Get Into James Shorts - 36. 1991

1991

As the Systems Administrator for a small state agency before the Internet, I was required to do quarterly backup of all of our computer systems. I always chose to do them on the last Friday of the quarter because it would take until past one in the morning or even later if one of the tapes failed to test good after the backup had been made.

As it happened the June 28, 1991 backup was a shit show. Three tapes failed so after dealing with all that crap and boxing the tapes up for off site storage, I was finally done a little past two-thirty in the morning. I was not loving it.

There was a little twink bar called Kyle's on the same block as our building. Even at this hour, the thumping of the bass was difficult to miss. I had gone there a few times for a beer but the crowd was cute little college boys and underaged kids got in somehow so at the grand old age of twenty-eight, I was a fossil in that place. If you weren't nineteen, it just wasn't your venue.

I was never, ever a twink. Oh, I liked them. Still do. They're fun to look at but, they swim in their own circles. Someone big enough to play college linebacker like me was the sort they would be scared of. I didn't chase them. Something had happened to me. I was in a job that went from 8 am Friday to two-thirty in the fucking Saturday morning. I felt like I skipped my twenties and went right to forty.

That night all I wanted to do was to go home, smoke a bowl and pass out but that was not to be.

When I went out to my truck to go home, I heard something behind the dumpster. I looked to see what it was and it was a boy laying face down and naked on bails of cardboard. Clothes were scattered in a heap beside him.

I guess a lot of people would have said oh well and drove on. I wasn't raised that way. That was somebody's baby boy and in this part of town, nothing good was going to happen to him. In fact it looked like something bad might have already happened to him.

He wasn't dead and I didn't see a mark on him- at least on his back side. It was an extremely nice back side. I looked through the stuff in a heap. There was a wallet with a Mississippi College ID and a set of keys. Shit. If the MC people found out he was gay, bi or curious, they would throw him out in a heartbeat.

I looked at the ID and it was a really cute kid: Andrew Wilder. A nineteen year old sophomore who had apparently stepped into something bad. Being found in this condition in this place wouldn't be good for a student at a notoriously homophobic Baptist College.

I tried to talk to him but whoever had done this too him had slipped him something. There was the strong smell of alcohol on him but this wasn't drunk. I'd seen drunk. I'd been drunk. This wasn't it.

Thankfully we were concealed behind a dumpster so I managed to get his boxers on him. I collected all of his stuff and put it in my truck. Then I picked him up, put him in the passenger seat of my truck and put the seat belt on him.

I took him home and put him in my guest bedroom with all of his clothes and belongings I collected.

Then I worried about him. Did he need a doctor? Would he be OK? From what I understood about the most common "Mickey" at the time, he just needed to sleep it off but the last thing I needed was to explain a dead body in my house if he happened to forget to breath.

I got a comfortable chair and put it beside the bed and watched him. I checked his pulse and his breathing every now and then until I fell asleep.

I woke up and the sun was up. I hadn't been able to tell just how stunning he was until the morning light showed his pale skin and golden curls. He was a little guy. maybe a hundred and thirty pounds soaking wet. He was still asleep but occasionally he would laugh, talk in his sleep and play with himself.

He started to come out of it but he was still talking and acting drunk. He told me I was a hunk and asked me to fuck him. I told him to ask me again later. Then he would go back to sleep for a while.

He only really started to come out of it about noon.

At first he thought gotten really drunk and I'd picked him up and this was the awkward aftermath of a one night stand,

Then I told him how I had found him. He was shocked, horrified and a little suspicious of me until I told him why I'd taken care of him.

I was honest with him. He was a cute kid and I wasn't going to leave him there incapacitated for God knows what to happen to him.

I told him I had graduated from Mississippi College in '86 and knew what would have happened to him if the police had picked him up in the same block as Kyle's in that condition. I told him that I worked very late on the last Friday of every quarter and he was damned lucky that it was me that found him.

Neither of us could figure out why someone had done that to him. If it was a prank it was one of the meanest ones I'd ever heard of. He showed no signs of sexual abuse so we ruled out rape. We eventually came up with the theory that he had turned down someone vengeful.

I put his clothes in to wash and let him get a shower. I let him use my housecoat while his clothes were drying. I cooked us lunch and we took bong hits waiting for his clothes to dry.

We made love for the first time that afternoon and spent the rest of the weekend together.

There are much better ways of finding a boy friend but Andrew learned a valuable lesson: the guys you can trust to take care of you when you are at your most vulnerable are the ones you want to keep.

We saw each other until he graduated and moved to the west coast.

I hated to see him go but those were the days when we didn't think in terms of marriage and decades together but, I wish we had.

I loved Andrew and still do wherever he is.