Stories from a man who fails to meet media expectations of what it means to be gay:
white, frivolous, over sexed yet sexless, shrill, single, stylish, a clown, unimportant, et al.

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The house next door gets straighter and straighter.

I have been suffering from "senioritis" the past week, but luckily enough, work is now over and I am on vacation. Johny and I are off to Tokyo and I am really doubtful that I will be updating the journal while we are over there.

It may be hubris on my part, but I have added a notify list thingy at the bottom of the site in case anyone wants to know when I post again. Then again, it is probably hubris to post the journal in the first place.

Anyway, I should be back in a couple weeks. I hope you enjoy the story and have fun.

-nico

The house next door (going down the hill) was built sometime in the 1930's. I don't know anything about who lived there that far back, but I do know that for most of the eighties and the early nineties the house was rented by a gay couple. At some point around 1991 or 1992, one of the men died of AIDS and his partner moved out. John and I never met them and I don't know their names, but I do that they gardened. Old shrub roses once lived in that backyard and a once tame blackberry patch at the bottom of the hill has grown into a monster which has tried to take over several of the adjacent properties. Lemon and orange trees grew along paths that were also bordered by persimmons and pomegranates.

By the time that John and I moved into our home, the house next door had been rented for several years by a friendly woman and her roommate, a rather quiet, white, early thirties kind of guy. They weren't a couple, but rather good friends. Unlike the previous tenants, they ignored the backyard. Lets call them Mary and Bill.

We met Mary a couple of days after moving in, which turned out to be unusual, because she was rarely home. She had a long commute and spent most of her time at her fiancee's apartment in Santa Monica. It wasn't until a couple weeks later that John met Bill when they both got home from work at the same time one evening. During a friendly "hello there neighbor" type chat, Bill mentioned in quick succession that he was a teacher and that his girlfriend Betty worked at the same school.

Oddly enough, John went to college with Betty and was still friends with her. John did not remember her ever mentioning a boyfriend named Bill. When John mentioned that he was friends with her, Bill immediately started back peddling. "We aren't dating anymore, we kinda broke it off."

The next time John saw Betty, he told her about meeting Bill and she replied that they had dinner once and it wasn't a date. She had no idea why he would bother telling a stranger that they were an item.

John and I thought the story and the way he acted was odd, but we didn't give it that much thought, after all we had just moved into a new house and we had a lot of work to do.

A couple of months later we started noticing some things about the house next door. Namely that a car with a bad oil leak was starting to park in front of it a lot. The car belonged to neither Mary nor Bill. Turns out that it belonged to a man who stayed over nearly every night. The visiting man was not Mary's fiancee. The visiting man was obviously gay. After a month, he stopped visiting and new visiting man started to come around. In fact a lot of "questionable" men would visit or spend the night. I have lost track of how many different men I have said good morning to as they were leaving and I was getting the Sunday paper. Let's just say that it was a lot of men. A lot.

It bugged me a little that Bill never did tell us that he was gay. It would have been OK. After all, we were the gay next door neighbors. Maybe that was the reason he never did say anything. He may have been gay, he may have been popular. Very popular. But he was also closeted.

He might have felt that he couldn't come out because he was a teacher, but the truth is I will never know. Every time John or I would say hello to him, he would nod at us then quickly disappear.

Eventually Mary decided that it was stupid to pay rent on a home that she was never at and moved out. Bill moved out as well soon after. The day before he left, I was in the kitchen washing dishes when I saw him standing on his back balcony dressed up as a fire fighter. A shirtless fireman that is. He was modeling for a photographer. I stood there watching longer than I should have, but for whatever reason I didn't mind being rude that day.

The house sat vacant for a while and the owner did some cosmetic work to the building, nothing too elaborate or too expensive though. He didn't do anything to the backyard.

After several months, the house was rented again and we had a new neighbor. He was a white guy in his later forties named Mark and he introduced us to his dog Samantha. We quickly found out that Sam was an accomplished escape artist.

A week after moving in, Mark threw a party. After a couple of hours of normal party next door type noises, John and I started hearing chanting. We couldn't make out the words, but it was definitely chanting. You can see into part of the next door back yard from our kitchen and this was decidedly weird enough that we felt justified in looking to see just what the heck was going on over there.

What was going on was that a vitamin company banner was strung through some trees in the back yard and all the guests were huddled into a circle. They were chanting the company's name over and over again.

Our next door neighbor was a cult vitamin selling guy.

A few weeks after that, John told me that he had seen Mark naked on his back balcony. I thought John was joking, until one morning when I looked out the kitchen window and saw Mark in his backyard watering plants nude. It quickly became a common sight to see him eating or working outside nude or in a thong. If Mark had been a particularly handsome or ugly man, it might have been gross or interesting, but since he was neither, it didn't take long for it to become mundane.

