This actually happened before the one I wrote about previously but whatever…
In March of 2010 Derek and I spent a weekend in Provincetown. I used to live there and he had never been there for more than a few hours, so I figured it would be fun. It was. For a while.
It was during the “shoulder season,” so there was no event that weekend that I remember. We stayed from Friday until Sunday at The Chicago House.
Most of the weekend is a blur because we drank. We drank a lot. We were at the A-House on Friday night, I think, during Bingo at The Little Bar. We won a couple of cards and ended up drinking for free!
I believe we spent Saturday evening drinking at the A-House disco. It was pretty empty when we got there but it was relatively busy later in the night. We also went to The Vault.
Walking back to our guest house, I took out my iPhone to show Derek a scene from a porn film, just a second, really, that I find funny. What a mistake.
A qualifier: In my experience, most gay men have porn of some kind or another on their smartphones. I used to have more, not a lot of movies but some photos. I'd been downloading dirty pictures from the internet for more than a decade before I met Derek, so I had quite a collection by then. Derek had one of his “episodes” when I showed one of the photos to a mutual friend in a bar one afternoon. He just could’t believe I would do that in front of him (as everyone else in the group, partnered or not, was doing at that moment!). He found it insulting. This attitude was, I thought at the time, fallout from being married to a woman for ten years and his Mormon background. He often said things like "Margie and I would never do that," comparing our relationship with his former heterosexual one. Me, I think gay and straight relationships are fundamentally different. He obviously didn’t agree with me. I eventually deleted most of the minuscule amount of porn on my phone. I moved what I’d collected on my computer to an external drive, and I didn't acquire any more while we were together. Still, there were many future arguments during which he insisted that I delete all of it, claiming I was obsessed with porn. He often checked to see if there was anything new on that drive. I am not kidding.
Anyway, when I found the one second of footage on my phone, Derek started screaming at me on the street beside Town Hall. I was shocked. I know: stupid me! First of all, I couldn’t figure out what on earth he was so angry about. Once I did, I told him that I refused to have this argument—or any argument, really—on the street in Provincetown. Neither would I have it back at the guest house. Once again, I found myself as half of “that couple,” like so many vacationers I saw while I lived in P-Town. (I lived above a lesbian karaoke bar, so this was almost a nightly occurrence during the season.) It was humiliating. Drunk as I was, I had enough of my wits to just keep quiet.
Back in our room Derek tried to continue arguing. I refused to raise my voice. He started packing his bags and said he was going home. There was a lot of clichéd door-slamming drama. I figured I could just take the bus home on Sunday and told him it might be best if he just left. I certainly wasn’t going anywhere. I can just imagine what it would be like trapped in a car with him driving drunk for eight hours. No thanks!
He eventually returned to the room, trying to apologize. I just wanted to sleep, still refusing to have an argument while I was drunk.
We left as soon as we woke up in the morning. I was hoping to avoid the owner and the other guests, knowing that they must have heard some of the chaos. Of course, they were all sitting around the kitchen table. I quickly apologized and we got out of there. I was mortified.
Most of the ride home was quiet. I’m sure we talked it out eventually but I don’t really remember how it happened.
Sunday happened to be my friend Mike’s birthday. Since he lives on The Cape, we were supposed to stop by and see him on the way home to Philly. The atmosphere between Derek and I that morning was so toxic, that I just couldn’t put anyone in the position of having to deal with it. We didn’t stop and, unfortunately, I didn’t call. I still feel terrible about it and I am still apologizing.
Here is the offending one second of footage. What I think is funny is the look on the man’s face when the guy on the left ejaculates. Really. One second of footage caused all of this drama.
This is mostly for long-time readers of High Strung Loner and it’s former, more X-Rated, 