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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
He wasn't gay, but after he broke up with his girlfriend he dated me for four months. Then he shot himself.
Apr 7, 2003 | I visited his studio apartment the morning after. The smell was horrible. I guessed maybe 12 hours had passed, I wasn't quite sure. A large piece of plywood was installed in place of his door because the firemen had kicked it down. There was an inch of space between the top of the plywood and the door frame. I asked an Asian college student across the hall if I could borrow a chair. He handed me a metal folding one without looking at me.
Peering into his room, I saw that everything had already been cleared out -- his twin bed, minifridge, potted plants. In their place was a black box, right there in the middle of the floor -- making a soft whooshing sound. Was it sucking out all the smoke? The scent of human blood? What was it trying to take away?
There was a bright white outline along the left wall, an enormous shape that was thick at the bottom and tapered into spatters at the top, a waterfall in reverse. This is where the blood had been bleached out. I stepped down from the chair, trying to catch my breath. The Asian student was standing behind me.
"Pretty weird, huh?"
"Yeah," I said. I didn't tell him that he'd been my boyfriend, that I had slept in that room for months.
"Fucking idiot. He could have killed everyone in the building."
"Yeah, I know." I smiled at him. I didn't know what else to do. I felt like apologizing. I felt like punching him in the face.
"His name was Tim," I said, then turned and walked out of the building.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
The campus newspaper headline read, "Gay Student Commits Suicide." The article went on to describe how Tim set his apartment on fire and shot himself in the head. There was no mention of the pills he had swallowed.
Tim had come out at a gay pride rally at our Iowa City, Iowa, campus earlier that year. The only problem was, Tim wasn't gay, not really. I was a four-month detour from his heterosexuality. He was grief-stricken over the breakup with his girlfriend of eight years and was desperately searching for a companion. I was that companion, a warm and consoling presence, introduced to him by his sister, Jen.
Tim was a blond-haired, blue-eyed boy-next-door type, a free spirit willing to try anything. Jen encouraged him to go out with me. After our first date he was insanely happy that we had hit it off. I was wary at first, but also punch-drunk at the thought of this handsome "straight" man dating me.
Within days we were spending all of our time together, doing all the things couples do: movies, restaurants, bars, cafes. But after a couple of months things started going awry. We had sex less and less. Tim admitted that maybe he wasn't gay. He missed his girlfriend and couldn't stop thinking about her. And yet, he didn't want us to break up.
It was the middle of winter, snow and ice all over the city. We both sank into deep depressions. We continued seeing each other, but were hardly talking. Most of our time was spent drinking, smoking and sleeping in each other's arms. Neither one of us wanted to be alone. One day I told him I couldn't take it anymore, that I couldn't date someone who didn't identify as gay. He said he understood. We parted ways with the promise that we'd remain friends.
I lost hope in everything. I hated school, the city I lived in, my body, my face. I pushed myself to buy a bottle of sleeping pills. Just go buy them and see what happens, I told myself. One morning I did it: I had the bottle in my bedroom. I was very still and calm, determined to shove all of these white pills inside my body. Within a few minutes I gulped down all 90 of them, handfuls at a time. I lay back on my bed and felt as if I really accomplished something. It seemed that everything was going to be taken care of. I started dozing off. But then a jolt of fear shot through my body. Is this what I really wanted to do?
I wimped out. At the hospital I was given a charcoal mixture that made me throw up the pills, after which I passed out. When I awoke I was in intensive care, talking constantly and incoherently even when nobody was at my bedside. I shat the liquidy charcoal mixture all over myself. A nurse had to clean me up and change my bedsheets.
There was a brief stay at a mental hospital. I knew one of the orderlies from a local gay bar and was ashamed to be seen by him. I kept to myself most of the time, hanging out in my room and in the smoking lounge. My roommate was an 80-year-old farmer who had attempted suicide. He would wake up in the middle of the night and walk around the room talking to his dead wife. After a few days I told the psychiatrist that I was aware of the mistake I had made, that I didn't really want to kill myself, and that I just wanted to be at home, in St. Louis, with my family. To my surprise, he approved my discharge. My parents picked me up the next day.
At home I thought of nothing but Tim. How could I tell him what I'd done? Would he be mad at me? Would he ever talk to me again? We had talked only once since the breakup, a tense and forced conversation that left me feeling worse than before.
A few nights after I arrived home I decided to call him, but his phone was constantly busy. I knew he had call waiting. Had he taken the phone off the hook? I called Jen. Busy. I called his mother. Busy. I called Jen's girlfriend. Busy.
It was only when I called Wendy, my best friend, that I got through to somebody. She said she was on the other line and would call me back the next day. This wasn't like her -- she always called me back right away. I could hear a tremble in her voice. For some reason the thought occurred to me that maybe she had been raped. I was confused and concerned, my heart was beating rapidly.
"What's going on?" I said. "Are you OK?"
"I'll just call you back tomorrow."
It all seemed so obvious, right there in front of my face. But I couldn't piece it together. "Look, you're really scaring me. I need to know what's going on." I heard her take a deep breath. "Something terrible has happened." Pause. "Tim committed suicide."
