I’ve always had a very generous heart when it comes to helping people. I have been blessed that I come from a culture where the people I grew up with always gave to others when they could. If I see someone who is trying to make a change in their life, and I have the capacity to assist them in some way, then I will. I was fortunate to grow up in a safe and sheltered environment. That is not the case with a lot of people, and it was definitely not the case with Goldie. Coming from a sheltered environment, there were many types of people that I just never knew existed. In many ways, my limited exposure to corrupt people made me a victim. Over the past ten years, I have met people whose morals don’t quite match my own. I don’t pass judgment on anyone, because I understand that we are all products of our experiences and our environment. I understand that Goldie’s experiences and environment made him into the person that he was (or still may be), but hopefully his experiences with me gave him something else to work towards.
As Goldie and I got to know more about each other, he would share details about his past and the hard life he had lived. He had always gone back and forth from his mother’s and father’s homes in Houston and Philadelphia respectively. This went on until his mother remarried. He had a bad relationship with his stepfather. After a physical altercation between the two of them, his mother refused to let him come back to her home. Tensions between Goldie and his stepfather had gotten so bad that she didn’t want the two of them together and around the younger children she had with this new husband. Her only option was to send him away to live with his father for good.
As I grow older, I realize that the more I try not to repeat the mistakes of my father, the more I find that I still have a lot of his ways. The same could be said for many men just as it could be for Goldie and his father. When he talked about why his parents got a divorce, he said it was because his father had a bad drug habit, and he used to beat his mother and steal all the household money. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. I suppose Goldie’s mother could probably see his father in him, and didn’t want to be around it or expose her young, twin boys to that behavior. I could tell by the way he talked about it that he felt betrayed by his mother. She never let him come back to live with her, and he held a lot of resentment for that.
When Goldie’s mother sent him to live with his father, she, in essence, sent him to live on his own. With his father consumed in a drug habit and a younger sister in the house, he ended up finding ways to survive on his own and provide for the two of them. Goldie dropped out of high school sometime during his senior year, and moved out of the house completely at seventeen to live with a boyfriend. This was the same time he started stripping in gay clubs to make money. He quickly found he was very good at it.
Strippers are a fantasy to a lot of people. I have to admit, I have my own stripper fetish; there is something about attaining the unattainable, like a trophy on your wall that everyone else wishes they could claim. Goldie learned early in his “career,” that there were certain people who indulged a little too heavily in the stripper fantasy. He learned how to read and manipulate all types of people, how to gauge a personality in a very short conversation. For Goldie, stripping was an easy way to meet “clients,” and that the real money was in being an escort, going out with men who paid him for his time. According to him, he never had sex with them, but anytime he needed something, there were people he could call for money.
When one hears something like this, I’m sure most would be a little skeptical about escorts who don’t sleep with their clients. I know I was, at least until I saw him in action. One of his “clients” was someone I actually knew, and I also knew the personality type. Successful men with self esteem issues and extra money to spare were a sure target. When a young, cute, and clever guy with a very nice gym body gives this type of man some attention and quality time, he can get almost anything he needs. For Goldie, he didn’t see it as manipulation. He saw it as being nice and developing a friendship with generous people who didn’t mind helping him out financially. As long as he never slept with them, he could lead them to believe he was “semi-wholesome” and there was a possibility that one day they too could have him.
Because of how this story will eventually end, to this day, I still do not know if I was being manipulated from the start or if he had sincere feelings for me. I believe deep down inside that he wanted to be friends with all the people he manipulated, so in his eyes, he was partially innocent. In the beginning, Goldie wouldn’t tell me about how he made his money. This was something I found out by putting the pieces together over a few weeks of observation and conversation. I didn’t live within the Houston city limits or near public transportation, so every once in a while Goldie would ask me to use my car to visit his friends. I wasn’t about to keep him prisoner in my home, so I let him come and go as he pleased. Somehow, he would always come back with money in his pocket, because his generous friends would help him out. Since I knew some of the people he would visit regularly, I didn’t think much of it. I had known “Jeremy” for years, and his friend, “Marcus”, would come to the house every now and then to visit.
