Chapter 8 November 1998.
We discussed family plans for Christmas vacation. Patrick said he never took a trip over Christmas before.
I told him my parents found an old place in the BVI they liked. He asked me to show him on a map. I got out my North American atlas which went all the way down to Panama.
"We'll fly from O'Hare to Miami, then on a smaller plane to Nassau. Then we take a high speed catamaran to Road Town in the British Virgin Islands (BVI), then switch boats and sail to Norman Island where we rent huts at a place called Pirates Bight, which was a small bay with some shacks and a beachfront restaurant.
I reminded him we already ordered fake IDs since gay is against the law in the BVI.
"Why go?" He asked.
"Because my parents are paying, it's tropical and warm, and the water is clear, and almost everyone is filthy rich so the service is fantastic."
"You been there before?"
"Yep, twice."
"What's there to do?"
"Swim, hike, snorkel, eat good food, and you never have to do a fucking thing, everything is done for you, except wiping your ass."
"Is it a big hotel?"
"No, it's not a hotel, it's a bunch of (WW2) Quonset huts along the beach, it's a two minute walk to the restaurant. People anchor their huge yachts in the bay, and it's a great place to get invited to a deck party."
"What's missing?"
"What's missing is my favorite part of the place: there's no roads or strip malls. We can eat local caught, burgers and steaks, and all sorts of fruit smoothies made from stuff they grew on the island. There's no noise or waiting lines, but there's always cops in uniform watching the tourists, and smoking weed is totally against the law that will land you in the slammer. Beer is legal at age 18 and they got a full bar on the beach. There's no cable TV, no air conditioning, and it rains every evening, and the place is extremely quiet and very laid back."
I paused for a bit then said, "You basically live in shorts the entire time. It's like being retired! There's hiking trails all over the island and places to explore and swim, it's a paradise compared to Wilmette!" He chuckled.
"Is it against the law to masturbate?" He asked sounding half serious.
"Probably, but who cares? Once you're in the water there's nothing they can do about it. If you flash some flesh to the right people you can get invited on one of those yachts and join a big sex party on the deck at night. I've seen 'em. Everyone is naked and people fucking on deck with a crowd watching and cheering them on."
"Did your parents join the party?"
"Fuck no! My mom can't even say the word 'sex' out loud.
"What if you get busted?" He asked.
"They got a fenced-in outdoor jail if you get too drunk or beat up someone, then you got a big problem. Getting busted in a foreign country is a major ordeal. I saw the island jail once."
He had a worried look on his face, I told him not to worry, we'd have too much fun to get busted for dumb shit. You can do almost anything you want in your cabin as long as you don't break shit or forget to pay your bill. Then I told Patrick, "You'll be fine, just do what I do and we'll make it back home just fine, with great sun tans. This will be a vacation you'll remember forever."
I told Patrick on my first trip there I got invited to join a party on a multi-million dollar sailboat, it was like twenty drunks watching two hetero couples fuck on deck.
The look on his face was one of intrigue but also worry. I think I needed to sell him on the idea a bit more, but either way it was coming up soon.
"You know the islands in the Caribbean are all different countries with different laws from the USA, it's easy to get busted on any of 'em, but just go there and have fun and don't do stupid shit and you'll be one of millions of Americans that visit the Caribbean and had a great time and went back home with nothing but great memories."
I tried to explain how the place we went catered to wealthy middle aged couples that didn't expect to be coddled or entertained 24/7. It was a place to go and relax and enjoy the quiet and beauty of a small bay on the Caribbean.
The extra day we spent indoors really lifted his spirits and made him much closer to his normal self (nurses referred to as his: baseline). The next morning the distant empty stare and worry painted on his face were totally gone and he had a smile most of the time. I felt he was mostly unaware of his facial expressions.
Around 11am we drove to Target to buy him new shoes, socks, undies, two pairs of jeans, four t-shirts, an insulated hoodie, and some bathroom stuff. I spent about $340 on winter clothes for Patrick.
We ate lunch at Michael's on Green Bay Road near my old high school (NTE) then headed back towards home after I drove us around New Trier East. Then I took him to Tower Road Beach, Elder Lane Beach, Kenilworth Beach, and lastly to Gillson Park (across the street from Point Obo) but it was too cool outside with the lake wind to do much so we stayed in the car at Gillson. He told me about being harassed in high school for his rumored queerness and how he believed his brother started most of the rumors and got his redneck friends to harass him.
Back at home we rolled his bicycle into the garage for some routine maintenance. Chain and brakes adjusted, tires aired-up after patching a leak in the front inner tube he'd had for the past four weeks now. He watched in amazement as I tuned up his bike like I knew what I was doing. He watched me patch his tube and mumbled, 'Chicago's only gay bicycle mechanic.' I smiled at him while I tucked the tube back inside his tire and manually pushed it back on his rim and aired it up. I tried to recall if there were any bicycle shops in Boys Town.
