Lair Davis (Our Man in Costa Rica)

My Four Loves

If I were a non-gay person, I supposed I would have been married four times. That is how many lovers with whom I have lived for extended periods.

Jim, Valentin, Nick, Roberto.

Jim was first. I loved him dearly, but he exasperated me. I was a young theater director who was “going places,” and Jim appeared to have no ambition whatsoever. He was a hustler living with an older man when we first met. He gave up that life for me.

Jim was quite talented, but didn’t really have much interest in using his creativity. He dabbled a bit in this and that, but he was perfectly happy working at a fastfood outlet and then coming home to cook and clean house for me. I wanted him to be as motivated and driven as I.

I didn’t know (because he didn’t let me know) that he had a very fragile heart that doctors were quite certain would give out quite soon. Jim didn’t live for the future because he knew he had no future.

I didn’t know, so I kicked him out.  I felt he was wasting his life — and my time.

I kicked him out, and one month later he died.

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I fell in love with Valentin in Uijongbu, Korea, where we were stationed with I Corps. I was organizing entertainment for the troops, and he came to auditions. He won a role and my heart.

Val was from Germany but had lived in Detroit for a few years. The US Army had drafted him, with the promise that after he had served his time, he would be put on the fast track to citizenship.

I cast him as in a production of A Thurber Carnival. I can still hear his Germany accent as he narrated, “Once upon a summer morning, a man looked up from his schkerrrrrambled eggs to see a unicorn in the garden …”

After we got out of the Army (at the same time, as the goddess designed it), we settled in Carmel, California, where I worked at the Golden Bough Playhouse while Val taught school. We had an wonderful life together there, but he was homesick.

“I’m German,” he would whine. “I miss my homeland. I need to go home.”

He wanted me to go. I needed to stay here.

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Nick and I met in Madison, Wisconsin. I had turned into a hippy by this time, but had decided to leave my life of rock and roll and start a new theater company — a gay theater company. Nick was a poet and a playwright.

After a couple of seasons, he and I left the cold climate of Wisconsin for balmy San Diego. He had never been to California. I wanted to show him the good life.

Life was very good for quite a few years. Then, Nick and I (and a couple of other friends) established a gay newspaper, the San Diego Gayzette. I became the managing editor. Nick, the poet, became an occasional staff writer. I was gregarious and made lots of friends. Nick was reticent and resentful. I became a big fish in the little pond of gay San Diego. (That pond is not so small anymore.)

Nick became the editor’s “wife” — and he didn’t like it one bit.

It is hard to remember the many years Nick and I spent together happily because those final three years were hell. Neither of us wanted to do the “dirty deed” of leaving the other. (We had made promises, you see.) So both of us took on the task of trying to make the other so miserable that HE would leave.

I won. One day I came home to the letter. Nick had gone to New York City. I stayed in San Diego another 15 years.

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If someone had asked me in 1994 what the perfect lover for me would be like, I would have described Roberto. I was 53, and he had just arrived (illegally) in San Diego from Mexico — and HE picked ME up in a bar. The next morning, he announced that he was going out to find a job because he had changed his plans. Rather than go to Los Angeles, he intended to stay in San Diego with me. He made it quite clear that I was not to support him financially in any way.

He got dressed, went to the YMCA where he was staying, changed clothes and did just that: went to work in a Chinese restaurant washing dishes and mopping floors. Then he would come back to my place every evening after ten hours of backbreaking labor and cook dinner for me, bathe me and make such love to me that I thought I had died and gone to homo heaven. Although it was absurd, because I made so much more money than he, Roberto absolutely insisted on paying half the rent and buying half the groceries. He knew that friends would think that he was being “kept” by me, and he was determined to prove that was not so. It never was.

Why is it that after much too short a time I came to look forward to when Roberto was not at home. When I had my privacy? When I could be alone with myself? How could I not be happy with the perfect mate?

I am not one for too much self-analysis, I’m afraid, so I will leave that up to you.

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Four “marriages.” “Four-time loser.”

Loser?  Loser?  No!  Not in any way!  I have been a winner in the “love” department. I loved all four of them. I was lucky to have them in my life.

I am 63 now. I do not wish I had a lover. Been there. Done that.

Jim, Valentin, Nick, Roberto.  They were plenty for me!

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