Roomates

This article was recently published by our friend John Schimmel in a new magazine written by and about GLBQ people and their family and friends. John has been a long time friend of Gregory's since college days.

IN APPRECIATION OF MY COLLEGE ROOMMATE

By

John Schimmel

This is the story of my own coming out. I am not gay – I don’t mean that kind of coming out. My coming out was from a place of myopia.

Freshman year of college I pledged a fraternity. It housed the Adelphic Literary Society. The eating club cook was an enormous, Czech psychic. Kegs were tapped at parties but the intoxicant of choice was acid. The sport of choice was Frisbee. It was not your everyday fraternity and I immediately regretted my choice.  In the long run it turned out to be the perfect place for me, which is probably all I need to say about myself.

The fraternity house had a huge music room with an ancient piano that had to be sent out to be refurbished shortly after I joined. When it was returned it sat for a time in the entry hall before being rolled back to its home. I was upstairs one day and heard music wafting up through the stairwell. I went downstairs to find a tall, skinny, pale sophomore we’ll call George playing Eric Satie’s “Gymnopedie.” Not  just playing it. Breathing exquisite life through his fingers into the music. What happened next was the heterosexual equivalent of love at first sight.

Eventually, George asked if I wanted to share a two bedroom suite in the frat house the following year. I did. I went away for the summer. I came back ready to move in – and discovered that  George had gotten there before me and decorated the suite. Zebra striped curtains hung in the huge bay windows.

I was furious. I told anyone who would listen that the place looked like a gay brothel.  I refused to move in for weeks – I can’t remember where I slept but I wanted nothing to do with the image George was projecting for us.

I eventually relented and unpacked. George was incredibly forgiving. As things thawed we wound up spending hours and hours talking late into the night. George shared his passion for architecture with me. He had not officially come out yet but he confessed his discomfort about a crush he had on two very beautiful fellow students – this was an all-men’s school at that time. He helped me deal with a crush another man developed on me, a man I loved as a friend and did not want to wound.

The following year, I joined George and two other friends renting a local beach house. It was right on the Long Island Sound, affordable only because it was off-season. We cooked feasts, walked the beach, watched snow collect on the frozen tide and undulate as the current moved beneath. All activity halted for sunset.

The following year we rented it again, minus George because he’d graduated. He’d started dating a fascinating woman by then. Toward the end of my senior year he arrived at the house, handed me a guest list, said he wanted to get married on the beach, and left me to plan his wedding. It turned out to be a glorious, quasi-hippy affair. The morning after the wedding I found George in bed with his new bride and one of the beautiful boys he’d had a crush on. But he’d still not declared his sexual preference.

I can’t recall how long the marriage lasted. I remember visiting George and his wife in Boston and going with another couple for a spectacular twelve course Italian meal in a room that held only the six of us behind the kitchen in an out-of-the-way restaurant. I remember being drunk enough to later argue with George’s wife about her desire to have a kitchen with identical unmarked mason jars for all the spices.  Why would she not label the jars? What was the point?

At some point I learned George was divorcing his wife. He’d met a man and fallen in love.  The lover was George’s opposite in every way – short to George’s tall, flamboyant to George’s reserved. George liked to live without clutter; his lover was a collector of tiny things – tiny houses, tiny furniture, tiny dice, tiny playing cards, all neatly curated in display cases. They eventually moved into a wonderful old house by the railroad tracks in Evanston, Illinois. The kitchen was filled with un-labeled Mason jars filled with spices and teas.

When I decided to marry the beautiful and brilliant Chicago native I’d been dating I sent George and Mark our guest list and told Greg it was his turn.  The two of them found the location, caterer, florist, photographer. The day of the wedding, which as to be outdoors, it rained so hard there were ducks swimming on the lawn. But George and his lover clearly had some sort of magical power because it cleared up for exactly the amount of time we needed. The storm broke again as the last of the bartender’s equipment was loaded into his truck.

During one of the moments when it was legal George and his lover eventually married. Mark retired from teaching and helped George run his architecture firm. They had what seemed like an idyllic life. But now, after forty years together, George has developed early onset Alzheimer’s. My brilliant roommate is not always home now, though there are flashes of his old self. But he pretty much requires constant care. 

George and  Mark have had to shut down the architecture firm. They sold George’s piano, a family heirloom, because he could no longer play. They sold their house where my wife and three kids used to visit at Thanksgiving.  Mark donated his collections to  a children’s museum. The museum has built a special gallery that he curates, but he has largely dedicated himself to taking care of George. He gently helps George finish sentences. He sends out email notices of George’s accomplishments and status and writes beautifully about the disease about which he has had to learn so much. He could not be more loving or supportive or present for my friend whose homosexuality I once scorned and feared. My appreciation for what he is doing and my respect for his courage under heartbreaking circumstances bring tears to my eyes. I defy anyone to find a couple more dedicated to one another.

In college, George and I took the same English class once from an eccentric lecturer who, on the first day of class, told us the topic for our final paper. He gave us the date and even the hour it would be due. He said he would never mention it again but that at the appointed hour “the train will leave the station.” Translation: He would flunk anyone who tried to deliver late. As the date approached, George bought a small suitcase, affixed a railroad baggage tag to it, and put in it his final paper together with an album the professor was to listen to while he read the paper. Needless to say, George aced the paper.

I am embarrassed by how many years it took me to understand that the zebra stripes were hung in the same spirit. George wanted to tweak my straight-guy-from-Beverly-Hills view of life.  I tell George and his husband, when we talk, that I love them. The ability to say that to two men is one of George’s gifts to me. But I forgot to thank him, when he still had a fully-functioning memory, for letting me move into the suite he’d decorated with such profoundly, wonderfully funny bad taste after my spectacularly immature hissy fit.  I can send this piece to him, though. That’s the joy and danger of putting something in writing: It’s always there as a reminder.