I showed him I put four ten-dollar bills in his backpack if he decided he needed to leave for a while. I had to assure him that I was not pushing him out the door just that (according to him) we were not in a formal relationship and he was not stuck here. He was free to come and go. I told him that my home was a no-drugs allowed place, I could lose my nursing license forever if I got arrested for much of anything. He seemed to accept that one rule. I also told him he couldn't bring anyone over unless we discussed it at least one day ahead of time. And lastly, he should be the only person in the apartment on my work days (except maybe my parents).
We talked about Wilmette, the buses, trains, things to do, places to see. He said it sounded like a boring town, which I honestly had to agree with. Wilmette was not excitement central, it's mostly residential. I told him it was hard to imagine it used to be farmland back in the 1800s and Indians on horseback before that.
That weekend I worked my regular hours (7p-7a,Wed,Thur, Fri nites), Patrick lived on the same sleep schedule as me. When I got home he went to bed too. He said he used my computer to start a journal like mine and maybe even write a book about his childhood. He said he liked staying up all night.
When I got home on Thursday morning he seemed like he had something he needed to talk about so we showered then went to bed holding hands. I lay there and listened to what he had on his mind. The big topic was he wanted to get a job nearby and maybe stay longer than he first thought he would. I told him it would be fine but the quiet time during my work week was the most important thing and must be protected since it paid all our expenses.
After we were done talking it was about 8:45am, he actually leaned into me and gave me an honest kiss on the mouth. I lay on my back, he rolled onto his stomach, scooted closer to me and lowered his face into mine and placed a very romantic kiss on my lips. Then he lifted his head and looked me in the eyes, I said, "Thanks, that was very sweet. I needed that." So he did it again without any tongue. That time he moaned softly.
Then came the third time but this one came with lots of tongue and lasted for maybe a minute or two. We both whimpered on the last one. I struggled to not fall asleep.
That weekend he got a voice message from his mother, she said they got a large manila envelope from the State Department for him, he said he'd stop by and pick it up soon. I told him that was his passport.
During the week our fake driver's licenses showed up in my mail, they looked totally legit real, they had hologram stickers and an embossed gold state seal, they had data chips that worked.
Patrick told me twice during the week my mother hired him to run errands for her, she had dry cleaning to take to the cleaners down by the L station, she had certified company forms to mail at the Wilmette post office (she didn't want to get stuck standing in line), she wanted him to vacuum the inside of her car and clean the windows, and she asked him to blow the leaves out of the bushes and into the alley behind the house because their lawn guy was back down in Columbia for the winter.
"You mind me asking how much she paid for all that crap?"
"Well, she let me drive her car, which was very nice, especially the heated seats, I never sat on heated leather seats before. They really warmed my ass!"
"So how much?"
"She paid me for the three jobs as one task, it took me two hours to blow the leaves to the alley and maybe two hours to do the two deliveries and stand in line at the post office, she paid me $260 bucks."
"Holy shit, she likes you man!" I reported honestly.
"I could see that but hey, $260 in cash really filled my wallet nicely!"
I wondered how many hundreds I spent on him since we started dating, I'm sure it was way over four hundred. But I was glad he was happy, darn near excited about it.
The weeks went by and suddenly it was Thanksgiving. Our trip was only four weeks away and we were already acquiring stuff to bring along, like towels, face masks, snorkels, sun block, nice shorts for swimming or wearing to the restaurant, insect repellent, and I got a fanny pack to carry valuables in since the huts barely locked at all. I always put my wallet, cell, passport, and money in a water proof bag inside a fanny pack of some type. There was a uniform BVI cop on the beach 24 hours a day every time we went there, my parents ignored them but they sort of freaked me out a little, especially at night.
Most of the BVI cops were African and had very dark skin, plus their uniforms were black and navy blue so they were hard to see outside at night. I think they were there because the island had problems in the past with paparazzi sneaking in to photo the celebs.
The people that owned the boats anchored in the bay obviously had money and you never knew for sure who was on board. If you had a lot of money and wanted to stay at a quiet place and be left alone Bight Bay was a quietly popular spot.
Thanksgiving always fell on a work day for me but the burn unit had no burn patients (it was usually a seasonal business) so we took on less complicated ICU patients, but not major stuff. We had one guy that came home with Malaria from Central America he got on vacation, he was very sick.
Northwestern University Hospital was very selective about what patients they took because they didn't offer all the common specialties, just the ones they taught to med students. They usually kept intubated patients in the regular ICU and not in the step-down unit, but we did get patients on BiPAP if they were otherwise stable.
