It’s the middle of the 1980s when I arrive at college. Marquette is a Jesuit Catholic university in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and my first function is my freshman dorm orientation.
The resident adviser gathers everyone around, and he introduces himself, and looks at us and says, “You guys look really uptight, so I’m gonna give you an icebreaker to help you relax—a joke.”
And he says, “You guys know what ‘GAY’ stands for, right?
“ ‘Got AIDS Yet?’ ”
And it worked. The ice was broken, everyone’s laughing, including me, because I’m thinking, Okay. I’ve been in the closet for eighteen years. What’s another four? I know the drill.
But by second semester I started getting this reputation that nobody in college wants: I’m known as a good listener. It’s only because I have nothing to add to the conversations, which are all about my friends’ love lives. Since I lack one, I just become this repository for all their dating details.
By Valentine’s Day I was desperate enough to do something drastic. So I went into my dorm room, I locked the door, and I did the 1980s version of Googling something, which is to dial 411—the number for information.
I hear this voice pick up, and I realize I’d never come out of the closet to anyone, not even a stranger on the phone.
It’s too much. I hang up the phone.
But I wait fifteen minutes, I call back, the operator answers—same voice, I think—and I say, “Do you think maybe you could give me the address of a gay bar?”
And there’s just this silence. She then quickly mumbles an address and hangs up.
That very night I am standing in the freezing-cold industrial section of Milwaukee, staring at this dimly lit door. The numbers are peeling off, there’s no name on it, and I’m thinking, How can a dump like this possibly be a gay bar named C’est la Vie?
But I go in, and there’s a handful of guys standing around drinking and smoking and doing a bad job pretending to ignore each other. So I join them, you know, my people—all ten of us. And I realize that this is not going to be the place where I meet the love of my life. That is, until the door opens and this other guy walks in.
I was so relieved. I remember thinking, Okay, because I didn’t know gay guys could look like that. I mean this guy, above the neck, he looked like a young Kennedy—he had the strong jaw and the cleft chin, and intelligent blue eyes, and this windswept blond hair, like he’d been sailing or canvassing.
But below the neck, he was all blue-collar realness, you know? He had on these chunky work boots and a factory uniform, and he had the sleeves rolled past these Popeye forearms. And no coat.
No coat in Milwaukee in February is really saying something.
What it said to me was that he probably had a car, and he definitely had a real job, and possibly an apartment nearby.
So he walks over to the bar, and I think there’s going to be this stampede to get next to him, but there isn’t.
So I do. I go stand next to him. I notice he orders a whiskey, so I order a whiskey (which I hate, but who cares—I would have ordered gasoline if he had).
At some point our elbows make contact, and he doesn’t move away, and I don’t move away.
And it was the most wonderful male conversation that I’d never had.
That was when I noticed the wonderful smell. I thought I was mistaken at first, but there is no mistaking the smell of chocolate—this guy smelled of chocolate. And this bar reeked of Stetson and too much smoking and rancid beer.
So I’m there, and I’m thinking, This guy is a tough factory guy, and here he has this sweet aura around him. You know, maybe I should just say something to him.
But all I have is, “Is that you who smells like cookies?,” which is weird, so I don’t say anything.
But I do smile, and he gives me this look. And it’s just pure confidence. There’s nothing extra in it. It’s the look of someone who knows what he wants to be doing. And what he does is order another round. And he picks up the drinks, looks at me briefly, and then walks away.
I look into the bar mirror, and I see him go give the drink—what I thought was going to be my drink—to some other guy in a Brewers cap, and the two of them chat for a while and then they leave together. I feel so stupid because I did not see that coming.
But I go back the next week, and he’s there, and the same exact thing happens. And then the next week, too, the same thing happens again. The only difference is that he gets more efficient at picking people who aren’t me and walking out with them.
So during this whole series of rejections, I got to know the bartender, as you do in those situations.
I went up to him, and I said, “What is the deal with that guy?”
And he’s like, “Oh, is he your type?”
I said, “Yeah.”
He’s like, “Well, we call him ‘ET’—he’s everyone’s type, honey, not just yours.”
He told me that, actually, the factory guy’s type was dark and skinny.
So I thought, If I can’t date him, maybe I can be like him a little bit, at least copy his style.
I started with the boots. I went to campus, to this surplus store, and I bought these chunky black boots. It changed the way I walked to more of a lumber. Then I bought these tight work shirts. And since the factory guy was muscular, I hit the gym.
