Gordon, 1969

Although my heart belonged to Robby, Gordon and I were thrown together in Senora Burke's freshman Spanish class together.

I don't even know how it started - probably when he sat in the desk next to mine.

He was very fair. His hair was curly and wavy and dun-colored. In a lot of ways, we looked a lot alike and could almost have been taken for brother and sister. He had a soft, round face and hadn't started to shave yet. His nose was short and slightly upturned and his eyes were green-gray. At that time, we were the same height and probably close to the same weight.

I was goofy for him. He was goofy for me. Everybody knew it. A coup de foudre in third-period Spanish, go figure.

My mother drove us to the freshman dance. All we did was walk around the halls together, our feet bare and held hands.

I thought I was going to explode.

My mother had never had much of a discussion about sexuality with me. She was relieved when my best friend's mother shoved a book about sex at me. Still, I had no idea that I was so turned-on that I didn't know what to do with myself. I felt like I was going to burst.

I did not explode or embarrass myself. I have no idea if Gordon embarrassed himself. At that point, I was still locked in the belief that boys only had one ball, and I had no idea what they did with it.

But Becs the freshman two-timer still pined for Robby when I was walking around holding Gordon's hand. Robby was not attainable. Gordon was.

Somehow, this all limped forward in high school. It was never a constant thing. Every now and then, we would remember the other existed and then Gordon asked me out on My First Date. We went to see a movie, "Red Sky at Morning". He picked me up in his brother's dark maroon 1964 Impala. We held hands in the movie. He walked me to the door afterwards and gave me a little kiss good-night.

Senior year of high school, I found out he had no intention of going to college. In fact, by that point, he'd started drinking and probably was smoking pot that his brother gave to him. His old friends fell away, but I don't think he had any new ones. The guy who had been his best friend, Tony, (who had endured years of snickering "Homo!" flung at him) wasn't his best friend anymore.

Gordon was lost. I honestly don't think anybody much cared. He was so sweet. He was so good-natured. Everyone was sure that he would come to his senses and mend his ways, go to college, get a good job at an insurance company, get married, and raise two or three delightful and mild children with his delightful and mild wife. And I'm not being sarcastic. It was what we hoped and wanted for him, because he was a good guy and deserved better than he was giving himself.

The last time I saw him was just after my second year in college. I was hanging out at the soda fountain where my sixth grade boyfriend Al worked. (I asked him to be my boyfriend. He said he would. But I couldn't get him to chase me, like he was supposed to.) Al and I were talking and Gordon showed up, thin, barefoot, his gray jeans hanging on his hips, wearing a filthy t-shirt. I don't remember the conversation but I think there was a great deal of pleading with him to go home, to shower, to sober up. He left, not bothered much by our pleas.

Not much later, Tony called me up and told me that Gordon was dead. I figured he'd been driving drunk and been in an accident, but that wasn't what happened.

He had a girlfriend who lived in an apartment complex where you couldn't tell one building from the other. He got drunk and went over to visit her at midnight. He got the right apartment but the wrong building. He pounded on the door and shouted at his girlfriend to let him in.

Inside was a woman with her newborn baby. Her husband, a Richmond police officer, had left for third shift. When she heard the pounding on the door, she called the police, got a knife from the kitchen, and waited in the hallway.

When Gordon busted down the door, she stabbed him. I don't know how many times she stabbed him. He fell back to the parking lot and wandered around for a minute before he fell down and bled to death in the parking lot.

We all went to his funeral, his too-smart college student friends. We stood around his casket and said, "Look - they put pink light bulbs in the lamps." And of course, Gordon was clean and his curly / wavy dun-colored hair was shampooed and barbered. They'd put him in a suit his parents probably had to go buy.

Gordon's monkey-like older brother Bill came over to me and said, "Wanna go out some time?" I backed away from him and said, "No" as quietly as I could.

I noticed when I looked at Gordon again that there was a tiny little bit of blood that they hadn't been able to get from his bottom lip. Or perhaps in that light, it was just a little bruise. It bothered me that it was there. I didn't think about his other wounds. And in fact, until this very moment, had not considered them.

I often thought about him dying alone in the parking lot, lost, confused, not knowing what had happened so that he ended up at that hysterical woman's apartment.

Two years later, I was living in the Fan and at midnight, someone tried to break down my apartment door. He wasn't very quiet about it and he wasn't very effective, either. I ran to the kitchen and grabbed my only knife. It was long and it was sharp.

I took the phone with me and the knife into the bedroom closet and closed my bedroom door. I got on the phone and I begged the Richmond police to come. And then I stood at the closed door, behind all my clothes, as small as I could make myself, with the knife clutched in both my hands, praying that the police would get there before he got in.

They did.