W.P.P.III.

Charlottesville, VA 2012

I ignored the insistent ring, letting it go to voice mail. I didn’t recognize the number, and I didn’t want my train of thought derailed.

I was finally finding some clarity in the order of events during my dancing years in the 70s and 80s. I’d just brought a big box of saved notes, photos and programs from that era up from basement storage, and after unpacking them, began arranging them by date along a timeline unfolded accordion-style along my kitchen counter. It revealed clearly where my memory was a muddle.

I had moved to New York City with Warren in the late 70s. And here was the agreement we’d written on yellow legal paper about who would pay for what, an agreement we’d signed for each other prior to the move. But there was no date on it, and I found myself unsure about what came before, what happened immediately after. When was that move in relation to the performances of the dance company I was leaving in Boston? When had we gotten together in the first place?

Before I began paging through the diaries and programs to sort out the order of events, I needed a break to get some distance. So, I pressed the button on my phone to listen to the voice message that had come in.

“Hello. I’m not sure I have the right number.” A man’s voice said. “I am looking for the Roger Tolle who was a dancer in New York in the 1980’s. If I have the right person, could you please call me back at your convenience. I am calling from the Yale AIDS Memorial Project, and we are trying to locate people who knew Warren Smith. Thanks.” The name and number that followed were garbled.

As I put the phone down, my spine tingled. Just as I was thinking about Warren for the first time in decades, I get this call. That they were calling about a project that had to do with AIDS hit me hard. I had lost contact with Warren after we’d split up. I’d lived through the deaths of countless friends and artist colleagues during the 80s plague decade, but somehow, it never occurred to me to find out whether Warren had survived. And now, in an instant, that question was both asked and answered.

Grateful that my phone had stored his number, I called the guy right back, with my heart hammering and my brain in a swirl.

“Hi. You just called me. I’m Roger Tolle and I did know Warren in the late 70s. We actually lived together for a couple years. How can I help?”

He explained that the project he and some other alumni of Yale were engaged in was to gather and publish the stories of all the Yale graduates that had died of AIDS. And they were trying to uncover information about Warren.

They’d had little to go on. Warren’s college roommate only knew my first name and that I was a modern dancer. But when following up on other alumni in the Library of Performing Arts in NYC, they found videos of my dance company with dates that made me a plausible candidate. Armed with my full name, their internet searches finally lead to my current phone number.

“Since you knew Warren, we are hoping you might be willing to write a short piece for our publication. Just some memories, as personal as you wish. Even a couple hundred words would be lovely. If you have any pictures, that would be great, too.”

I agreed to dig through photos from the period, gather my thoughts and send him something within the week. And he assured me I would get a copy of the eventual publication.

Before we hung up, I asked. “When did he die? I have not been in contact with him since 1980.”

“We first thought he had gone home to his mother’s in Minnesota at the end. But his obituary says he died in his home in Union City, NJ in 1987.”

Only when I hung up did I allow myself to gulp some air and sob. As I realized what I had agreed to do, the memories began flooding in. A thick, heavy sadness surfaced again as I remembered all the glowing, talented, beautiful friends and fellow dancers I’d lost. And something more bittersweet emerged as I recalled the particular pleasures of meeting Warren and how much I had learned and grown while I was with him.

Boston, MA 1977

On the Friday night before Labor Day, I’d arrived early at 1270, the dance club and Boston’s premier gay bar. I needed to be on the floor well in advance of the cruising crowd to get the most out of my weekly blow-out ritual. In the exhilarating darkness illuminated only by flittering sparks from the mirror-ball, I could lose myself in mash-ups of the Hustle, the Jerk, the Frug and any other popular dances I’d encountered, then reinvent myself over and over by dancing different personas every few minutes. As if rehearsing for a new role, I tried on ‘Mr. Confidence’, ‘Playful Puppy’, ‘Prowling Panther’, and recently, although never convincingly, the ‘Sexy Slut’. I held out hope I might connect with ‘Mr. Right’ one of these nights and dance what I hoped would be the ‘Soulmate Surrender’ with him into the wee hours.

