This weekend was a busy one. I had event after event to go to and at the end of it I am genuinely exhausted. Mentally, physically, and (most of all) emotionally.

I had two events that were in-law related. One was a birthday and the other a celebration of life. I was happy to go because I do genuinely love my in-laws. I love them more than my own family, to be honest. The other reason I wanted to make sure I was there was to be my husband’s stand-in. I know I will never replace him, not in a million years, but I know it is what he would want from me. Nothing makes me happier than for him to be happy, even if it is totally up to my own interpretation.

The only downside of being at these events was that Charlie wasn’t. His absence was greatly felt. Especially from me. All I wanted to do was turn to him and make small asides about the family. They were all in good fun, but the inability to even that broke my heart and make me miss him even more.

The thing I’ve heard in the ALS LGBTQ group a lot is that this is the year of “firsts.” All of it is going to be something new and sad. I just have to power through with a smile and know that the one thing (I know without a shred of doubt) is that my husband wanted me to keep living.

Yesterday I made it back to Disneyland with the boyfriend. It was something we loved doing and did (monthly) prior to the great disrupt of Covid, and the subsequent diagnosis of Charlie.

My husband hated Disneyland. He hated the crowds, the rides, and the price of everything. So when I found someone to go with it was heaven. The one thing I would look forward to was going home and telling him all the things we did and show him the cool swag I bought that he would have hated or thought was tacky.

On the ride home I just felt sad. The phrase I repeated in my mind was “I miss Charlie.” I do…

When he was alive the moment I left to go do something he’d wait 20 or 30 minutes before he would message “Do you miss me yet?” At the time I found it annoying and only slightly emotionally manipulative because how could I miss you when we haven’t even gone an hour without talking. Even a text keeps someone in my thoughts so I don’t really miss them if they’re still there. (I think that’d an ADHD thing by the way.) Now I’m angry with myself for not knowing what was to come and for getting angry. I wish I could tell him how much I really do miss him. And I am sure on some plane he knows.

I was never one for the “free” service OneDrive offers for photos “On This Day.” I couldn’t have cared less. I had other things to think about besides strolling down memory lane with photographs of happier times. Moments when my life wasn’t consumed by chaos. However since my husband’s death I have taken each opportunity with renewed excitement. One, because it’s been nice seeing photos that wax and wane from sentimental to bizarre. (“Why the fuck did I save this?”) And two, because every one of them has included a dick shot from the bf. Which I find hilarious. Today’s photo set did not though. Which is serendipitous because it put the spotlight solely on Charlie, my husband.

This trip was one of our favorites. We recounted it up until the end because it is what got us hooked on “spur of the moment” and “unplanned” adventures. It’s also where we got some of our best stories.

Charlie had been given his inheritance from his grandmother’s (or grandfather) passing. After purchasing a video camera he had intended to use to film his own adult entertainment (a la Corbin fisher or Sean Cody) for his own website, he decided that we should take a trip up to San Francisco. We needed a vacation. We needed time to reconnect and mend our fence.

Prior to this, in March 2005, was when he had discovered the emails that proved I was cheating. After a very tense fight we broke up for a couple hours before he called me back to his place. It was then that he told me what it would take for him to earn his trust again and I agreed. I would do anything to rectify the hurt I had caused him. And it was serious trauma. For both of us.

This trip brought us out of the funk that had lingered around the brief break up. We reconnected and found what made us work. It was our openness to adventure and the possibility of the unknown.

During it we made a stop at the Winchester mansion, one of my more favorite locales in California. Not because of the spooky nature of the home, but because of the absurdity some people place in their beliefs of death and dying. (Me being one of them by the way.) We didn’t get anything spooky on film however I got some pretty neat photos. I’m surprised they didn’t show up in yesterday’s email…

Later that night we walked from our hotel into China town and down to the wharf. We immediately regretted it on the trek back, which was almost entirely a steep incline.

The following day we took a trip to Alcatraz (as shown in the photos) and after a rest from scouring “the rock!” we went to a male strip club located around the corner from our hotel. It is THE STORY I love to recount because of how bonkers it was. (And just know there are minor details that add to the flavor that unfortunately didn’t make it into the narrative.)

