior and senior year and I was living with Annmarie, who was living with Chris while she waited for her new husband to complete basic training. Chris was a friend from her 7-Eleven job, and his apartment was a place to stay.
At first, I went to the apartment off Monroe Avenue to keep Annmarie company for a few nights. But nights became weeks, then months. Everything was dreary at home, my mother seemed lower than usual, and I couldn’t bear another summer of stagnant ghetto heat.
I enjoyed the brightness of Chris’s whitewashed walls and Pier One furniture, and couldn’t get enough of Chris himself—his tips on the proper application of eyeliner, his stories of love gone south, his stacks of Wham! cassettes.
There were fights. How could there not be? Chris stole my blusher; I broke a champagne glass. Annmarie used up Chris’s last squirt of Sun-In; Chris didn’t return the twenty dollars he’d borrowed.
But for two whole months, I stayed at Chris’s place and pretended I was of the world. We all worked different hours, and many times, I had the apartment to myself, a luxury I’d never known.
I’d sit on the small deck, stretching my legs on the weathered wood beside Chris’s collection of potted succulents. I’d read in the company of those desert plants until I got bored. Then I’d slip into black harem pants and walk up and down Monroe Avenue, studying people as they left head shops and used bookstores. The neighborhood was edgy and brooding, a perfect mirror for my own mood.
When Chris was home, we’d slip Madonna into the tape player and spin around the room dancing to “Borderline.” We stayed up late talking about men—what made some good, what made some bad—and when I discovered that Ruben had a live-in girlfriend and thought I would split open from the pain of his deceit, Chris held me in his arms and called me baby doll while I sobbed under a framed poster of Judy Garland.