joel Laverdure stirred my soul, even though I knew him only briefly, and I am terribly grateful.  I can return there still, finding the place because he left a precious mark.  Joel is dead, but the one he stirred is moved forever. 

Apparently, this story will be told backwards, and that's not so bad a way.  He died at the age of twenty, in a car crash in Lancaster, Massachusetts.  Two cars speeding, collided without skid marks at exactly the center of the road on a gentle curve shortly after midnight.  Several bodies came to rest halfway through each car's windshield, and all of them were incinerated by the fire which engulfed the crash.  My friend Donald was an EMT with whom I worked, and he arrived as part of Lancaster's volunteer ambulance squad, hoping to help injured accident victims, until he saw the flames.  Donald was unable to recount the event, even a month later, without crying right out loud. 

 i've never made love with somebody I really loved, and I've been wondering what it would be like," Joel said to me as we sat in his driveway late one summer night, more than twenty years ago.  I had brought him to his house in my 1970 Ford Galaxy 500, but he didn't get out.  Instead, we drove up Smith Road, an unpaved deserted fire road that led from my hometown, Northboro, through thick woods and over a high hill to Joel's hometown, Berlin.  Joel and I never got all the way home that night, not together.  But that's OK because Joel opened his heart to me completely, and that's what love is, really.  Love is neither gay nor straight, love is what Joel gave to me. 

Excuse me for a moment, I'm sorry to interrupt the story.  But I can scarcely believe that this was me, my life, and that this was Joel—with whom I was in love—saying those things to me.  The stirring just doesn't stop.

Joel's house was immense; the kitchen alone, vast; his siblings numbered around a dozen.  The place was full of love and passion, singing often, huge and generous meals, yet his parents didn't even speak to one another.  I met his mother when Joel took me with him to help her do her paper-route.  He explained that's the only way she could have spending money, because his father wouldn't give her any.

From time to time Joel ran away from home, mostly in his early teens, and once later, when he was 17.  His sister-in-law, Ellen called me to see if Joel was with me.  There had been an argument, she said, and he was gone.  Please call her if I hear from him, she asked.  I drove around for hours that night, in a vain hope that I might find him, not for his good but for my own; I wanted his injured soul to be companion to mine.  We had known each other only a couple months then, but I longed to be the one he would turn to in his time of trouble.  I truly envied him for his soul, and for the ability it gave him to open up completely, and love people as freely and generously as he did.  I wished he had called me, because I was dying to be loved, but no matter where I drove on the backroads of Berlin, Bolton, Lancaster and Clinton, I could not find that hurting boy.  And on the radio, Leo Sayer sang 'When I Need You' over and over again.  Tears rolled down my face for the absence of something I could not find, something I had never known, something I did not understand; and for someone I hardly knew, yet for whom I ached to hold and love. 

I realized, just today, that the hurting boy I looked for that night, who I thought was Joel, was really me.

 joel and I became fast friends, later on.  I would massage his neck and shoulders while he sat on a chair in his kitchen, and I pretended I was not aroused.  He told me later he always knew.  One night I slept over his house, and he wanted to sleep on the couch so I could have his bed, upstairs somewhere in that big house filled with people I did not know.  That was not for me, and I insisted on the couch; I had hoped he'd let me sleep with him in his bed, but somewhat I prevailed:  He felt bad about giving me the couch, and leaving me downstairs alone, so he spent the night with me there, only he stayed on the couch, and I laid on the floor beside him, holding his hand all night, and it was perfect that way.  I kissed his hand before we slept, he smiled, and his eyes reached right into my soul and loved me.  We were never lovers sexually, but we were lovers in every other way, and those ways are stirring most of all. 

I remember how we argued, and how desperately lonely I became when I stayed away from him once for a week, because we fought too much.  He had missed me, too, and he suggested we go on a short trip together.  It was a trip to visit places and people familiar to him, but I was not eager for such a trip.  In fact I was unwilling to go with him to places he had been, and be introduced to people he had known, as all the while I tried to execute a covert love affair, and keep concealed a giant passion, right in front of them, and within inches of him the whole time.  But Joel was stubborn.  I didn't want to argue and I didn't want to go.  But more than either of those things, I did not want to be away from him again.  So we planned the trip.  Isn't that what lovers are supposed to do; make us push what we think are our limits, make us let go of our secure illusions as we reach out to hold the one our heart desires?  Lovers draw us out of ourselves and into other worlds.  And so Joel did for me. 

