Snapshot of Scott

Our living room is in shambles. Scott sits on the floor in the middle of it all. 

Parts of the cabinet project are scattered all over the floor, strewn far enough apart that all four of us could be sanding simultaneously in separate work areas. The sleeper sofa Drew and I had purchased the previous year for visiting friends and the big desk we'd harvested from the street are covered with plastic and shoved out of the way against the wall. The big dark brown credenza, also discovered around the corner on trash day and lugged up into our apartment, turning and twisting to get through the doorways, now anchors the jumble of specially cut plywood pieces soon to become Diane's design masterpiece. That credenza, legs abandoned on the street, serves as our multipurpose workbench, a perfect height for perching to gain additional purchase on a cabinet drawer gripped between knees. That credenza sometimes also serves as a landing strip for hand tools, packs of sandpaper, cups of coffee, sweat dampened bandannas, protective goggles. And sometimes it emerges as an outcrop from the forest of construction debris on which to plop down, weary or worried, to survey the surrounding rubble through which we have navigated. 

In the snapshot, Scott sits on the floor, grinning up at the camera, or perhaps at me or at Drew, the bill of a baseball cap tipped back, sawdust on his nose and mustache. His sandpaper hand hovers above the edge of what will be one of the front doors of the cabinet, but what is then still an ungainly piece of plywood 20 inches wide and 8 feet long. He props it up with both feet and his one free hand. He is happy to be helpful, engaged in our big project, happy to have been called when we needed extra hands, happy to be spending time among good friends, his chosen family. His rosy cheeks and bright wit are undimmed. 

This is the Scott I remember. Scott in 1985, who is still sowing seeds of sweet and juicy joy, still touching hearts with tender touch, still delighting in hidden but no longer forbidden pleasures. 

Scott, who sang in an early music group with Drew some years before, and now idolizes him. Scott, who became my buddy in weekly rehearsals with the New York Gay Men's Chorus all spring. 

Scott, whose bright smile and soft hair seduced my mouth and hands when we rode together for several hours on a school bus full of lusty, enthusiastic, overstimulated gay men making their way to a retreat center where the chorus rehearsed for two full days the weekend before their June concert. 

Scott, whose weight is light and liquid as I roll him off me and fit myself in next to him; whose naked butt brushes the cold wall bordering the bottom bunk we shared those two nights; whose surprised squealing is commented on by our neighbors the next day; whose lilted gratitudes are slipped, one by one, into my ear between nibbles; whose eyes are wide open, accepting, undefended when I come inside him. 

Drew and I had hired Diane to design and build that elegant cabinet to house our TV and sound equipment, to hold all of our cassettes, video tapes, LPs, and sheet music in specially designed compartments. Records would stand, organized by artist, in a neat library hidden behind the cherry faced doors. The inside of the doors would conceal lipped shelves full of rows and rows of cassette tapes, all snugged in place and in order. The lower part would be drawers, just the right depth to fit our growing catalog of videotapes--commercial ones for entertainment, as well as those recording the expanding body of performances. Unfortunately, Diane mistakenly measured the drawers to fit Betamax tapes instead of VHS. This almost brought the project to a disastrous end. But some quick redesigning on her part, removing the divider boards, gave us just enough room. 

Other photos taken much later that day, perhaps by Scott, show Drew and Diane and I mugging for the camera, covered in dust, showing off our handiwork, vamping like Vanna White in The Price is Right. 

There is no photo, only memory of a second disaster later in the week. We had purchased two cans of cherry colored stain. We opened both, each took a can, and Drew began on one door while I began on the other. As we finished that first coat, and stepped back from our work, it was clear that the two cans, although identically labeled, were not the same color of stain. It took a full extra day to return the cans, double check the new cans of stain, then sand down the surface all over again and re-stain everything. 

That elegant cabinet, when it was finally completed with all its layers of stain and shellac, brought welcome order to our musical lives for a while. But it could not re-order our expanding emotional and erotic lives. It would move up to Inwood when Drew moved to an apartment there a year later, after he had experimented with a few other relationships both in NYC and on his travels. And after he deduced that Scott and I had slept together. 

Two years later, Scott abandoned his New York friends and his life in the City to move to a large country house upstate to live with a communal band of brothers/lovers devoted to their voice-teacher-turned-spiritual-guru. And a few years after that, he suffered in his childhood bedroom in Rochester, New York, releasing his last breath as so many young men of that time did, no longer surrounded by the family they’ve chosen, but by the parents who felt obligated to deal with their unloved offspring. 

That elegant cherry stained cabinet still stands with it's now obsolete sound equipment, antique and valuable vinyl records, and unplayable cassette tapes in the artist barn at the lovely Catskills home shared by Drew and his husband James. Nearby is the photo album Drew opened for me on one of my visits there, while researching this memoir. There, my eyes welled with tears in front of the snapshot of Scott.