The Blurry Prodigal Sex and Death In Virginia

Sex

[su_dropcap style=”flat” size=”5″]W[/su_dropcap]e burst into the room at the Motel 8 in Roanoke with laughter and a six-pack. That is, Key-im and me. Key-im, from Jawn-son City, Ten-uh-suh-ee. And my name was Grey-eg.

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With quick, sober precision, I rotated the beast with two backs so that Kim was now on top, shielding my virgin sphincter from the offending member.

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We were laughing because we had just had sex in a parking lot next to a 1-hr Fotomat, where a guy had pulled up next to us, and there we were bottomless, with her on top — a humpin’ and a bumpin’ and a bumpin’ and a humpin’ . . . all the live-long day! — and there was nothing for the three of us to do but smile and wave at each other.

But let me tell you how I met this girl. Because that’s another fun story.

In the mid-90s, after the break-up of a long-term relationship, I put myself through a lost weekend that lasted until Christmas of 99. I was self-medicating, as they say — trolling bars for girls; including a gay bar, which was the only place in Virginia Beach open for booze after 2 am.

Yes, I flirted with guys to get free drinks. Anything beyond that is none of your business.

I bring this up with all the attention-grabbing emotional insecurity and defensiveness that I can muster, because, whenever I tell this story . . . you see . . . sooner or later, my sexual preference is called into question. Which is entirely beside the point! But I can’t ever get to the point until I explain how I came to meet a hot, Daisy Duke trailer girl named Key-im (or Kim) at a gay bar.

First off . . . I must say . . . pretending to be gay in order to get free drinks is not a bad idea. As any woman will tell you, fresh meat in a bar fulla guys is worth at least a couple rounds before any one suitor figures out that you’re not gonna put out. Make your way through several suitors in one night and, before you know it, you’ve had plenty to drink.

But pretending to be gay in order to pick up girls — straight, bi-, and (Oh, yeah!) the occasional lesbian threesome — well . . . I am proud of that. Mwah! It’s brilliant. BRILLIANT, I tell you!

Why? Because straight girls go to gay bars specifically not to be hit on by guys like me. They let down their guard. They fall into my trap. And there I am to collect the booty. So to speak.

With the exception of the clumsy, crass bachelorette party girls who stumble through gay bars with their stupid tiaras and penis straws, straight girls typically go to gay bars for one of two reasons:

1. They are either tagging along with the gay guy-pal they have a crush on;

. . . or (especially with hot girls) . . .

2. They are there to drink and dance away their guy problems without having to worry about waking up in bed with another problem, like me.

And it was on one of these nights that I walked into the gay bar — after my usual night of humiliating failures at straight bars — and spotted Kim sitting at a booth across the dance floor with some slender bearded guy.

This time, I didn’t wait for a dude to buy me a drink. I bought a shot-n-a-beer myself. Downed the shot. Took two sips of the beer and made my way across the dance floor, through pockets of slender, buff boys and silvery queens all checking me out.

Luck was with me; the guy she was with excused himself to follow some other guy into the bathroom just before I got to her table.

Kim’s face lit up when she saw me. I slipped into the booth next to her. She was as drunk as I was.

We got closer and closer, trying to hear each other’s slurred greetings over the loud music — to no avail; except that, in that moment, there was ignited between us an explosion of attraction.

Without comprehending a word between us, our lips and tongues locked; not to mention the desperate groping that commenced. I heard a group of boys chime, “Ohhhh, he’s not gay! He’s not gay!”

Somehow, we made our way to her motel room, where the clothes flew off and we tumbled onto one of the two queen-sized beds.

We were both naked and well into our frolic before I heard a guy say, “Mmmm, you are so beautiful!”

He wasn’t talking about Kim. 

In my drunken blur, I hadn’t noticed that Kim’s bearded friend, James, had also made his way back to their motel room and was sitting on the other bed, fully clothed, watching us go at it.

Kim and I continued falling on and off and in and out of each other until we finally settled into a steady missionary coitus.

Next thing you know, James was naked and trying to do something to me that I think is still illegal in Ten-uh-suh-ee. An immediate cockblock was in order.

With quick, sober precision, I rotated the  beast with two backs so that Kim was now on top, shielding my virgin sphincter from the offending member.

James bellowed, “Hey!” Then he jumped up and quickly got dressed. “I’ll leave you two alone. One hour, no more!”

Snap, door slam!

An hour later, Kim and I were fully dressed, sitting on the bed playing cards. Not sure why. I think because we had to wait for James to bring back his car so I could get a lift back to my car at the bar. Or something like that. But anyway, that’s how I met Kim.

And that was in the Summer of 96. So over the next few months, she and I got together every few weeks — at various rendezvous points between her place in Johnson City and mine in Virginia Beach — to work our way through the Kama Sutra.

Yes, she was a kinky lass. When I asked how come a young woman like her — mid 20s — knew so much about obscure sexual techniques, she replied that, in Johnson City, “There’s nothing much else to do!” For her, an orgy was no special treat. It was something else to do after you’d seen all the movies and didn’t want to go bowling anymore.

Death

[su_dropcap style=”flat” size=”5″]B[/su_dropcap]y the time Kim and I burst into that Motel 8 room on Halloween weekend, I think it had occurred to both of us that we didn’t have much of anything in common except drinking, smoking and screwing. And that had been okay for the time being.

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This must have been the way Adam and Eve felt after eating the forbidden fruit and becoming like God.

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The reason why we were having sex next to that Fotomat in the first place was because I had taken a picture earlier that I wanted to see right away. We’d been driving on the Blue Ridge Parkway. The Fall colors were at their peak vibrance. It began to drizzle. The intermittent wipers allowed the windshield to blur every few seconds before wiping it clean.