Marcus was his club buddy and best friend. Marcus would come to pick Goldie up on the weekends and take him out to the clubs. He would pay for his way to get in, and I’m sure Goldie would use his money to buy an 8-ball (a bag of cocaine for the innocent). There were times when they would return from the club with a friend or two and finish off their bag then smoke weed until 4AM. Since the gay community in Houston is so small, I happened to know some of the people he would bring back. They would say, “Christopher, I didn’t know you and Goldie lived together.” Then, of course, I would join them and we would all catch up, passing blunts and doing lines.
At this point, Goldie and I had been living together for about 2 months and dating for a little over three. This routine of Marcus coming to pick him up and them returning from the club with other friends went on for about another month. Sometimes, his friends would meet up at the house before they went out, do a few bumps, and then go out.
One Saturday afternoon during the summer, Marcus came over and Goldie must have been in a great mood. He told us both that he was going to wash and detail our cars, so he took Marcus’s car to the carwash around the corner. Marcus and I used the time to just talk, since I had never really had a real conversation with him alone. He asked me about myself and what I did for a living. He also told me that he admired me for being such a professional and having accomplished all that I had at such a young age. I was a little flattered. Eventually the conversation got a little personal, and he asked me, “So what’s up with you and Goldie?”
“What do you mean, what’s up,” I asked slightly perplexed?
“I mean, are you two supposed to be dating or something?”
“Are we supposed to be? Why would you ask me something like that? It should be obvious. Has he told you something different?”
“Well, I kinda figured there was more there, but he only told me you two were roommates.”
“If you were curious about our relationship, why wouldn’t you ask him? He’s supposed to be your friend.” At this point, I was starting to get slightly annoyed with him, because it seemed like he was just being nosy or about to be messy. Aside from this episode, he had been a pretty nice guy, so I was having a hard time understanding where all of this was coming from, but my interests were perked.
Just then, Goldie pulled up in Marcus’s car. It was clean and shiny. “What are you two talking about?”
“Oh nothing,” I said. “We’re just chillin’ and hanging out in the garage, really. It’s nice out here today.”
“Well, I’ll be back in a little bit,” Goldie stated as he grabbed my keys and pulled off in my car this time.
There was a short silence, almost as if he was waiting to make sure he had cleared the block before he continued, “If I tell you something, will you promise not to tell Goldie I told you this?”
We all know that when someone says this to you, they are about to break some serious news, and I wanted to hear this serious news regardless of the consequences, so I lied and said, “I won’t say anything to him, what is it?”
“Well, we slept together.”
My heart just dropped out of my chest when I heard those words. I had to be sure this wasn’t some kind of joke though. How can you be sitting in my house telling me my man has been fucking you? All I could muster up the strength to ask was, “Recently? You slept together recently?”
“Yes,” he said.
I was still in disbelief. Goldie had never gave me the impression that cheat on me, nor did he have that kind of unpredictable or irregular behavior. I had to be really, really sure. “Recently, like within the last two weeks recently?”
“Yes,” he repeated. “Please don’t say anything to him. I had no idea you two were dating, and I promise, now that I know, it will never happen again. You're a great person, Chris, and I wouldn't want to do anything bad against you, that's why I just thought you should know the truth.”
My mind was racing. I didn’t know if I should be beating this dude’s ass right in my garage with all my neighbors on the block watching. Should I be throwing Goldie’s shit out on the lawn? I was so mad, I couldn't even think about crying. Then again, I couldn't just take his word for it. Here I had someone who couldn't have been as close to Goldie as I thought if he didn't even know we were dating. Even Jeremy knew that. I took a deep breath to regain my composure and looked up to find Goldie pulling into the driveway.
I’ll leave you here for this week. Tune in next time for more of this story. Still to come:
- Meet the Parents
- The House Party
- The Hurricane
- Lesbian Crack Heads
- And much more…