The “strip club” was called Knob Hill Theatre, located next to “Charlies inn” which my mom had said was a funny coincidence. We paid entry and walked in to find a man blowing an entirely naked hunk to our right, in the top row of a set of theatre seats. Caught off guard we hurried down the hallway to where we could see the start of a stage through another doorway. As we got closer we saw no one was there. Stepping into the entryway we looked back and realized that the completely naked man was the dancer. This was before the announcer could let us know that “the bigger the tip, the bigger the thrill.”

We ventured on due to the discomfort of the scene and found a set of showers, equipped with booths to view in, and a room filled with televisions playing various pornographic video clips. In that room was a man with his pants around his ankles jerking off. Startled we hurried out of that room and back into the hallway.

“Do you think he works here too?” I asked my husband.

“Nope. I think he’s just some guy.”

We go back to the theatre and it’s empty. We take a seat along the aisle, midway in the audience. The next dancer comes out, Rico. He has a samba soundtrack with a Latin beat to match his outward exterior. He removes some clothes and ventures out into the audience to ask for a tip. My husband and I shake our heads to politely decline and he goes to the back where the one other gentleman had been blowing the previous dancer. I assume he also declines and “Rico” goes back on stage and removes everything else but his socks. He strolls once again into the audience to us. He leans against the back of the chair in front of me, props up a leg and opens up the top of his tube sock to say “do you want to give me a tip?”

I giggled and said, “I’m good.”

He does the same to the guy in the back who, it appears, to have also said no.

Rico storms to the stage, grabs up his clothes and leaves the stage in a huff. The music playing loudly overhead to no one in particular.

Next comes out a dancer who looked as though they literally took him off the street. He was wearing cargo shorts, vans, a t-shirt underneath an opened, button up shirt, and a cap. His chosen dance tracks Fiona Apple and Madonna songs. Slowly he starts to dance this reserved, insecure collection of body movements, while looking back at the music booth with the most pathetic expression, as if to say “don’t make me do this.”

He continues to dance through each song reluctantly taking off items of clothing. Finally, I lean over to Charlie and ask for a $5 and rush up to the edge of the stage. I hold up the folded bill between two fingers and say, “Please don’t cry.”

He laughs and takes the money. I return to my seat followed closely by (who we would forever refer to as) the crying stripper. He was totally naked at this point and as he’s standing in the aisle, stroking himself, as he has a totally mundane conversation with both my husband and me; asking us where we’re from and what we’re doing in the city. Shit you have with someone in a hotel lobby and not at all while someone is masturbating before you. Finally he ends the conversation and goes back on stage to collect his things and leaves.

“How is it that you can have an easy conversation with him but you’re shy around my family?” Charlie had asked me.

I shrugged.

The next dancer was a no show, so we make one final round through the place before leaving. That’s when we see someone in the “shower.” It was our crying stripper! I rushed into the booth and knocked enthusiastically on the glass. He turns and I excitedly wave at him.

He laughs and I pop in a $20 through the slot in the window. He holds up his index finger.

The crying stripper pumps some soap into his hand and then strolls over to the glass and starts jerking off. After a few moments he cums on the window and I clap while I say “yay!”

He blushes, chuckles and then mouths, “Thank you.”

I am sad to inform you that the theatre is no longer open. It was one of the many casualties of the Covid epidemic. However, I’ve heard rumors of people trying to preserve and reopen it. Fingers crossed. It was a fun place! This story alone got my friends interested in going, which also resulted in another story for the book.

I’m glad I have these photos. If it wasn’t for my persistence in taking them (at this time) I wouldn’t have them now. He hated having his picture taken. He would ruin any photo with a weird face or by blocking the lens. So I had to get clever of when and where I took his picture. My techniques followed me throughout our relationship. My preferred choice was on the sly, when he was distracted with something else. To me he had a natural handsomeness in his “observations.” If he were to do the same to me I would just look bitchy. I have some intense R.B.F.

I am genuinely sad that we will not have any other misadventures. They were what made our life unpredictable and fun. Not only that, he made them better to experience them. We pushed each other into the most bizarre of scenarios, just because something off-the-wall sounded kind of fun. And those were always the stories we loved to tell.

Side note, he would be mortified that I posted this one in a public forum.

It’s strange. I have been writing this in my head ever since we got Charlie’s diagnosis but waited until the last minute to write it like I always do. It didn’t hit me until yesterday that this wasn’t fueled by my ADHD as usual, this was because once I do it it is real. It’s most likely the reason why even though I’ve spent the last four years thinking about it I never put it in writing. Now, I wasn’t composing it mentally because I was looking forward to it. I was doing it because I wanted to make sure I got this right. I wanted it to be a perfect encapsulation of Charlie, without making it about me. Even now I can hear charlie saying, with his mischievous smile, “oh, you’re going to make it about you. You can’t help yourself.”

