In Another Dimension with Michael
By: Alex
Tags: Spirituality, Creative Non Fiction, LGBTQ, Relationships, Drugs

Relationships | Love | LGBT+ | Autobiography

In Another Dimension with Michael

Reminiscences of 1970s San Francisco

It was early evening of what had been an absolutely first-class, San-Francisco-summer day in the first week of August 1979. It was the end of my second day in the city after having been absent in Fairbanks since summer 1978.

I was at the door to his second-story flat in a fine old Victorian on Delores Street, the southern boundary of Mission Delores Park. Looking out over the street, I saw the park’s vast, sloping, green expanse dotted with a copse on the uphill side to my left. There was a row of well maintained Victorian homes across the park.The downtown skyline punctuated the background.

Fog blanketed the Avenues and the Bridge, where I had been cycling two hours earlier. But here, over the park, the sky was clear. The sun shone a dusky orange as it marched onward to the western horizon. It was 7:00, but there was still more than an hour to sunset. There was a slight chill to the evening.

I was floating on air with anticipation. I was confident of what was going to happen — two hours of dining on the authentic Spanish dinner he would prepare, with coffee and Orujo to finish, followed by God only knew how many hours of slow, tender, languid lovemaking, twice, perhaps three times over. I had extra lube just in case. I had no condoms. Neither did he, I knew. We had never used them.

He had a brilliant, inquiring mind and a quick wit. He was exceedingly well educated, nearly as widely read in the humanities, biography, history, and literature as was I — less so only because he was four years younger and I had had the extra time. He was in his first year of a pediatric residency at UCSF Med.

He was full-blooded Navajo and uncommonly handsome. He had shiny, thick and straight, steel-blue hair that came down almost to his shoulders. He brushed it 100 times every morning with a stiff horsehair brush, just as his mother had taught him. His dark brown eyes turned to pools of midnight when he looked at you with desire. They could melt a soul of iron, and leave it in a muddled heap wondering what had happened.

He was a definitive endomorph. His five-foot, eleven-and-a-half-inch, beautiful, brown-skinned body was well muscled. He had classic six-pack abs below rock-hard pecs. He had a perfect bubble butt and thighs that grew rigid when he flexed them. A sizeable package showed whenever he wore his button-fly, Levi 501s. He oozed sex pheromones.

He was my ultimate dream. Whenever I was near him, a siren song played about him in silent, golden tones. Like Odysseus, I would have had to be roped to the mast to resist him.

His name was Michael. We met in the summer of 1975 at the gym, the Golden Gate Y. I was hanging upside down from the parallel bars doing vertical situps and obliques. Across the room, he was on the mat, stretching out.

We connected the instant we locked eyes. It wasn’t merely chemistry and heat; it was fireworks and magic.

I was in my first year of law school. He was in his second year of med school. We dated for two years. Except, it wasn’t dating as if we were courting or engaged, though I wanted it to be.

From that first upside-down sighting of him sitting with his legs out to his sides, his torso and arms extended forward and flat against the mat, with those pools of midnight looking straight at me, I was entirely stricken.

I would have seen him every day and slept with him every night just to awaken with him against me in half-sleep, an erection rousing to full extension. I would have moved my razor and toothbrush into his bathroom and clothes into a drawer. I wouldn’t have asked for more than one.

I missed him when we weren’t together. I would see an art exhibition or a gymnastics meet and reflexively think, “Michael would love this.” I wanted to share them with him, to see the delight on his face or hear the timbre of his voice speaking of how they affected him.

I’m here to testify that love, at first sight, is real. From the beginning, I wanted to live life with him.

But, he set the pace, and I never brought up the prospect. I knew instinctively that the subject was unwelcome. Then, for some reason that eluded me, he quit our relationship after two years. I had finally built up the nerve to ask him why, when serendipity delivered me to Tyler, whom I came to love, and with whom I spent that third year.

The next year I spent as a law clerk in Fairbanks. It ended in June 1979. I had a job at a law firm in Philadelphia waiting. I was to start the last week in September. I was spending August in San Francisco, having spent July in Seattle. Serendipity was about to do a little spell-work in my life yet again.

On my first day back in the city, after two years apart, I came upon him in the steam room at the Y, appropriately enough. He was sitting naked on the tiled bench, a white gym towel with the Y’s logo casually draped over his right knee. The steam enveloped him in a translucent cloud. Condensed steam and sweat ran in rivulets through the cleft between his pecs and down his belly to where it pooled in his jet-black bush of pubic hair.

Ah, there were those pheromones again. He was as alluring as ever I remembered him.

He struck up the conversation before I had a chance to recover my tongue. He was friendly and welcoming, which surprised me a little. Whatever I had done those two years earlier seemed to have been forgiven or forgotten. He invited me to dinner the next evening.

“Arrive at 7:00 for 9:00,” he had said, which was how I came to be standing on the stoop to the Victorian ringing the bell. I was aquiver with expectation and a little trepidatious about the Orujo I knew he would serve. It was a cultivated taste. I hoped I hadn’t lost mine in the two years since I had last sampled it on his tongue.

After a leisurely, relaxed dinner, coffee, and Orujo, for which I still had a taste, he took my hand and led me to the front bedroom. He switched off the light as we passed the sill. Indirect moonlight entered through the bay window for which there were no curtains. The city lights twinkled like fireflies in the night. It was a bit after 11:00. All the gay boys were headed for the bars on Castro and Folsom streets.

We had something else to do.