It was difficult to tell if my Malaria patient was getting better or not because his case was so complex. He was on a BiPAP and cardiac monitoring. He ran a fever of 103 for days, and if he started to hallucinate we sedated him for staff and patient safety. For an hour or more every day he was 1:1 with nursing staff. He was only 44 years old but expected to survive with complications possible the rest of his life. Some people that got Malaria dealt with it for years afterward and never fully recovered, but most people recovered completely. His case did not respond to the IV meds normally used for Malaria and it appeared he had a secondary pneumonia and possibly a rare fungus in his lungs that secreted a substance that acted like LSD.
My family could have waited for Saturday to have Thanksgiving dinner but decided to do it on Thursday and packed me a meal to take to work on Friday: turkey slices, mashed potatoes, salads, corn, etc. My mom usually cooked a great turkey, but like I said I'm not a big fan of turkey or duck, once a year was fine for me.
Patrick attended in my place and said they had a good time and my father was very kind. As a joke I asked Patrick if he wore a shirt and he laughed and said yes, he did, he went upstairs fully dressed, he even had shoes, socks, and underwear on, and helped with dishes.
I think Patrick enjoyed his temporary retirement a little too much but at least it gave him a taste of life away from his fucked-up family. He told me his brother called on Thursday evening and wished him, "Happy Thanksgiving asshole," he said he just hung up. That kind of told me his family felt his absence as a large empty spot that caused discomfort to their souls. To me it sounded like his brother was trying to be funny and mildly disrespectful at the same time.
One thing I should confess to was if you worked in a hospital around the holidays it was often the nicest days to work. Everyone brought in food and candy. We had potluck dinners in the break room and the hospital often spent money on food or gifts for employees. Plus, if your family was fucked up it gave you the perfect excuse to not attend any family holiday gathering. I'm sure I wasn't the only nurse that figured that out.
After Thanksgiving we usually started to see snow and low temps down to single digits. Living close to a large open body of water was sometimes good and other times not. Chicago got blasted with huge snow storms when the lake was not frozen over and we got big winds out of the east. It picked up lake moisture and it fell on the city, sometimes measured in feet, along with drifting snow.
Living near Lake Michigan meant you needed two types of winter clothes, one more for wind chill and another more for basic bone chilling cold. Luckily, the L seldom got shut down due to snow.
In my mind I privately expected Patrick would not stick around very long, just long enough to patch things up at home then move back to his old stomping grounds south of Old Orchard Mall. His world was bordered by Dempster St., Green Bay Road, Golf Road, and Edens Expressway.
I'd love to move into my own place but apartments in Evanston were expensive, I think it's better to stay at my parents house and enjoy the cheap rent. They got nobody else to keep an eye on them and they're both showing their age. Dad is 61 and Mom is 52, they're no spring chickens. He talks about retiring now that they have a reliable vice president.
Something else I got done was I found two schools that offered classes over the internet. The classes were recorded but I had to fly to the university once per semester for final exams. That would give me a masters in nursing (MSN) and I could do it part-time in three years from home, but it was super expensive. I still had two more schools to investigate. I also had somewhat of a gut feeling that if Patrick stayed here he would have to be super stable for me to be able to do online school, it would take almost 20 hours at the computer per week. Just for fun I made a printout of the tuition costs for the online schools I've found so far and gave that to my mom. Once I enrolled and signed the contract I'd show her and she would quietly tell Dad to pay it ($22k including rental books but not travel costs).
Two weeks before our trip Patrick was still here, on my days off I took him on the L to downtown Chicago. We walked over to Michigan Avenue and I took him up to the Observation Deck on the Hancock Building. After that we walked all the way down Michigan Avenue and went to the Field Museum, which was my favorite one. That's the museum with all the mummies and stuffed animals.
I watched a History Channel show about World's Fairs and saw color film of the 1934 Fair right here in Chicago near the Field Museum and McCormick Place. It's hard to imagine how different everything was back then. And even harder to picture the oldest fair they had in 1897 down in Jackson Park. That World's Fair drew a huge crowd from around the planet. I think the Science and Industry Museum was one of the few buildings left over from the 1897 Fair, most of it conveniently burned down after the fair closed.
The building where the St. Valentine's Day Massacre (Feb 14, 1929) was gone but most of the surrounding buildings were still there. It's hard to imagine how different the city was back then. We also went to see the grave of Al Capone in Mount Carmel Cemetery on the far west side of Chicago on Roosevelt Road. There's always lots of coins on his headstone. Their headstones were flat and sat in two rows near the Capone headstone which was usually obscured by bushes.