If now he said, "Come to Mars with me," I would instantly go.  I miss him so...  I could hardly believe during our daytrip how opposed to it I had been, and by the time we got home, I would admit having had only mild reservations before hand, because I absolutely loved that trip I took with Joel.  But I came back holding in my heart two opposing truths that I knew were going to break it in two.  This friend would never be mine, all mine, a lover for me.  And I would never, ever, from that day on, be able to stop loving him, stop wanting him, or ever stop needing him.  I knew I'd never forget him, and that I'd soon have a jagged fault-line across my quaking heart as proof.  That pain is precious to me now; the evidence in me of Joel. 

 we went to Hartford, a place to which he'd run away years before.  He showed me the spot in the woods where he had made a campsite.  He strode about the place like in a trance, grasping at faint moments from a precious past, like trying to snatch butterflies from flight.  He told me of the events immediately before he fled to the woods; the seedy bar, the go-between who pointed out the older man, the painful sex.  Joel had been fifteen.  I asked about the reason he left home in the first place, but he would not revisit there, not on this trip, and as things turned out, never. 

We walked in the soft ashes of the past, and nearly every step brought up a puff of wispy memory; a story, a person, an event.  He led me on through both sides of Hartford, and the side we found richest for us that day was the poor side.  There we found the fundamentalist preacher and his family, who had taken Joel in, despite their abject poverty, and cared for him after he left the campsite.  Even at the age of 19, I was skeptical of bible-thumping preachers.  But this one didn't fit the mold, and I was overwhelmed by the genuine love and kindness expressed by his wife and he.  Even the presence of their four young kids did not cure my reluctance to leave these friends of Joel. 

He had so many others he wanted to visit, but he only found a few.  These were not people who kept itineraries, or whose names were in the phone book.  Some had no real address, only likely locales; a bar maybe, or a diner where somebody worked who used to know the person Joel was trying to find.  At most of the places we went to find his friends, the people regarded Joel with cool suspicion, or maybe it was just unfriendly curiosity.  Joel was a very handsome young man, and unusually open and accessible to everybody.  Some I'm sure considered it an act, but others knew it for what it was.  Joel was an undefended innocent, and in this social world—like in wilderness but with subtlety—such a discovery inspires either a nurturing response, or predation.  No wonder a trolling chicken-hawk had seized him within hours of his arrival. 

Some of the people we encountered did remember Joel from years before, and were reluctant to engage him because his needful tenderness was painful to see close up.  I learned from Joel that most everyone is good and kind, but few are brave.  Most people hide their hearts, and hide from others' hearts, and most people never knew the astounding joy and stunning agony of loving Joel. 

 at an autobody place, Joel asked the whereabouts of Jesse, an 18 year old who might have worked there once, or had family there.  Jesse had shared Joel's homelessness nearly two years before, and they had become friends.  Joel would never hide his love for a friend; he never tried to manipulate with love, and he never withheld love.  Some people did not know what to do with the way Joel rushed in with eager fearless innocence and love, and many times I saw Joel hurt when his affections were ignored or rebuffed by people scared of love.  When we finally found Jesse, I worried that he would dismiss Joel as unremembered or insignificant.  At first, Jesse looked at Joel suspiciously, not like he didn't recognize him, but more like he didn't trust what appeared on the surface. 

Jesse was 18 but looked younger because of his small frame.  He had long blond hair, was married and had a baby.  He was doing drugs, but was sharp enough to know that this person returning from his past might be a real friend, not the usual 'friend' looking to get something from him.  For a few moments things were undecided, Joel started looking hurt, and I started wishing we weren't there at all.  But finally, Jesse concluded this friendly come-on was the real thing—it was the same Joel, just as innocent and sincere as Jesse remembered him.  Sometimes you never really know a friend until they go away, and then come back.  Sometimes that's the only way you know.  Jesse's youthful face, which betrayed wisdom beyond its years, now broke into a beaming smile, and their friendship had come home. 

