Tomkin Watts

I “Hello, Robert—it’s been a long time.” His face, at first, puzzled me. It happened at the book-signing that night: the usual pleasantries and the flourish of my signature completed, then the gentleman, accepting the book with a handshake, added, “You probably don’t remember me from high school. Loren Van Horn. I live here in New York now.” Astonished, I gazed at him, barely recognizing him but somehow knowing that it was indeed him: the hair, impeccably permed and sprayed to hol

A middle-aged reckoning with the past: a moderately successful gay author stops in New York on a book tour, and confronts memories of his school days. How we perceive ourselves, how we perceive others and how others perceive us, can change as our vantage points shift in time and space.

Thanks to your suggestions, I revised the final portion of this chapter, beginning with "It always amazed me how easy it was..."

I have revised this chapter to included an expanded section dealing with Michael's relationship with Roland.

Thank you very much!

Whew—we did it!!! The longest piece I’ve ever written. And many, many thanks to my fictional friend, my hero, Michael Lindstrom, Jr., for so patiently putting up with all my pesky editing and rewrites. Let him step forward and take a bow for a fantastic performance!

“Ladd! You’ve aced me again...” “Mikey… Baby…” He pulls me closer to him. His arms hold me tightly around the waist as we press our lips against each other’s. “Mikey,” he says, “I love you!” It is true. I think of nothing else, and the newness of my love for him overwhelms me. I am elated: I have come so far from where I had been before; I had left behind the man who had been a compulsive consumer of men, the naïve young man who sat on his suitcase in the park, the guy who ca

Tris - I love that word, "twitterpated!" I'd never heard it before and had to look it up--it's in the OED!

We don't know. All we can do is live in the present, hope the best for the future and cherish every moment and all the good things we have in our lives.

“As blond as My Little Viking’s hair!” Ladd teased, pointing down, as we were led across the shiny, light-toned hardwood floor of Le Monde to our table and then sat upon oaken rush-seated chairs, just as blond, that tried their hardest to place us in a small village somewhere in the south of France. The plainness of white walls contrasting with colorful abstract canvases, white table cloths with a single long-stemmed red rose in a tall white vase, matching broad white plates centered with a

Thanks! If you think this novella appears to be auto or semi-autobiographical, I am pleased, because it is not. In reality, Michael is almost entirely a fictional character, although partly based upon some friends I lost to AIDS. The only personal experiences I share with Michael are the teenage impression I had of the Lutheran God, getting stoned and listening to Frank Zappa in college, my experience as a newcomer to the gay scene in San Francisco (in Chapter 6), and my experience of the clone scene (Chapter 8), although mine was not as dramatic as Michael’s. Although I did not grow up in Minnesota, I did live there for a few years, came out there and first went to gay bars there. And there was an old oak tree in my life, but to me there was nothing special about it, on the edge of my college campus. And how could I not mention the guy with dark hair and glasses reading a book in Chapter 5? I lent him my favorite skimpy red nylon briefs--that I loved to strip down to in Lafayette Park, my book (either "Shogun" or Mishima's "Forbidden Colors") and my straw mat. I still have those briefs, in a box of old things...

A year before that night I met Ladd, soon after I moved into the Castro place, my phone rang around five a.m. one morning. “Michael—your father just passed away,” a cousin told me in a shocked, unbelieving voice. My dad had suffered a massive, unexpected heart attack; he was gone by the time the ambulance arrived. “Your mother asked me to call you,” she said. An emptiness, a sense of overwhelming loss, overtook me. I had become closer to my dad after I moved to San Francisco, and spoke

But before I could get in line at the bar to buy a beer in Foggy Bottom, my body trembled at the sound of a crackly voice over my shoulder, an unaffected easy-going voice addressing me, so close I could feel his breath on my neck. “Hey Viking!” Then, chuckling, as if backtracking what he’d said, almost apologizing, “You must think I’m crazy!” “No—I don’t. And you are absolutely right—I am a Viking! Swedish,” I asserted, all too happy to have someone pay any kind of attention to me, and

Over a lifetime, I have been in many, many gay bars of all types, but none were like Toad Hall, the model for "Wonderland" in my story. The one time I went in, it was the most sterile, asexual gay bar experience imaginable. It was all about looks. All around the bar, the same mustache, mustache, mustache, mustache...