The spot where the Chicago Fire started in 1897 was marked with a bronze sculpture of a large flame, it sat outside the entrance to a Chicago Fire Department school building, but the actual site of the O'Leary home was a hundred feet to the west inside a power substation, but they didn't mention that on the plaque.
I guess the main suspect for starting the fire was some neighborhood guy (Peg-Leg O'Sullivan) that stole milk from the O'Leary barn and lit a lantern so he could see what he was doing with the cow. That area is also near Roosevelt Road, between the river and the Dan Ryan Expressway, about three blocks north on Jefferson Street at DeKoven Avenue. In 1870 that was a neighborhood of poor Irish immigrants. You wouldn't know that by looking at it today!
It was a long day with lots of walking, riding busses and trains, and freezing our asses off but we were both tired and went home after stopping for Chicago Dogs at a place near the Howard Avenue L station.
Back at home we stood in the shower until the hot water ran out, then went to bed and made love. That time we laid on our sides, him behind me. I don't think his boner was long enough to do that one very well, he kept popping out. I could tell he wanted to drill me that night because he took the time to hand wash my bunghole and up inside me too.
I loved washing his full back side in the shower. His muscular back felt so nice and how his butt stuck out and how slender his waist got. I still doubted he knew how good looking he was. I'd love to have him professionally photographed some day before he lost his looks and shape. And wouldn't it be hot to get the brothers together in a photo studio, naked and hard but Matt would never agree to that. What a waste.
On December 7th Patrick announced he got a job working at a small movie theater in town. Downtown was about one mile west of our house. He could walk, ride his bike, or hitch a ride down Lake Avenue. The crew started five nights a week at 10pm and swept the theater, cleaned bathrooms, and the front lobby. It took a crew of two or three about seven hours to get it all finished. The concession stand kids cleaned it nightly but they ran vacuum cleaners over the entire lobby and the carpeted walkways along the rows of seats.
To keep the employees happier they played music in the theater if the cleaning crew asked. I think the Wilmette Theater was very old, like 1913? He said he was the only non-Hispanic on the cleaning crew but they were a nice bunch of older guys, but one of them was always drunk.
He forced me to make one change in my apartment, Patrick insisted I buy a VCR so he could record football games. He loved the Bears more than me and wanted to see every game they televised, so I purchased a VCR at Walmart for $130 and commented to him how much the prices had dropped since they started making them in Korea. Once the cheap brands appeared you could find them on sale now for under $100, but sometimes the really cheap brands didn't last too long, maybe a year. I think Patrick wanted to rent some gay porno tapes from Blockbuster.
I kidded with him, I've told him several times before that I would blow him any time on a day off. All he had to do was ask. I've never said no to a boner pointed at me.
I got a hint from my mother that they would pay for my master's degree as a Christmas gift this year, that made me so happy I cried at their kitchen table, which made her cry too. It's been years since I last hugged my mom. Like I told Patrick I had no idea how much they're worth but if I had to guess it was probably at least ten million and possibly as high as seventy. They lived very simple lives, not at all like people with money. I wasn't sure if mom even knew how much they were worth, but most of their wealth was tied up in the business.
That night I had a long talk with Patrick about going back to school and what that meant for us as a couple and it would take two days a week from my life. It would be like working five days a week instead of three. He said he fully supported my goal.
That evening when we were done eating he got up first and carried our stuff to the sink. I turned my chair sideways and grabbed his arm and yanked him over near me and told him to open his pants. He reached down and unbuttoned his jeans and unzipped them and spread them and stood there. I slide them down a little, just enough to clear his nuts and took him in my mouth. In anticipation of what he suspected was coming he was half hard by then.
I took him in my mouth seated beside the table, he ran his fingers into my hair and slowly humped my face. Patrick didn't last long, maybe three minutes and he started to moan and tightened his fingers in my hair so he grabbed thick clumps of hair.
Another minute and he was starting to bump his lower belly into my face and warned me it was coming soon, but I was ready to swallow. My only wish was his come was thinner and not thick like sour cream, I liked him with a consistency more like Elmer's Glue.
I knew it was about to find out how well hydrated he was when he let go of my hair and put his hands behind my head and pressed hard against my face, so I pushed back and on my lower lip I felt his dick twitch.
He didn't come a lot, so he must have done it in the bathroom during the day and not told me.
Like always, he got emotional and lifted me off his dick, our mouths came together and we shared his seed between our mouths. He moaned then too and whispered that he loved me, I whispered it back, then drew the word LOVE with my fingertip on his back.
Contact the author: borischenaz gmail
My other books on Nifty.org include: Response Team, Crossing Panama, and Playing with Fire. Other previous titles will return over time as new versions can be written.