The hope never left me that one day soon I'd actually fulfill longings I’d found so hard to articulate even to myself--the skin hunger satisfied only by hours of cuddles and caresses, the erotic urges I could now admit to myself but was still too embarrassed to name, the sense of oneness shared with another soul, the unspeakable joy of shared laughter, the exquisite tenderness of kissing away another man's tears.

But, all too often, the guys I found on the dance floor stayed stuck in macho posturing, frantic grinding, stiff repetitiveness, or other boring mockeries of the real deal, and sent me back to my Cambridge apartment with its large, lonely bed, frustration my only companion.

I wasn't at the club long that night, only beginning to get lost in the music and my need to let loose, before a slinky movement on the other side of the dark space caught my eye. A short-cropped afro framed his high cheekbones. His narrow hips caught the upbeats with playful, sensual ease. His smooth, coppery skin broadcast the first sheen of exhilaration.

I danced where I was through several songs until he noticed me, then circled in closer. We kept dancing, copying each other's moves and twisting them into new patterns. This seemed to hold his attention as much as it did mine. When we drifted to within arm’s reach, he pulled me into him and down into a pelvic pulsing that grabbed the full and appreciative attention of my new dancer persona.

I’d done OK as a ‘Good Little Boy’, but I knew there was more to me than that. So, when he lifted my hand, I twirled a couple times under it. And when he cracked up at my antics, I swung around to catch his hand behind his back, spun him away without losing a beat, then pulled him back into a hip-to-hip clench. His unrestrained delight in my making a game of our dancing together lifted my mood close to elation level.

Several extended disco hits later, as we escaped the smokey darkness and exited into the streetlight outside the club hand in hand, I turned to him with a grin. "That was great. So much fun. But if you want to do the next step of this dance," my other hand indicating the space between us, "I'll need to know your name."

I could hear his laugh as it rumbled out of his belly. "Nice line. Nice double- entendre." He winked.

"So?" I waited, poised comically on one foot, the other hanging in mid-stride.

"I think I'll leave you dangling in anticipation for a while." Another of his dazzling smiles as he let go of my hand and started to turn away.

"It will be quite a while. I'm a professional." That stopped him, and he turned back to see me still balancing on one leg.

"Well, well. A professional, are we? And just what sort of profession would that be?"

"I'm a dancer. A professional modern dancer.” I settled both feet back on the sidewalk and turned to face him. With even more predictable social protocol, I stuck out my right hand for him to shake--as if we hadn't just danced together for more than an hour. “And my name is Roger Edward Tolle. But my dancer friends just call me Rog.”

With a sideways cock of his head, he caught my shift of tone and took my offered hand. Instead of shaking it, though, he pulled me close and swung me back into the groove of the faint thump-thump drifting out of the club. My body offered no resistance to this delaying tactic. My hips joined his and our feet began to slide on the smooth pavement. Following a quick spin, his lead hand slung my arm in an arc over our heads, turning us inside out. Then he pulled us close together and looked me in the eyes, a crease deepening between his brows. Was he considering something, some serious choice? His upper body stilled, but he continued to keep my hips locked in rhythm. Then he blinked, took a deep breath in, brought his full lips up close to my ear. "Warren… Paul… Pinkston…the Third.” The last word heavy with regret. “But I took my step-father’s name, so that made me Warren Paul Smith."

He pulled his head back just enough to stare at my face, judging my reaction, I guess. When I didn't blink, but only offered a soft, inviting smile, he leaned into my other ear. "But my friends just know me as Warren. Only Harvard knows my full name. I'm starting my third year in law school."

Having met my bid, he paused to look around, a little nervously, I thought, then pulled me out of the streetlight, and back to the shadow near the wall of the club. The darkness felt safer to us then, out of view of passing motorists, out of range of an angrily hurled beer bottle aimed, as they were way too often in those days, at unsuspecting men on their way in or out of the club, and accompanied by drunken epithets--faggot, queer, pansy, or in his case, the N-word.

That little back step, could have derailed our flirting entirely. But as a testament to some inner courage, or more likely the roiling hunger for contact he would later reveal to me, he used it as a springboard for more risk-taking. He upped the ante and began to talk about himself with surprising candor.

