The Stalker

Ok; so on the cruise, there was this guy who quickly became known as 'The Stalker.'  He was big and had an odd, almost mullet haircut -- something out of the 70s.  He got the nickname in the steam room on day one.

A couple of the guys I was hanging with had gone in during the day and he was there, seemingly all afternoon, following people around and, well . . . touching himself.  He was obviously trying to strike up a few steam room friendships, if you get my drift . . . and, though the gay boys were all pretty much grossed out by the whole scene, I'm sure he scored with a few of the more frustrated or curious heteros on board. 

Funny thing about that.  Usually, the illicit tea room kind of gay sex that goes on is done by seeming heteros -- guys who are so far in the closet that they can't afford to go to a bar or just be up front with anyone else.  Gay men who have accepted themselves and have no fear about connecting with others are rarely interested in the bushes or the bathrooms. 

For the next 13 days, The Stalker spent his afternoons in that steam room.  I went in twice and found him there.  No, I wasn't interested.  But I did observe him tagging along behind one of the vendors who worked on the ship who looked as if he were interested.   But I did get to meet him out on deck and actually had a fairly in depth conversation with him over breakfast one morning. 

This guy was 40.  He lived in a small town in Kansas (like 12,000 people) and had a good job with the only real employer in the area, a meat processor and packer.  I'm being as vague as possible because I don't want to create problems for him.  He lived in a house that he owned, with a couple of roomates, had never been married and nobody knew he was gay.  Not his family, not his friends not his roomates.  Interestingly, he'd lost about 100 pounds over the previous six months. 

He explained to me that to let his secret slip would mean the end of his job and the rejection of his community.  He would lose everything and have nothing.  So he was as closeted as one can be.  And in true closet case fashion, when he discovered a relatively safe place to be sexual away from home, he jumped at it. 

He was on the cruise with his family -- a kind of Christmas adventure for the whole group -- and made it clear that it would probably be best if I pretended to barely know him if I saw them together on ship (I'm sure it was clear to the universe what I was all about, 'cause I wasn't into pretending anything on my vacation, ok?).  Still, I did have the opportunity to observe and to have a couple more conversations before we got to Ft. Lauderdale.

'How can you . . . be gay in a small town in Kansas?' I asked.   He replied that you can't.  He drives about an hour and a half each way once in a blue moon to spend an evening in the closest gay bar, in Wichita. 

I asked him why he didn't just pack up and move.  He was having trouble leaving his aging parents and was certain he'd never get a job that paid as well as the one he'd been working for almost 20 years.  I gather he had no advanced training or degrees in much of anything and had risen to a very comfortable place by just garnering his annual raises year after year. 

For me, The Stalker was not a freak or pervert (whatever that is).  He was just a fairly decent guy living in a cage of his own design.  His eyes were full of pain . . . but there was also some hope there.  For what, I don't know. 

I found his to be one of the most tragically screwed up lives I've ever encountered.  He obviously has something going on for himself:  anyone who can lose 100 pounds in six months has discipline and drive in spades, I'd say.  He also wasn't that bad looking:  a haircut and some dental work and he'd be fine in South Beach or West Hollywood.  But he was 40 years old and had wasted his life hiding in the bushes.  Nobody knew him.  He might as well have been a Martian dropped down on earth with instructions to let nobody know his true origin.  He was in his own prison, his own witness protection program.  He had assumed an identity that was not his own.

And just as he'd wasted his life, he wasted a good portion of every afternoon on that ship sloshing around in the steam room hoping that somehow, someone would touch him.  He was starving to death. 

I thought about my own situation.  I came out at 40, too,  but I hadn't been in hiding the previous 25 years.  I'd made a conscious decision in my 20s to pursue a hetero life.  On the Kinsey scale I was probably a 4 and had the discipline and drive to make that a reality.  I'd be doing it today had not my wife wisely ended our near idyllic marriage.

On the other hand, he said he'd known he was gay since he was five.  There was never any debate or question about that in his mind.  So he was a Kinsey 1, I guess.

Funny.  The Stalker has been hiding all his life.  I didn't really begin to hide until I came out.  From the moment I gave myself permission to be gay I started tucking that fact in so that nobody would know.  Coming out to the world happened in stages for me over the next 5 years. 

I don't know.  Maybe we're all hiding something . . .  Maybe the goal of it all is to discover, acknowledge and manifest all that you are.  Maybe that's what Maslow meant when he talked about 'self-actualization:' 

"A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write,if he is to be at peace with himself.  What a man can be, he must be. This is the need we may call self-actualization ... It refers to man's desire for fulfillment, namely to the tendency for him to become actually in what he is potentially: to become everything that one is capable of becoming ..."

Self-Actualization is the state at which all the threads of our lives come together in perfect concert with one another.  There is no  discrepancy between our thoughts and our actions, between our desires and our efforts.  We are ONE in heart, mind, spirit and body. 

I used to think that would come when I finally got my head screwed on right.  If I could just get my heart and soul to behave the way my made-up self was behaving in the world, then I'd be self-actualized.  I expected it to come with maturity.  It didn't.

Instead, I realized fairly recently that it's your actions that have to match your thinking (not the other way around).  If you have the heart of a soldier, then don't be an accountant.  If you have the soul of an actor, then don't be a businessman.  Seems very simple right?  All we have to do is know who we are.  As Alexander Pope said, "Know thy thyself, presume not God to scan. The proper study of mankind is man." *  But it's not that easy.

So much of our developing years are spent being shown a picture of what we should be and our entire environment is manipulated to move us toward that goal.  Some of us get there happily as adults because that's who we really are.  But many of us either turn our backs on the picture and discover our own path or we never really make it at all, and what progress we do make is achieved through the denial of who we really are and what we really want.  We get to our middle years and we look around and realize we're so far off course that it will take the total destruction of our now comfortable but desperate lives to even begin to approximate our true path. 

Resolution comes through either doing just that, or -- as is more often the case -- simply giving up, accepting that you've done what you've done and that's what this life is going to be about.  We go on auto pilot and amuse ourselves with the lives of our children and grand children.  It's called retirement.  What gets retired is the dream of the soul. 

The Stalker is headed for a train wreck.  It'll probably happen in the next five years.  He's going to wake up one morning and simply not be able to go on living someone else's life.  And then he will have to make a decision.  I can't imagine what his options will be . . . but here are some words from Langston Hughes to ponder:

A Dream Deferred

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

I think Langston was talking about the dream of African Americans to be truly free, but his poem is more universal than that.  I'd like to believe his own struggle to find a way to be gay in the 30s may have been in his motivational mix.

I ended my last conversation with The Stalker by passing on my favorite Cajun quote.  I've used it here in these blogs before.  I hope he remembers:

'Be what you is.  Even if you's old and ugly, then be old and ugly but be what you is.'

* Alexander Pope wrote this in his Epistle II followup to The Essay on Man.  The poem is very long but the first stanza seems appropriate in light of this post.  So, here you go, Stalker:  from the 18th Centry, This Is Your Life:

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of Mankind is Man. Plac'd on this isthmus of a middle state, A being darkly wise, and rudely great: With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side, With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride, He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest, In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast; In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer, Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err; Alike in ignorance, his reason such, Whether he thinks too little, or too much: Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confus'd; Still by himself abus'd, or disabus'd; Created half to rise, and half to fall; Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all; Sole judge of Truth, in endless Error hurl'd: The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!