Knowing Dave

I don't remember how I met Dave: our friendship just kind of grew naturally. One minute he was just one of a few guys I chatted to on my corridor at work, the next we were finding ourselves regularly sitting together in conversation in the pub on Friday evenings.

The more I got to know him, the more I liked him. He was funny in an intelligent way and, unlike most of the men in our workplace, seemed open and honest. I found it especially endearing – perhaps even cute – that he tended to get a little nervous in social situations: he never seemed sure what to do with his hands and laughed longer than would be natural as if afraid of a leaving a silence.

Despite his slightly rough appearance and the guys he hung around with, it became quickly clear that Dave wasn't your average straight lad. He made jokes about getting pissed and getting laid, but always seemed to be the one who had walked home on his own at the end of the night. And he seemed to like to stay in as often as he came out. During those first few weeks of getting to know him, I'd often ask one of his mates where he was in the pub after work and they'd laugh and say something like, "Knowing Dave, he's probably at home reading something by fucking Einstein or someone." And they'd laugh and I'd have to pretend to.

He was the guy who first introduced me to the internet: that will give you an idea of how long ago this was. Until Dave showed me Netscape, I'd thought of the internet as being a thing of DOS-based chat programs and Telnet services. The first time I saw a webpage, with colour and graphics, I was flabbergasted. It was a website about Newcastle United – Dave's team – and it had a photo of former-player Alex Shearer on it.

I said, "That's on the internet?"

Dave grinned. He liked showing off his new toy. "Yeah. And you can press on the blue words to go to pages on other stuff."

He showed me some other sites he'd found. One was about the formation of black holes; the other about the supposed reality of time travel. These were, he explained rather sheepishly like he was confessing to being a cross-dresser, both interests of his.

"I'm a closet anorak. Don't out me," he grinned.

I smiled and liked him a bit more. Most people thought he was thick because he had a Northern accent and went out on the pull with the rest of the lads. He could eat curry and throw up with the best of them. But he had depths he didn't want most people to see.

I asked, "Have you a computer at home?"

He shook his head. "Not yet. I'm trying to save up... at the minute I just look at this stuff in my lunch hour and," he smirked, "when no-one's watching."

He showed me some other sites on science fiction, which we were both into, and I was hooked.

Then he said, "If anyone looks over my shoulder, I always have a page open I can flick onto quickly... like the Newcastle United one... or... this..."

He opened up a page on what looked like the Playboy site. Remember, these were the days before the regulation of the internet in the workplace.

He grinned. "Guys in this office would freak out if they saw me looking at a page on 'doctor Who' or 'Sapphire and Steel'. But put a naked girl on the screen and they'll just wolf whistle, make a joke about me going blind or something, and then piss off..."

I remember that I had made it clear, at a fairly early stage, that I'm gay and that Dave had, in turn, made his acceptance of that fact equally clear. He was straight – though hopelessly inept and unsuccessful in that role – and I was gay: what more was there to say?

We had started going out more and more. We'd meet up in the pub after work among the crowd of other people, and then slink off together to a quiet table in the corner and talk together for hours.

He told me about a novel he was planning on writing. It was about a group of aliens on some distant planet monitoring transmissions which had travelled through space from Earth. The story revolved around their attempts to communicate with us but the best part, as far as I was concerned, was his ideas on how they would struggle to understand things we, as humans, take for granted.

"Like music," he had said, grinning over the top of his pint which he held in front of his mouth, intending to take a drink but too caught up in what he was saying to do so. "I mean, imagine how an alien race would view our enjoyment of music. When you strip it down, music's just a load of tones of different wavelengths put together in such a way that we humans find it pleasant.

"But to alien ears, it might sound like a cacophony of noise, or be totally soundless... they might have no concept of how sounds can be put together in harmonies. You can imagine them staring at a transmission of people playing instruments in an orchestra. Looking at each other and thinking, 'What the fuck are they doing now...?!'"

He was the ideal companion to share time in a pub with and to get quietly drunk with. He always had interesting angles on things, unusual ways of perceiving the ordinary, and I liked to fuel his mental wanderings by suggesting different scenarios and possibilities.

I'd said, staggering out of the pub one night, "What do you think your aliens would make of gay sex?"

He smiled. "I never thought of that." Then, after a few seconds thought: "Actually, they might have just one gender so even straight sex would freak them out."