He told me that he was given that god-awful name by his Black father who then abandoned him and his White mother. She raised him in Minneapolis, scraping by as best she could on meager income and minimal support from her family and eventually a new husband. It was only with a lot of loans and scholarships that he got into Yale. And following surprising academic achievement there, including writing for the prestigious school paper, he'd earned a full ride to Harvard Law. He spilled all this out in a rush with only brief glances around to be sure none of the men flowing in and out of the bar were listening in.

By the time he stopped and leaned away enough for me to focus on his face, all I saw was a hesitant and vulnerable hopefulness in his deep brown eyes. Not a hint of the confident playfulness I'd seen on the dance floor, and none of the evasiveness of our first fresh-air banter.

"Good move." I said, not sure myself if I meant the sidewalk sashay or this torrent of personal revelation, but sure that a man who was willing to risk so much so soon was worth significant further exploration. "My next move is a simple question. Your place or mine?"

My bright red VW Bug, a car that perfectly balanced my exuberant sensibilities with my tiny budget, followed the short, winding route along the Charles River. Warren helped scout out one of the scarce parking spaces in his Beacon Hill neighborhood and led me up the long staircase to his apartment.

He winced when he flipped on the overhead light. "Sorry. I hate that thing."
Before he could get across the room to turn on a soft bedside lamp and back to the door to turn off the offending light, my eyes had taken in his attempts at better- than-student-grade furnishings-- new-looking stereo system on a real wood cabinet packed solid with records (mostly classical composers, I would later find out), crown moldings separating the off-white walls from the stark white ceiling, sheer white curtains covering big black window panes, framed posters of famous paintings emblazoned with the names of European museums lending color and class to the simple space.

Undeterred by a large desk stacked with books and piles of papers that crowded in from one side, and a big bed with a puffy white comforter looming from the other, we began a slow dance on the small oriental rug in the middle. Finally, in private space, and with the lighting adjusted to his liking, he pulled our dancing in even closer, moaning the only accompaniment for our hungry kisses. We wasted few words, but spent plenty of time revealing ourselves to each other by stages, each layer of damp clothing peeled off with a bit of self-conscious flourish. Gooseflesh rose on each new area of skin exposed to the cool night air. As we finally peeled off our underwear, we both froze for a moment. Awkward. Awestruck.

Warren broke in with a chuckle. "Such happy little men are these, standing at attention between us."

I laughed out loud, pushed him onto the bed, and we let our "little men" wrestle for who would lead and who would follow in the horizontal tango that drew us in. Like on the dance floor an hour before, we trusted the pleasure in our bodies at each twist, turn, slip or slide to show us how and when to alternate the lead.

Even with this organic evolution of our lust play, we’d pause briefly at each change of role or position to make eye contact and confirm with a nod or a smile that the other was alright with where we were heading. This subtle but conscious unadorned acknowledgement along the way was new for me. Watching this dance--in bed with Warren--seeing how it was being choreographed as we went, noticing the two of us as dancers and how well we danced together--all this conscious awareness added another layer of pleasure. Each new 'yes' on the road toward deeper intimacy revealed for me a new way to see and acknowledge the dance between us as beautiful.

Resting after sex, still tangled in his arms and legs, I soaked for a long while in his warm vanilla scent. I wanted to feel even closer to him, and somehow decided that more disclosure was needed. After his earlier sidewalk revelations, I wanted to risk giving words to what I was feeling and the thoughts swirling in my mind, but with so much sensation flowing through my body, it was a struggle to find my way back to speech. "I love getting to know your body… and… and I love how you have been getting to know mine, too… I… I want to try to tell you what I’m feeling."

He twisted his head to look me in the eyes, a bit wary, but curious. When he nodded, I took it as a "go ahead."

"I feel great all over... warm... and tingly... and heavy... and oddly, I don’t know, also a little weepy." This last tacked on in an unsuccessful attempt to use candor as a cover for my emotional insecurity. I wiped my eyes, then paused for a long uncomfortable moment. "What are you feeling right now? Can you tell me?"

His body tensed next to me for a moment, then relaxed back into the mattress with a sigh. "Wow. You don't pull any punches, do you?"

