I had met and chatted briefly with Phil at the Eagle several times, with his dense, black beard and sunny smile. Sometimes I’d be sitting on a stool upstairs at the Eagle and Phil would come sailing over to sit on my lap and call me “girlfriend.” No one had called me that before, but it made me feel, of all things, accepted and normal. Who knew?
So once when I saw Phil, I asked him if he’d like to have dinner sometime. Shortly after that, we met at Annie’s Paramount Steak House in DC after work, and after dinner (and bearing a nearby table of shrieking women, increasingly a fixture in otherwise couth establishments), I asked if he’d maybe like a back rub, and we went back to his house (that was easy!).
I had the very odd feeling of inevitability with Phil. It was like, “Phil is a bear who pushes all my buttons so OF COURSE I have to have sex with him” ―like I had to get it over with because I needed him in my collection, or to get him out of my system, or something like that. I didn’t think that about anyone else, before or since; but for some reason I did with Phil though I certainly didn’t mention it.
By now I had discovered that while I very much liked chest hair, I didn’t like a great deal of back hair and Phil had a lot of it. Phil was very much a bear, very hairy all over, which a lot of guys like, the more the better.
Since I was spending the night, I took out my contacts and squinted my way around his house. I tried the back rub thing like I used to do with Ernest but since Phil quite was a bit bigger than Ernest, what I could do wasn’t so effective. But we shared a nice jerk-off and in the morning, Phil dropped me at the nearest Metro station. I had the impression Phil had grown bored with me. And maybe I with him, especially now that I had gotten him, well, out of my system.
Although our dinner-date wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, it did mark another milestone for me: I took Metro not home but directly to work, still in my work clothes from yesterday. No one at my office seemed to notice I had done a walk of shame (nay, triumph!)—all straight people.
I saw Phil out and about for years and although he remained hail-fellow friendly, we never got together again.