Once Upon A Time And All So Strange

Once upon a time I was sixteen and very, very good looking.  I was also becoming aware of my sexual attraction to other males and what this might mean.  In essence I was becoming "a gay."  A slow process for some, really years of agony, indecision, and growing determination.  It is difficult to say why that was not my story.  In short order I was comfortably promiscuous, in my small home town, relatively notorious as a "cocksucker."  I credit it to my family's prestige, our money, my good looks and my instinct for making nice in every social situation. I had a strange experience in the midst of this which I have generally repressed, and only occasionally does it surface.  Today was one of those days.  In those days on the main street there was a cafe presided over by a tubby middle aged cook and his helper the dishwasher, who also set and cleared the tables.  They were utterly nondescript, the patterning on the ugly, tired wallpaper of life.  The cafe was popular with the kids of the town; I spent a lot of time in there, pseudo flirting with all my girl friends, trying ever so subtly to put the make on the good looking dudes of the town, totally horny and utterly stupid who more times than you can imagine were willingly led into assignations with me in my car on a country lane.  Our transactions were all witnessed by the chef who presided over his hot plates and handed the dishes across the counter top to us all.  One Sunday when the cafe was of course closed (this was god's country) I got a telephone call at my home which surprisingly enough, as I came to realize through the coughing stumbling and mumbling, was the cafe chef inviting me to his room over the cafe.  I was apprehensive, not that I feared violence or anything like that, but I grew up as a social snob and I knew that his guy was not someone one "knew."  Why did he want to talk to me?  Could not imagine and with my generous arrogance told him I would stop by.  It was a strange experience.  He was naked when I arrived; I don't remember seeing such an old person without clothes.  He wanted us to get into his bed and make out.  Suddenly this self assured center of attention in the cafe downstairs was a tubby loser, and so lost as to be desperate.  How did he ever get the nerve to telephone me?  Make the assignation?  The funny thing was that the matter turned upon my mother's social graces which had led me to spend so much time with her chatting up entirely improbable people as a gesture of grace and kindness.  I stripped down, lay beside this guy who by then was sniffling and verging on crying, and took his body into my embrace.  It was, as kids say nowadays, "weird," and I have never had an experience similar to that in my entire life.  But I think that it is important for arrogant, proud, self assured persons, somewhere along the line, to experience the ordinary, the ugly, the desperate, the deserving undeserved.  Hey, it's only a roll in the hay; it's not a night at the opera.