Even my friends noticed a difference.
When one of them said to me, “You know, you’re not such a good listener after all,” I knew I was getting somewhere.
So I go back to the bar, and the bartender is not there for some reason. But there’s the factory guy, and he’s sitting in the corner, but he looks somehow different. He’s drunker than usual, but like most really handsome people it only suits him.
So I went to the bar, and I ordered the two whiskeys. And I turned around just in time to see the factory guy do something that I’d never seen him do before, which is to leave alone.
I wasn’t even consolation prize material for this guy—to him, I wasn’t better than nothing.
I left, and never came back, because I was so afraid I would become like those regulars at C’est la Vie.
College ended, and the eighties ended, and I got my ass out of the closet, moved to New York, and got a job teaching English as a second language in Washington Heights. I got friends and roommates and an apartment and even my first serious boyfriend.
One afternoon I was teaching, and I would try to use the TV to expand my students’ vocabulary and comprehension. We would watch current events and get new vocabulary words that were ripped from the headlines.
We are doing this when a news bulletin breaks out of Milwaukee. It shows this guy, and he’s got his hands behind his back. He’s doing a perp walk, and there is a close-up on his face, and I’m like, THAT’S HIM! That’s the factory guy!
I said to my class, “I know him. I know that guy!”
But then I had to sit down because of what they showed next.
It was a hazmat team in gas masks, and they were hoisting these blue fifty-five-gallon drums down some steps. The drums were later said to contain acid and the un-dissolvable remains of Jeffrey Dahmer’s love life.
My students struggled to comprehend the story. Everyone knew the term “serial killer,” but other words escaped them, like “Rohypnol” and “stench.” The words with cognates they got right away, like “dismemberment” and “decapitation.”
But the word that brought a chilling silence to the classroom was “cannibalism.”
Eleven of Jeffrey Dahmer’s seventeen victims spent their last unimaginable moments in Number 213 of the Oxford Apartment Building, just a short, ten-minute drive up Wisconsin Avenue from C’est la Vie.
I was feeling nauseous and confused, trying to take in this information. I turned off the TV, canceled class, and decided to walk all the way home to Chelsea.
I had to sweat something out of me.
I was walking for a while, and I thought, I was right about one thing—that he smelled of chocolate, and not just a little. He put in eight-hour shifts at the Ambrosia Chocolate factory in downtown Milwaukee before he went out to the bars.
As I am walking down Broadway, I am hot. Mostly my feet, and I notice I am wearing those boots I bought in Milwaukee six years earlier—the ones I got to make myself more rugged, more like him. They are slowing me down, and I don’t want to be slowed down, because then I think of how I yearned not just for Jeffrey Dahmer’s attention but specifically for an invitation to get in his car and to go to that apartment, where I was sure he would jump-start my love life.
But he didn’t choose me.
And it might seem callous, but unlike any of his seventeen victims, I was alive and young and filled with ambition and passion, and all sorts of ideas about the kind of man I wanted to be.
I decided to go to a sporting-goods store. I walked in and bought the first pair of white sneakers I saw. I put them on and paid for them, and I walked out of that store.
I took the laces of those boots, and I tied them together, and threw them into the first garbage can I could find.
I kept walking. And with each block I left them further and further behind.
TERRANCE FLYNN is a writer, a teacher, and a psychotherapist who contributes to the Wall Street Journal. A chapter from his memoir-in-progress, Dying to Meet You, recently earned a notable-essay citation in Best American Essays. The memoir depicts the two simultaneous and intertwined journeys of having a baby through surrogacy, closely followed by the author/new dad undergoing a sudden heart transplant. His fellowships include the MacDowell Colony, PEN Center USA, and most recently SPACE on Ryder Farm. Awards include the Sustainable Arts Promise Award and the Thomas Wilhelmus award for nonfiction. His personal essays have been published or anthologized in Slice magazine, the Normal School, Creative Nonfiction, and others. Terrance grew up the middle child of a large Irish-Catholic family outside Detroit, Michigan. He is interested in dead and dying malls and loves all things shark-related. Visit his website at TerranceFlynn.com.
This story was told on January 26, 2018, at the Center for the Arts in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The theme of the evening was Flirting with Disaster. Directors: Meg Bowles and Maggie Cino.