I liked that idea. I said, "Imagine them being faced with idea of one human putting a part of his body inside another human... and wiggling it around for twenty minutes or so... supposedly for fun..." 

He laughed. "And then of them finding out which part gay guys push their knobs into... Jesus, how the hell would they come to terms with that...!"

About a month after we'd started chatting on a regular basis, and following a meandering Friday night chat at our corner table, he came around to my flat, picking up an eight-pack of cans from the off licence at the end of my road, to watch a couple of my old seventies sci-fi videos.

I joked, "Guys will start talking about you... saying I'm leading you off the straight and narrow..."

He grinned but shook his head. "Naah..."

"You know what guys are like... especially some of the twats we work with..."

He kept shaking his head. "They know I'm straight. And they're smart enough to know a guy can't just decide to change his sexuality..."

I kept teasing him. "They might think... you know... because you haven't had a girl in so long..."

He laughed loudly. "Fuck off, Wes! Even if I haven't they know I'm not that desperate..."

Now I laughed. "Why, thank you, Dave... nice to know I'm regarded as the ultimate last resort..."

"No... you know what I'm saying... if I was gay then you'd be my type exactly... but I'm not, and so no amount of desperation is gonna make us get together... I mean, there'd be absolutely no sexual desire on my side so it just wouldn't happen..."

I smiled and nodded and realised I felt a little disappointed. I hadn't deliberately raised the issue to hear his opinion on it, but now that I had, his rejection made it clear to me that I had, perhaps subconsciously, been speculating on the possibility of something happening between us.

Maybe he saw me looking a little hurt, because he added, "I guess we could put you in a long blond wig... but... naah... that wouldn't work... you've too much stubble..."

I was going to say something about me being more than willing to shave it off but thought that might put a slightly uncomfortable edge on what had clearly been a half-hearted humorous remark. So I just laughed and said, "Yeah, when you're kissing someone with stubble, you're gonna be aware that it's a guy no matter how good the wig is..."

And that's where we left for a few weeks.

Our meetings in the pub continued, and he kept coming around to my flat two or three times a week to watch videos. Then we started going to a sandwich bar for lunch together and I found that, knowing I'd see him in the middle of the day, made my mornings go faster.

He obviously did too. He'd keep saying things like, "We've got to keep doing this... it's really good to get out that place at lunch time..."

And I'd say, "But what about the internet... the sites you were looking at..."

And he'd come back with something about the guys in his office doing his head in or the fresh air doing him good. Then, "But if you don't want to... I mean, we could stay at work if you want..."

And I'd laugh and say, "No way."

After a couple of weeks he admitted that some of the guys he worked with had made comments about the two of us being "bum boys".

He had seemed so convinced that they wouldn't be derisive about our friendship that I was a little surprised they had. I said, "What did you say?"

He grinned. "I just nodded. Said we'd gone halves on a blond wig and a tub of Vaseline..."

"And what did they say?"

"They just kept making stupid jokes until I pointed out that in assuming a straight guy is going to have sex with a gay guy just because there aren't any girls giving him a second look, they were proving how unstable their own sexualities are..."

"How did they take that?"

He laughed. "I don't think they knew what the fuck I was talking about. It sounded intelligent so, through force of habit, they left well alone..."

A couple of nights later he came around to my flat to return a book on the way home from his weekly football game. It was something by Paul Davies; something on the formation of the universe, I think.

I was amazed at how good he looked in his dirty football strip and how attractive I found the sweaty, earthy smell of him. His legs were hairy and muscular and his biceps looked as thick as his calves. His face was red and he had dried blood above his right eyebrow from where he'd collided with someone during the game.

And he just walked in, smiling his greetings and saying something about the book; quoting a part of it that had really interested him.

Brains and brawn combined magnificently, right there in my hallway.

All I could do was gape at him, wide-eyed, and to try not to look like I was drooling.

He took my reaction to mean I found him a little ridiculous.

He said, “Yeah… I know, I know… I haven’t really got the build for it… but it gets me a bit of a runaround once a week…”

It was true that he was a little short and probably not as well-toned as he would have liked, but the strip looked fantastic on him. The shirt clung to his large firm chest and was unbuttoned low enough for me to see a tangle of dark thick hair sprouting from it. The shorts were tight and flimsy and showed off a bulge between his legs I’d noticed before on frequent occasions but had always dismissed as off limits.