You heard it all through the Castro, the gay community—and, sometimes, even in the city beyond; chattering, sometimes maliciously gossiping, people saying things about the Castro Clones; it seemed that some people were constantly saying one thing or another about them, so much that a popular columnist had even snidely mentioned them in the morning paper. “Their favorite hangout is that bar on Castro, Wonderland,” they said. And when people said those things about the clones and that whole scene,

After a half year or so of my new life had passed I started to wonder: how many men have I had since I moved to San Francisco? I had never tried counting, but maybe a hundred or so, perhaps closer to two? The answer was uncertain and could have been anything, but I knew I’d had sex so many times with so many men that I felt I now excelled and outperformed many of them; I certainly had learned how to give them pleasure. I’d also done so many different things with some of them too—and some of thos

Thanks for your comments! I could have expanded this into another chapter or two, and cut a lot out of what I initially included, but I didn't want the story to get bogged down in Michael's sexual adventures. I might consider expanding this part, perhaps adding another chapter--there is a lot I might have shown him doing, like the bathhouses, the bushes in one of the parks, or the gay beach. It is true that, for a lot of guys during that time, it was all about sex, with no thought to love. To someone from the Midwest, or even the East Coast (excluding New York), San Francisco was very exotic, even the non-gay aspects; I cut a lot of that out in order to sharpen the focus on Michael's sexual life. And, sadly, there was a price to be paid for all this, but it was still several years in the future.

The house had been built as a modest mansion, perhaps a century ago, with high ceilings, elaborately carved fireplaces and a grand staircase; obviously built for someone with a lot of money, but not enough money to afford one of the large mansions on the other side of the park. All the second-floor bedrooms had been taken; high up in the attic of the big old house, with a sloped ceiling under the roof, my room had long ago been used as a servant’s room. Until the other old servant’s room co

San Francisco is a big city, but it is also a small city...

It already seemed that I’d been sitting on my suitcase for a long time—the guys said they’d meet me here at noon. I had arrived a few minutes early to be certain I was in the right place and told myself to be patient; perhaps they were running a little late. I’d met them a few weeks earlier at Trifles, and we hit it off almost immediately; later they invited me up to their hotel room for a three-way—a first for me. “You should come to San Francisco—you’ll love it!” they said afterward. “You

There was nothing to do in our little town; there was nothing new; all time I was growing up, nothing ever happened there, unless something or other was going on in the big Lutheran Church, or a popular movie like my favorite, “Lawrence of Arabia,” was showing in the theater. Still, it had been a wonderful place for me to grow up, and I experienced a happy childhood there. But now that I was older, our town bored me and I missed the liveliness of campus life. The town was as dull and featur

At least once a year—and it was always unannounced—my mother would thrust Smarmy Reverend Carlsson upon me the minute I came home from school, and each time he gave me a lecture on the many evil temptations that would ever so surely carry me on the way to hell: premarital sex, drugs, drinking, pornography and more—all the usual stuff, and all of which I blithely tuned out. In the midst of one of those sessions, only a few months before I left home for college, Smarmy Reverend Carlsson tried

Thanks! I love that phrase you used, "lazy summer haze!" (And I'll try not to plagiarize it!)

When you did something bad, your mother probably said something like, “You just wait until your father gets home,” and so did my mother. But then, not very long after Reverend Carlsson arrived, her fervor quickened and she joined his church. After that, what she said to us changed. “You just wait until Reverend Carlsson finds out what you did,” she started saying, as if my dad had no authority anymore. That was her new way of threatening us; perhaps it worked for my young sisters, but, to me, it

It was gradual. She wasn't all the way there yet at this point--she was still in that phase of increasing religious fervor and was still a Lutheran.