“Watch this,” I said. I turned off the wipers completely. Within a few seconds, the windshield became dangerously blurry.

“Grey-eg!” protested Kim. “We’re gonna die!”

I held the camera up to the windshield and snapped the shot.

There, at the Motel 8, we had our first good look at this exquisite, Impressionistic image — blotches of yellow, orange, red and brown leaves melting through the blurry windshield — a water-color of another mother.

Kim disappeared into the bathroom. I placed the photo on the nightstand, and then picked up the phone and called my grandfather to ask him where Roanoke Weenie Stand was. I wanted to take Kim there for lunch tomorrow.

You see, Roanoke was my grandfather’s home town. And one of the stories he often told me was that, when he was a little boy in the early 20s, his weekly allowance was a quarter. He used it thus: a nickel to take the streetcar into town; a nickel each on a hot dog and a Coke at Roanoke Weenie Stand (which is still there today); a nickel on a movie (silent movie, that is — sometimes a double feature with news reels, cartoons and a live organist); and a nickel to take the streetcar home.

“Uh . . . hello,” I said. “This is Greg Silva. I’m Karl and Elizabeth’s grandson.”

“Oh, hi Gregory. Let me get your grandmother.”

A moment later, my grandmother came on the phone. “Greg?”

“Yes?”

She spoke tentatively, though matter-of-factly. “I am sorry to report that your grandfather has died.”

“Oh,” I said, in just that tone (matter-of-factly).

Turns out, he had actually died a few days before. Everyone had been trying to get ahold of me.

This was before the days of cellphone ubiquity, of course. And, needless to say, I hadn’t told my grandparents that I was heading for the hills to shack up with Key-im for the weekend.

My grandmother had postponed the wake and funeral as long as she could. Good thing I called when I did.

“The wake is tomorrow at 2,” she said, “and the funeral is the following day at noon.”

There was no Kama Sutra that night.

In fact, my relationship with Kim ended, effectively, at that moment. How could I explain to her the magnitude of my grandfather’s passing? Besides, it was not in her emotional vocabulary to console a grief-stricken man.

After an awkward night — two strangers, who know a lot about each others’ bodies and not a lick about each others’ souls, sleeping in the same bed — she went her way and I went mine. And that was the last we ever saw of each other or spoke.

But on the way home to the wake, my mind spoke plenty. Let’s see, now . . . how CAN I convey the depth of my relationship with my grandfather?

In the Summer of 61, my mother, a 24-year-old single, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant from Virginia, conceived a son by an 18-year-old Portuguese boy in Newark, New Jersey.

They quickly got married. I came along in March of 62.

We moved to Virginia.

The culture shock was too much for my father. He left, and I was raised by my mother and her parents.

Those are the facts. But the sense? The meaning?

I grew up calling my grandfather Daddy. That was his name, as far as I was concerned. My mother called him Daddy, so I followed suit.

Of course, it was explained to me that he was not my actual father. But that didn’t matter to me. I didn’t know the difference. We often don’t miss what we don’t know. If you were raised by wolves, you would probably grow up calling the leader of the pack, Woof-Woof, or whatever the word for “Daddy” is in Wolf.

But my grandfather, my daddy, my Woof-Woof . . . this was a man who taught me how to use tools. We built a swimming pool together (an actual IN-ground swimming pool) when I was seven. We built a small boat when I was 10.

Somewhere in that period, before puberty, I beat my grandfather at checkers. I thought I was in trouble. It felt like I had done something wrong. Surely I couldn’t have won fair and square. Daddy must have let me beat him. I wasn’t ready to be better at checkers than my grandfather. This must have been the way Adam and Eve felt after eating the forbidden fruit and becoming like God.

But Daddy stuck out his hand and congratulated me. Ever after, he insisted that I had won, fair and square. “I’m proud of you, boy,” he often told me. “You’re the son I never had, and I’m the father you never had.”

Another one of his mantras was: “I wish that I’d had a grandfather like me when I was growing up.”

He bought me my first car. He sent me to college. We travelled a lot together in his last few years. And on one of those journeys, we went to his childhood home in Roanoke.

The building was still there. He had told me about it for years. One-story, one-bedroom house where he was born in 1914. His mother was 16.

It was the Summer of 96, the summer I met Kim, just a few months before his passing, that my grandfather and I sat in a car in the rain across the street from this now two-story house. He said his father added the second story when his sister Rachel came along in 1920.

We both expected a warmer welcome than we got. The pasty white trailer woman who answered the door stood with a dish towel in one hand listening impatiently to my grandfather explain that he was born in this house so many years ago and that he simply wanted to show it to his grandson. She replied, “Yeah, well . . . my husband ain’t here.”

And that was that.

I arrived at the wake an hour late. Most of the people had gone. I hugged my mother and grandmother in the greeting room, where they had been receiving condolences. My mother, by this time an ordained Pentecostal minister living in Israel (Long story!), had arrived the day before. My grandmother was well composed and surrounded by lady friends. I asked if I could be alone with Daddy for a few minutes.

“Reflections In the Tar River” by David Hoffman

Then I went into the viewing room and closed the sliding doors behind me. Through a blur of tears and snot, I said out loud,

“Thank you, Daddy, for raising me. You didn’t have to do that. You willingly took on that responsibility, without ever once looking back. You taught me how to live in this world. You gave me the tools to succeed. You taught me . . . how to be a man. Thank you.”

I touched his face. Just then, the sliding doors opened. It was my mother, who is pathologically incapable of leaving me be, for a few minutes.

I wish I could tell you that I stopped drinking at that time. But I didn’t. I put myself through another three years of that affliction.

And I wish I could show you that picture of the blurry Autumn leaves. But I left that in the casket with my grandfather.

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