In which I have a huge crush on a co-worker friend and think he likes me back but then he outs himself to me

I moved to Miami for a job with a big company, which will remain unidentified but let's just say "yellow trucks," in the sweatshop known as corporate finance. It was a horrible, awful job, where we drones (aka "financial analysts") worked until 9 or 10 at night because the director and VP wouldn't meet with us to review our work until 7 p.m. and really, who would have a problem with that after arriving at work at 7:15 a.m.? After all, we could drop our dry cleaning off on the first floor and there was an on-site cafeteria and a gym. Why would anyone need to go home?

I hated that job with a passion. Hated it. The only thing that made my one year and one day there somewhat bearable is that I liked four of my co-workers a lot. They all quit shortly after I did. The others are still there. Are you seeing a connection?

I especially liked Liam. We got along great, hitting it off from the beginning because of our shared love of travel and our shared hatred of our workplace. Although who wouldn't want to go through the past 15 years of annual reports and calculate what the stock price, revenues, and profits would have been had the company not sold its aircraft division ten years earlier? That is Very Useful Information. One of my co-workers had to do a cost-benefit analysis of installing a security system in the building. It didn't matter that the system had already been installed and the money already spent.

Liam had majored in Chinese or Asian studies or something like that. After college, he got a job running a small factory in China. He spoke Chinese fluently and had traveled all over Asia. He returned to the US to get an MBA, then got his job at The Sweatshop.

Liam and I became fast friends. We went to lunch together, volunteered in a business program at an elementary school together, went out to concerts together, went dancing together. We got an opera subscription together. We would use the tickets investor relations got to attend gala events together, like the Yo-Yo Ma concert and the small dinner afterwards. Oh yes. I have been not ten feet from Yo-Yo Ma. Are you impressed?

Liam had an out of town girlfriend, Claudia. But they were having problems. He would discuss the problems with me. I hoped he would ditch her. I never met her. He didn't have a photo of her. But she sounded like she did not deserve him.

I thought it odd when Liam told me that he had given Claudia a fancy camera for Christmas. Not very romantic, I thought. But that was before Primo gave me a digital SLR for my birthday a few years ago and before a former boyfriend gave me a belt sander. Those are two of the best presents I have ever gotten. So the camera should not have given me pause at all. At the time, though, it did.

Liam and I spent so much time together that our colleagues thought we had something going on.

"We're just friends," I told them.

"Right," they said.

I would then say, "Look at Liam. Do you really think we go together?" Liam was 6'2", blonde, green eyes, fab body. Gorgeous. And smart. And super nice. He'd been picked for the Cutty Sark clipper sail from Norway to England. As in, they picked the civilian crew for their photogenics.

A guy like that can do much better than me. Not that I am chopped liver, but I am not the female equivalent of Liam. Brooke Shields is the female equivalent. (Except she has a lot more money than Liam does.)

I was flattered that they were so convinced.

But no.

One day, Liam asked me if I thought it was better to be with someone who was like you ("you" in the non sex specific third person sense) or one who was different.

Thinking, "I am the one who is like him! We both love chocolate!" I answered, "Definitely the one who is like you."

"Yeah," he sighed. "I think you're right."

Then he told me he had something important to discuss with me and could he come over to my house that night.

Oh yes! This was when he was going to confess his feelings for me! I knew I wasn't his looks match, but we clicked on everything else. It could happen.

I bought a baguette, some good cheese and some grapes. Liam showed up with a bottle of wine.

Oooh! Makeout city tonight! My only other social and - other - actions since I had moved to Miami had been a phone message one Friday night asking if I wanted to buy a septic tank, which I did not because 1. I was connected to the sewer system and 2. I rented. Having a guy over was a big deal.

We started talking. I was waiting. Waiting for him to tell me, "I want us to be more than friends," because really, how many guys hang out with a woman as much as we did without an ulterior motive?

That is not what he told me.

What he told me was that he wanted to tell me something important that nobody else at work knew but he was tired of having to keep secrets all the time.

He told me he was gay and that Claudia was a man.

"You're dating a man named Claudia?" I asked. I didn't get it.

"No!" he told me. That was the name he had given to his boyfriend, Pedro, so he could take about him/her at work and nobody would suspect anything.

My jaw dropped. I usually had pretty decent gaydar - I had several gay friends from the Peace Corps. But they were out. Maybe guys trying to hide it in a suit and tie corporate environment could turn it off.

Well crap.