I remember Jesse nodding-off in an opiated daze, and another young man arriving with pot.  I was myself a teenager reluctantly employed, but these reckless lifestyles scared me, even as they fascinated me.  Their primary occupation seemed to be the acquisition and consumption of marijuana, cocaine and heroin, which I observed without a judgement, good or bad.  What scared me was the complete disorder.  This child and his child-wife raising an infant; the job Jesse might have gone to that morning, but didn't; the emotional conflicts between these young parents and their own parents, and between Jesse and his wife; and the quiet excommunication of Jesse from reality and from his own life, which scared me most of all because it most resembled me.  But my emotional abscence seemed worse to me, for it could not be cured by abstinence from drugs. 

Joel knew this about me, he saw through my shivering heart's dissemblance of its deep fear, and that's why he loved me.  Perhaps he pitied me, but I doubt it.  Joel loved me because it was his nature; his instinct was to love wherever he touched another soul. 

 and as I went through it, I sensed this visit to the Hartford of Joel's past was a rare journey right through the very hearts of his friends, where Joel could find his way so easily, but where I, without him, would never be able to go again.  That day with Joel was, for me, a priceless visitation. 

We seldom see ourselves—or those we love—illumined by the perspective of time; it is just too painful, even in the silent reflection of our own hearts, to look back and realize that we were indeed that foolish, and that we did behave at times like selfish children.  Like children, we sometimes refuse to believe that we will ever regret anything, even after we are not children anymore.  And so I am at the hardest part of this reminiscence.  If I am going to trust any memory or posess any truth from my past, then the light I have shined into these precious memories must reveal the ugliness as well as the beauty.  I must not only tell of Joel's face when I made his heart light; his great smile, his sparkling eyes and his loud laugh.  I must also tell of his visible pain when I dismissed our friendship as insignificant as he tried to share with me the joy of a new love in his life. 

 hey, Joe," he called to me as I came down the stairs and into the basement of St. Joseph's Church in Berlin.  I had managed to avoid him all through Mass, because I thought that would be easier.  Joel had been away and we'd had little contact for months, but I'd heard he was engaged to be married, and on that Palm Sunday he'd brought his fiance with him to church.  I could have fled, I would have made a clean getaway after Mass, except for this; truly in my deepest heart I wanted to see him again.  It is never easier to deny what's in your heart, no matter how much it hurts because your heart will always find a way to confront you with your truth.  You cannot avoid your own heart. 

"Hi."  I was terse.  I smiled at her as Joel introduced her to me.  She was innocent.  My raging ambivalence was toward Joel, not her.  'I loved him,' I thought to myself angrily, 'and he didn't love me back... (not the way I'd wanted) and now he expects me to be happy about him loving someone else?!'  And even as I stood there, acting cold and uncaring, I felt that goddamn love for him, right there under my surface, three feet from his face.  I felt waves of affection for this sweet young man crash against a wall I'd built for reasons I had no way of understanding on that warm April day, only eight months before his death. 

He could never hide his hurt, it was always obvious in his eyes and never an affectation.  I always envied his innocent vulnerability, and I used it that day to hurt him.  His smile dried up in my arid bitterness.  Afterward, I was supposed to feel self-satisfied, but all I felt were the waves of my love for him fall, spent at the foot of walls inside my heart, as they drained away and began their long sad recession into memory.  It was the last time I saw Joel. 

 can't you call him?" my friend Stephanie said to me.  When I was halfway through writing this journal entry, I told her I never knew I loved Joel so much, until I started writing about him here.  And when I told her he was dead, it was as if she should have known already; like, how else could I feel these things, if he were not gone?—that's when I realized these feelings are only safe to visit now, because I cannot fuck it up again.  I cannot call Joel, and raise again storms of love I cannot navigate, or cause another wreck which would be more than my capacity to grieve.  And I can never hurt him again.  I have wept through the unearthing of these things, with a timid joy, and a quiet sense of peace.  And now I have again the parts of me that Joel touched, parts which I had lost. 

It has been eighteen years and 4 months since I stood in St. Joseph's Church, at Joel's funeral, and could not cry—not like this, not like I am now.  The pain would have consumed me then, or I thought it would, and so I shut it off.  Who knows what may have changed, maybe I needed the distance of two decades to realize that it is not dangerous to have your heart broken, it only hurts.  Or maybe the recent threats to my mortality compelled me to reclaim these sorrows so as not to lose the tender love inside them.  I am not sure of anything but these two; that every bit—including all the pain—of my experience with Joel is forever precious to me now, and that today, at this very moment as I write, his love heals me. 

Thank you, Joel.  I love you. 

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