He paused for another long moment. Then very slowly, barely above a whisper, he continued. "The sex was great, but that question makes me feel more exposed than being physically naked with you right now, even more exposed than I felt when we first got naked, standing in the middle of the floor. I don't know how to answer you. But for some stupid reason, I trust you enough to describe the symptoms."

I met his eyes in the dim light leaking in from the windows. "Thank you." I whispered.

He lay back, folded his arm under his head, and looked up at the ceiling. I rolled over to nuzzle my face into the long scar down the center of his chest, my ear tuning into his heartbeat, my body stretched out over his.

"My head is spinning a little. My heart is beating fast. My breath is pushing my ribs into yours, and I like that."

I smiled, kissed his scar from top to bottom, then let my hand caress his belly lower and lower.

With a rumbling chuckle, he added, "I'm very sensitive down there right now, so hands off. And the desire to kiss you some more is about to drive me crazy."

I didn't need another word of explanation, nor another invitation. I kissed him then with an intimacy we had not yet dared, even after hours of dancing and shared sex play. Breathing became huge and important. Our lips stayed connected as we began to breathe deeper, then, remarkably, without discussing it, started alternating our breathing patterns. I inhaled while he exhaled, then exhaled, my nose to his, feeding him air for his inhale. I imagined us both filled and enveloped by our moving air. My body grew lighter and more porous. For the longest time, we floated, conjoined clouds in a star-lit sky.

We must have slept then, and stayed asleep a long time, too, because the next thing I knew, the sun was shining full and warm through the big windows and onto the thick comforter. Neither of us were in a hurry to disturb the peace of our slow awakening, our heavy, tangled limbs enveloped in the soft, cool folds of fabric.

Eventually we did drag ourselves out of bed, and while I showered, Warren ran down to the corner bakery for fresh bagels, lox and cream cheese. After he showered, he fixed us some incredibly aromatic coffee in his French press, and a lighter tone returned, both of us pulling back a bit from the intensity of our midnight revelations. I began to pepper him with questions.

I found out that, like me, he’d also studied in Germany during college. The posters brightening his walls were acquired during the travels in Europe that followed. The new stereo playing Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” had been a Christmas gift from his mother. The rug still strewn with our clothes was acquired on the street. I found myself hanging on each new detail about him as I lost myself in the discovery.

I was struck by his sophisticated manner of speech and how easily he seemed to read the frequent shifts in my mind. He seemed to know so much about the world, about current events and politics, as well as history and culture. That, and the contradictions between his lower class, Midwest upbringing and his Ivy League education captured my curiosity.

I learned through further research that morning, that dark-roast coffee pairs perfectly with salty lox and deep kisses. And that daylight could reveal nothing to dampen my infatuation with this man.

I startled when I noticed it was almost noon. "Oops. I have to get going. I promised to help my new roommate bring his stuff into his bedroom. He just moved in, and I want to be there for this beginning."

There was that crease between his eyebrows again. "Will I see you again?"

I bounced up, slipped into pants, shirt, shoes and jacket, then turned to wrap my arms around his neck and growl into his ear. "I know where you live, now. So, you can't get away from me."

He gave me a skeptical look, so I nibbled his earlobe and added, "My place tonight? Here's my address. Around 7:00? I'll cook."

I whipped around and spun out the door, catching, on a backward glance, his delighted smile.

Charlottesville, VA 2012

Over the next couple days, interrupted by bouts of sentimental weeping, I wrote a short piece for the Yale project about our meeting (minus the bits of dialog and the details about our shared intimacies, but including the best aspects of our relationship’s beginning.)

I added notes about moving in together in Cambridge, his decision toward the end of the school year to accept the lucrative offer for a starting position at a large New York law firm, our decision to move to the Big Apple together and his willingness to support me in a comfortable two-bedroom Upper West Side apartment for almost two years as I auditioned for dancing gigs.

I didn’t include his insatiable need for weekly club nights, nights that drifted into mornings after and that began to be dusted with designer drugs. I didn’t include our mutual exploration of a sexually open relationship that evolved into separate dating lives while living together as best friends for a year. And I didn’t mention our amicable parting of ways when he met and decided to buy a townhouse in Greenwich Village with a young doctor, a man who could afford to keep up with his newly acquired wealth and weekend partying lifestyle.