Mark had to have known that we could see him. He didn't seem too concerned by this, or presumably concerned by the fact that by removing the curtains from his front windows anyone passing on the street could see him nude as well.

Our next door neighbor was an exhibitionist, nudist, cult vitamin selling guy.

He did try to take care of his yard however. Well, at least the parts closest to the house. He tamed the bougainvillea which was attempting to conquer the garage and he watered the fruit trees. Hopefully he didn't cut back the bougie while naked.

For an exhibitionist, Mark wasn't that outgoing a person. We would usually talk only when John or I would bring his escape artist dog back home after an adventure of roaming the streets. Even then it was rarely more than a quick thank you.

Like Bill, Mark had visitors. At first it was just a woman who would occasionally stay overnight who Mark never introduced us to. Then it was a man who would stay overnight fairly often who Mark never introduced us to. They never stayed over at the same time and as far as John and I knew, Mark was never naked with them. Not outside the house anyway.

About six months after Mark moved in, John and I had a large rubber tree and a stump removed from the front yard. The rubber tree was decades old and was actively trying to uproot our house. In addition, the stump was ugly, dead and took up a lot of room in our postage stamp sized front yard.

The man that we hired for the job left a short stack of wood from the stump by the side gate and our front yard was suddenly sunny and twice as large. We now had a front yard we could actually do something with.

The first weekend after the tree had been removed cars were parked in all of the available spaces on the street. The usual sign of a party somewhere in the neighborhood. John and I were in the den watching TV, when we heard several men walking down the street swearing, spitting and making crude jokes about women. Then we realized that the guys weren't in the street, they were actually in our front yard and they were taking our wood. John stopped them and they returned the wood after letting us know that our neighbor Mark told them they could have it.

Mark came by later that day and apologized for the mixup. He told us that his men's group was having a camp out and need wood. The explanation was lame, but accepted. We were still a little annoyed about the incident and spent time making jokes about the men. Things like how they drove crappy cars and didn't know how to dress. We also joked about how sad it was that straight women had to deal with men like that and how said women may not have had to deal with at least two of them. Despite the swearing and spitting and misogynistic jokes and awful fashion sense, a couple of the guys were a bit femmy. After an hour of jokes, the incident was forgotten and we put our energy into fixing up the front yard.

A few weeks later things got stranger.

Around this time we started having problems with the mail. It was rarely delivered to the right address. Several evenings were spent with neighbors walking letters and bills over to the proper address. At least that is what we hoped was happening. We never did get some issues of a few magazines.

I came home from work one thursday and started sorting through the mail as usual. Junk mail; Junk mail; bill; letter for same address, but different street; bill for Mark, GLBT organization asking for money; GLBT newsletter, but with the next door address. It surprised me that Mark was getting "gay" mail, then I realized that it wasn't exactly a gay organization's newsletter. It took me a few minutes to place the name and recall that it was an exGay organization. I showed John the newsletter, then walked it over to Mark's mailbox along with his bill.

Our next door neighbor was an exGay, nudist, exhibitionist, vitamin cult selling guy.

We had no idea what to make of Mark by this point. Was the wood stealing men's group an exGay men's group? To be a straight man you only had to dress badly and spit while making vagina jokes? Who exactly was Mark's frequent female overnight visitor? His girlfriend? An exLesbian? Both? If they were "involved," then who was his frequent male overnight visitor? Mark slipping?

Just one of the silly additives we had labeled Mark with would have been enough proof that he was kind of odd, but this long ever growing list of additives was ridiculous.

Over the next six months, Mark remained withdrawn, continued to have overnight visitors of both genders, still spent a couple hours each day looking for his escapee dog and spent a lot of time naked. We never found out what he thought of having an openly gay male couple as next door neighbors and we never told him that we got his mail by accident.

Roughly a year after he moved into the house, Mark moved out.

The house next door was vacant again. The owner put the curtains back up and had a work crew clear out the back yard. The bougainvillea was torn out as well as the persimmons, old roses and pomegranates. They didn't touch the blackberries bramble.

After the yard was cleared (almost), crews began working on the house itself and the owner put the property up for sale. He told John that he was tired of dealing with renters and was hoping to make some money considering the shape of the realty market.

After four months of vacant house, the for sale sign came down and we had new neighbors again. This time a married thirty something Chinese couple. They are a nice people, if a little bit too "starbuck" type yuppies.

So over the course of the past two decades the house next door has gotten progressively straighter and straighter. From an openly gay male couple to a closeted teacher to an exGay, cult vitamin selling, exhibitionist, nudist man to an actual straight couple. I am not sure how it could get any straighter. The Chens could someday have kids I guess.

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