The White Room
The White Room
By Jeff Walsh
I’m lying in a bed in a white room, naked, as the sun’s rays caress my body on a lazy Sunday morning. I’m in that state where I can’t tell if I’m dreaming or awake. I look down at my sculpted abs (OK, it’s a dream) and at the naked man who is snuggled against my chest, his hair covering my right nipple, his right arm bisecting my torso. I can’t see his face, but I know who he is. He is the man I love, the man I never thought I would find. I lay still watching him gently rise and fall as I breathe, his smooth skin seemingly perfect under the unforgiving morning light. The white sheet we share haphazardly covers us, as his back seems to stretch forever into the white oblivion. I close my eyes and feel the warmth between us, a combination of the sun’s rays, our shared body heat and my sated longing for this moment. Of course, I know I’ll wake up soon. Alone. And I’ll never see his face.
It’s the same dream. Always. I’ve had it since I first acknowledged I was gay. “The White Room,” I call it. At first, it provided me solace as my entire world was changing. Then it became an ideal to strive for. Most days, that’s how I still view it. But, on occasion, I think it’s the standard I’ll never find, as well as the reason I won’t find it.
The image was an enormous help when I was first coming out, when my only gay community existed for $3.50 an hour on America Online (yes, it used to cost that much). It was the image that calmed me to sleep as the rest of my life seemed to be in turmoil. But, it wasn’t until the second guy I dated when reality and the White Room merged.
It was only one date, T.J. and I didn’t live near one another. He drove an hour to my apartment, and we spent upwards of three hours talking about our lives. I was just stunned this beautiful boy, who usually drew stares from everyone at the local gay bar, was in my house telling his stories to me. There’s a good chance T.J. never thought of it as a date, but I did. I had been attracted to him since I first saw him wearing a black T-shirt with either a Nirvana or Nine Inch Nails logo on it (this was at a time when that would have denoted progressive, not trendy). His black hair hung over his eyes as he spun on the dance floor, alone, oblivious — beautiful. I eventually found out his name, and became friends with him. We had similar taste in music and both felt trapped in Pennsylvania. Eventually, we would greet one another with a kiss and regularly plan to meet at the bar each weekend.
Long before I asked him out, I saw him at a party wearing some sort of white underwear with a black bondage “cage” of vinyl straps around his chest. I was transfixed. At one point, he slid the straps down around his waist, and unknowingly gave everyone — or everyone that was staring intently for the 1.5 seconds it happened — a view of his flaccid penis as it became hooked on one of the straps through his underwear. He also took my picture at the party, not knowing he was the reason I had attended.
On the night we finally had our date, we didn’t kiss. We just sat together on my love seat, talking. At the end of the date, we hugged for an eternity and he drove home. That night, I remember thinking, “Maybe T.J. is the person in the White Room.” And in that moment, when I pictured the White Room, the hair of the naked person in bed with me resembled T.J.’s hair, and was attached to T.J.’s waifish body that I had seen barely dressed at the party.
It seemed a natural thing to do. If you have an ideal and you’re trying to find someone ideal, plug them into the “room” and see if they fit. It’s not scientific, but what little I knew about T.J. made him feel right in the White Room. That, I would soon find out, would rarely be the case.
Before long, the White Room became very strict. After talking to someone for a few minutes, I would know they weren’t “white” for me. I used the room to rule out men faster than a size queen at a circle jerk. Too short, too butch, those eyes, that hair. And while other people I knew would be dating, I stayed home alone or went out with friends. If I already determined a guy couldn’t get in the room, why bother with dinner?
Then I met Jeremy. We were friends first before we were ever… well, we never were more than friends. But there was drama. I had talked to him online briefly before we agreed to attend a Pavement concert together in Philadelphia, which was two hours away from both our cities in opposite directions. We got a hotel room. Two beds. Two unmade beds in the morning. No sex. No drama.
Several months later, Jeremy traveled to my hometown to attend a Natalie Merchant concert. That’s when the drama began. We had always been friends, nothing more. But that visit played out like a date. Flowers, cuddling, dinner, concert, hot tub, kissing. But, in the end, it still boiled down to two beds. Two unmade beds in the morning. No sex.
After he left, I wanted a boyfriend. It wasn’t a new feeling, but he lit the fire back up. I believe in things happening at the wrong time, so I had intentionally been removing myself from the local gay scene in preparation for my move to California. If I hadn’t found a boyfriend in three years of being out and about, the logic was that I didn’t need one now that I had a plane ticket.
Thinking about Jeremy opened me up to feelings I had been trying to suppress. I wish I had a boyfriend like Jeremy, I initially thought. But, Jeremy was single. Jeremy also lived in California and was only attending school on the east coast. He planned to live in California after graduation in a few short months. As a computer geek, the odds of him working in Silicon Valley were good, which means he would be near me in San Francisco. It didn’t take long before I wanted Jeremy as my boyfriend. We’d both be in California. We both got along. We were both single. Why wasn’t this as obvious to Jeremy as it was to me?
Being an emotional exhibitionist, I told Jeremy all of this, and it made for a few odd meetings afterward, none of which ended with us sleeping together. My most surreal Jeremy moment did happen in his bedroom, though. One night in his apartment, we slow-danced for four slow songs in his bedroom, the last of which was “One” by U2, which was the integral song during my coming out a few years earlier. We danced, kissed lightly, held each other tight and, for once, I felt like Molly Ringwald in all of the John Hughes movies of the mid-1980s. Only this time, I was the girl who got the cute guy at the end of the movie, and not her nerdy asexual friend with the sarcastic one-liners.
This, of course, thrusted Jeremy into the White Room. When I was in the White Room, it was always him, but I still couldn’t see his face. I suffered through Jeremy seeing other people while still keeping him locked in my dream like some bad gay version of “Misery.” In the dream, though, Jeremy wanted to be there. It was just in real life that I couldn’t make it happen.
Eventually, Jeremy and I came to terms with our relationship. We work well together as friends, and that’s where it remains. The man in the White Room changed back to the mysterious figure I don’t know. Although, yes, on occasion, I think he looks like Jeremy again, but that usually happens about the same time I get an idea to write a play about a character in his 30s who realized he let the love of his life get away and he desperately tries to win back my, err, I mean, the other main character’s love.
So, now, I stand at a crucial point in my life. I’m still single, and I still have my White Room. I just don’t know if I want to keep it. I realize that the White Room could be seen as a way for me to justify my ideal, but I don’t use it that way. There are no pre-determined characteristics of the person in the White Room other than mutual, true love. And hair, if you want to get technical, which admittedly would eliminate the sizable niche of gay, buzzed clones.
Part of me is worried that if I abandon the White Room, assuming I can, I will be settling for less. But a lot of times, I think I need to get rid of the White Room to let someone get close enough to find love.
But, most of all, I’m just waiting for a guy who can make me feel like Molly Ringwald again.