To that I say, charlie I can’t write about you without including my own experiences.

And I can hear his response, “Yeah, yeah. Excuses.”

After charlie was diagnosed, the only thing I wanted was more time with him. At that point we had only been together 16 years and I wanted more than anything to make it to 20. That way he would have been in my life longer than he wasn’t. And I got my wish.

Charlie’s and my’s meeting was an accident. Back in the AOL days he instant messaged me thinking I was his friend “Nick.” This friend, who I have still never met, and I had had similar screen names. The first thing he ever said to me was “yeah, Diego and I are still together.” I replied “that’s great” and continued the conversation as though I knew him and what he was talking about. Eventually I asked him “who are you” and he explained the mistake.

Charlie’s and my relationship began with communication and never stopped. It was what shaped and molded everything. He had this uncanny ability of cutting directly through the bull shit to bring out what someone was really feeling. Which wasn’t fun for someone who, at the time, didn’t know anything about themselves. Charlie kept asking questions to not only figure someone out for himself, but so the other person could see it too. His constant role of “devil’s advocate” forced me to really examine my own beliefs and see another person’s point of view. I hated it. Nothing gave him more joy. One of my favorite memories was my mom telling me, with the biggest smile, “man he really knows how to push your buttons.”

His joy and positivity was infectious for me. Much like it was an achievement with my dad, getting him to laugh was always my favorite thing. The one thing that worked, without fail, was making myself the butt of the joke. Nothing made him laugh more. Well, maybe our dark sense of humor when it came to the reality of his disease. Even in something so serious we could see the absurdity of life and in that found joy to keep us going. While the jokes were not always well received it was his attempt to stay positive.

His positivity also extended to other people or situations. He usually saw the best in someone and even if they failed had the belief that they could and would change. He very rarely wrote anyone off. And in the rare instances that he did he would always backtrack and see them in a new light.

Charlie was always concerned about the joy of others. He was a fixer emotionally and physically. He would do anything that someone asked (even if he didn’t know how) to make that person’s life better. However momentary it may have been, or at the cost of his own joy. He may not have wanted to hang his mother’s shelves, curtains, or put together a BBQ but he did it because he wanted her to know that someone was there for her. To make her happy. It’s also the reason why his gifts were always lavish. He had a philosophy that gifts should be something that the person could not or would not do for themselves. Which made giving him gifts un-fun because I had no money and he had no reaction to sentimental trinkets.  I have since learned that it is a shared family trait with his sister. Every year I had to step up my game to find something that would be “extravagant” but within my budget. That’s near impossible to do. So, when I broke down and bought him a high end Kitchen Aid mixer I went into debt to do it. And for each subsequent gift after.

Charlie was simultaneously worried about finances but also not concerned about money. The moment he ever got any excess cash he would make some ridiculous purchase or take us both on some off-the-cuff trip, spur of the moment. At the time I was bothered by his (and let’s face it my) inability to save for something bigger. Spending whatever we got when we got it didn’t benefit us. Though with hindsight I’m glad we never did, because it absolutely served us. It gave us experiences that I will not forget. We got to live life instead of planning for it under the misguided belief that we could do it tomorrow. That was the best lesson Charlie taught me, without knowing he was doing it at the time.

I am genuinely disappointed that he wasn’t a teacher for longer. Or that his coworkers couldn’t see the potential and ability he had in being an instructor. He was always eager to show someone how to do something. Which he most likely learned how to do on his own. He was self taught and not one for the finer details. But he was eager to show me how to do something, even if I ultimately got super bitchy about it because what we both failed to understand that we had two very different ways of explaining something. So we would have to sit back and listen to what the other was trying to say to complete our task.

Being an unconventional teacher is what charlie was for me. With everything that made him up it culminated into being a guide on how to be a better person and how to live a good life. One where the only regret is that you don’t have enough time to keep going. Which, to me, is the better side of “I wish I had more time to do the things I never did.” I will miss him more than I could ever put into words, because he was truly my other half. He had the biggest hand at making me who I am today through all our trials and tribulations, failures and successes.

So, I guess you were right, Charlie.  I did make this about me.  But only because you’re invariably tied with who I am and who I have become.