Well rats.

Well I knew it was too good to be true.

Oh well.

In which I try to decide whether to friend my gay high school boyfriend on facebook

The other day, I got an email from a Fairview actor and comedian. Let's call him John McGivern, for that is indeed his name. John puts on these fabulous one-man shows about his childhood in Fairview - growing up as one of six children in an Irish Catholic family with a working class union father. Primo and I have been to several of his shows and have watched all of his DVDs. He is wonderful.

I'm on the McGivern mailing list. He's doing a new show, "American Fiesta."

The show was written by a friend of mine, Steven Tomlinson. OK, we're not close. I haven't seen Steven for several years, but we are tied by our mutual friend, "Holly." Holly and Steven used to be girlfriend/boyfriend. They lived together, I think.

Then Steven realized he was gay.

Which is always a devastating thing for a woman.

Because you wonder if you're the reason your boyfriend turned gay.

OK. Men don't turn gay. They are or they are not. They might not know or they might be trying not to be for whatever reason, but they are what they are.

But tell that to the woman who has just been left for another man.

It all worked out in the end. Holly met a wonderful man via mutual friends. They were engaged on their third date. Have been married for several years and have four kids. Steven has married as well and his career as a playwright is taking off, which is exciting. I love it when my friends succeed.

So what about me, you ask?

I dated this guy in high school. He was on the swim team with me.* Ken was hunky. Fab body, which is very important when you are in high school. Well, it was to me, anyhow. I am shallow that way. I mean, I was shallow that way.

He had a car and a driver's license, which was even more important, because I went to high school in the Panama Canal Zone, where the licensing age was 17 and where most military families had only one car because that's all the government would ship for them. Ken was an only child and his dad was a pretty high rank, though, so his parents paid to ship a second car when they were transferred to Panama. He had his own car and could drive it. He might have been the only person at school with his own car.

But. Was it really dating? We went out several times. Kissed maybe once or twice. One time, he told me I tasted like macaroni and he didn't like macaroni. The reason I tasted like macaroni? We had gone to a football game, then to the cafeteria after. I didn't have any money with me because I thought it was a date. He bought food for himself but didn't offer me anything. I watched him eat. When he took me home, he wanted to hang out some more, so I told him very pointedly that he would have to sit with me in the kitchen while I ate some supper. The leftovers I ate had macaroni. Hence, when he kissed me, I did taste like macaroni.

I don't remember if he kissed me again. That might have been the only time.

He would come over to my house and hang out with my mom. I thought he was cute until the day he shaved his head as part of his ROTC Ranger initiation. Then, bald bothered me. Now, not so much. To quote Fr Elias, who taught my 12th grade Sunday school class, "All men have the same amount of testosterone. Some of them choose to waste it growing hair."**

Ken dropped me right before the big Christmas dance, even though he and I and my best friend Julie and her boyfriend were all going to go together.

I went years thinking I was so unattractive that my own boyfriend didn't even want to kiss me. It didn't help that I was not asked to any other dances. Not that I am scarred by the fact that I did not go to my prom or anything. I AM FINE.

A few years ago, when I discovered the google, I realized that it was possible to google old boyfriends.

So of course I googled Ken.

I found him.

On a gay athletes' website.

There was enough identifying information that I knew it was he.

He was gay? The whole time, he was gay? Was I his beard? Or did he not even know?

History changed.

It wasn't me. It was never about me. I had wasted all this time thinking that there was something wrong with me - that I was unattractive and that was the reason he didn't want me. Yes. I am a little bit self centered, but really, aren't we all?

It was liberating. A little late, but liberating.

Now I see that he is on facebook. I am friends with an old boyfriend or two. Enough time has passed that there is no awkwardness. Do I friend Ken? There are so few people with whom I have a common biography. When you move around a lot as a kid, you lose your friends. Every single time you move, you lose your history.


Is it worth it?




* All you had to do to be on the team was show up to practice, which explains why somebody with my lack of athletic ability was able to participate. And letter. Yes. I lettered in swimming. Believe it.

** Fr Elias later left the priesthood to marry. He was a chaplain in Vietnam. He said that on Fridays, the soldiers would get their coupons for cigarettes and beer. The Baptist boys*** would give their coupons to the Catholics, but later, as the Catholics and the mainstream Protestants would be playing cards and smoking and drinking, the Baptists would come join the fun.

*** How do you keep a Baptist from drinking all your beer when you go fishing together? Invite a second Baptist.