by

Brett Averill

Hey Cockrub Warrior Dude,

This is an article my lover Brett wrote in 1983, after we'd been together about 6 months. It was first published in the paper he edited, the NY Native.

Eventually, it will go into The Story of Bill and Brett, but I put it up on the site today, October 23, 2000, both in honor of our 18th anniversary, and because I think those warriors who are into romance will really like it.

In some ways it's a companion piece to Hyacinthine Love, so if you haven't read that one, you may want to do that sometime.

Brett gave me a copy of it in 1992, and inscribed it this way:

For my lover Bill

An extra copy of an early statement of eternal love. It is even more true now than it was then.

I love you.

Brett

January 1992

He was proud of it, and proud to be my lover, the way I was to be his.

I hope you'll like what he wrote.

bill

by

Brett Averill

June 28, 1983

Late last October I met Bill Weintraub; by the end of the month we had both fallen in love. With startling speed we whizzed through infatuation, declared mutual devotion, set up housekeeping, discovered we were, de facto, monogamous. We had lots of sex. We engaged in long discussions over dinner, with the light of two small candles, and we suffered the delightful tension of getting to know you. Before long it became apparent that neither of us would ever be interested in loving anybody else, and, for us, that was that: an immediate, profound reordering of our lives that would continue as long as either of us breathed.

"Don't you think you're being a bit hasty?" asked an ex-fling of Bill's at a party one night. No, I said, feeling my jaw tighten. No. "Is this your response to AIDS?" asked a professional acquaintance of mine. I could not suppress my laughter. One of the more peculiar things about love is that it's such a solitary pursuit: the couple, made one, grows unto itself, and attempting to explain to others what it means leads to the sort of reception tendered religious hysterics.

We began falling for each other the first night we spent together. Having picked me out from amidst the wild shafts of light in Seventeenth Street Saloon, and after having related to me the bizarre tale of a man I had just rejected (a friend of Bill's -- recently stabbed numerous times by an ex-lover from Appalachia -- who freaked when I told him I am from Virginia), and having described in great detail a motley assortment of furniture left to him by a spinsterish aunt, Bill asked, "Would you like to come home and see it?" I didn't, particularly, but I was intrigued and vaguely aroused by this odd little Puck who had first addressed me with the words "I hear talking to you is like pulling teeth."

We didn't spend much time on Aunt Fanny's couch -- I don't think I even finished my first beer. I stopped him from explaining why he liked an especially hideous painting by placing my lips firmly over his. He held my hand as we went into the bedroom.

Bill is not shy about his body, but he turned out the lights. It is nice to discover a new lover's body in the dark: it introduces a sense of mystery that one hopes never to lose. We were all over each other, kissing, nibbling, testing muscles, biting tits, me licking his chest hairs and following them all the way down his stomach and into the groin, discovering along the way a thin, hard abdominal scar darting away from the navel. We writhed until I could feel in the dark that his face and then mine had wrenched into the expression of those in great pain or perhaps ecstasy.

Sometime in the early morning we fell asleep wrapped in each other's arms, and later, after daybreak, we awoke again and made love again, and we could not say goodbye, until I was two hours late for a long-awaited brunch. "Let's see each other often," he said, looking into my eyes with a passion that surprised me. Only a few weeks before, I had stifled my disappointment over an aborted infatuation. Could I trust what this curious man was feeling?

I saw him again that night, and by the end of the week we felt uncomfortable sleeping apart. I started taking members of a small circle of boyfriends out to lunch, explaining to them, one by one: "There's this fellow I've been seeing. Yeah, I like him a lot."

During those first autumn weeks we seemed never to be out of bed: sleeping, talking, fucking. We tumbled further into love; we saw less of even very close friends. We discussed the semantics of "boyfriend" and "lover," passing quickly from one to the other. We discovered to our surprise the poverty of the English language, which offers so few variations on the phrase "I love you." With words insufficient, we sought a million tangible ways of giving: he played sonatas, I orchestrated dinners, we bought flowers and trinkets, we nursed each other back from illness and frustration. We are as one man.

We have neither more nor less sex than we did when we were single. What coupledom has changed for me has been the rhythm, like oil tossed on a suddenly stilled sea. Occasionally when single I would go for what seemed weeks without making love to anyone, only to be overcome by a half-dozen men in as many nights. I used to jerk off at least once a day, but now I do so only rarely, usually when we are having sex together. He has stopped masturbating -- "I save it for you," he said once, mildly hurt at the discovery that my fist had wandered.

Sometimes our lovemaking is spontaneous and sometimes it results from a carefully nurtured plan. I occasionally endure a jock strap all day beneath my jeans, anticipating the moment that evening when I will reveal it to him in the semi-darkness of our apartment. One night, inspired by supper conversation with an anthropologist recently returned from Papua New Guinea, Bill adorned himself in a tribal outfit of cockrings, weightlifter's belt, and amethyst (cut-glass) necklace. But more often we are upon each other before we have thought of it: I slowly awaken to the pushing of his hard-on against mine; he meets me at the apartment door and I cannot keep from kissing his neck, pulling off his shirt.

Lovemaking is such a small part of making love to another person. The other facets are more difficult to describe: the long process of learning who he is, what he wants, how to help him attain it; progressing from spontaneous admiration of those things that are beautiful to appreciation of those things that are not; expressing and living a commitment to each other and to the intangible and imponderable emotion that has brought us together. We love each other more than life. Our separate worries -- mine that we might eventually break up, his somewhat darker, issuing from the pogroms -- merge to reinforce our determination never to fall out of love, and thus also our decision to ruthlessly cut from our lives anything -- everything -- which hinders our fervor.

Love and sex, love and hope and sex. We didn't have sex after slipping rings on each other's fingers -- a shared head cold and bad weeks on the job had done us in. A moment of arousal came and passed, and I went into the kitchen to fix dinner while he sat down at the piano.

We had sex later that weekend, sex wild and noisy and impetuous, with strong orgasms for which time stood still.