As Miracles Go

The average life expectancy for American males is approximately 76 years old; although the statistics are all over the map, ranging from 74.1 to 78.3, factoring in such things as health and lifestyle. In relation to the homosexual lifestyle, gay American men initially expect their life to last no longer than about the age of 30, or so they hope, because 30 is the new 90. Well, that’s my theory, anyway. 

My name is Tommy Wylie. I’m a homosexual American male. I recently turned 40 years old, reaching over half my statistical life expectancy of 76, and obliterating my own once-perceived life expectancy of 30 years old.

“I’ll be lucky if I see the age of 30,” I told my friend, Marie, at our high school graduation ceremony.
I believed it at the time not because I was some dirty whore destined to contract a terminal disease or because I was the unfortunate victim of a hate crime, but more because like most young gay men, I aimed to be as good-looking and wanton in death as in my youthful life.

“He’s so striking and beautiful, it’s such a shame,” friends and family members would comment at the wake.

Now that I’ve outlived my own once-perceived mortality by a decade, I’ve decided to be cremated at death — absolutely no wake will be scheduled. “Damn, they sure caked on the makeup, didn’t they?”
I was conceived, rather unexpectedly, in the late 1960s — my parents’ second offspring. “There’s absolutely no way you’ll have another child,” the physician told my parents after my brother’s birth, a year and 10 months earlier. I wasn’t a mistake, per se, as my parents were on an adoption waiting list. They wanted another child, and apparently they were horny. I guess I was a miracle baby, in a way.

As miracles go, though, I was lacking that certain divinity, that untarnishable glow surrounding my being like that of a silkscreened baby Jesus. I was constantly ill in infancy, unable to hold down any type of nourishment — I likely could have been the youngest Guinness World Record holder for bouts of projectile vomiting. When I was 7, my dad had rushed me to the the hospital, balled up in excruciating pain, in his blaze-orange International Scout, where I was diagnosed with extreme constipation — another possible category winner in the Guinness book: The Youngest Person with an Elderly Affliction. A year later, my brother accidentally shot me in the forehead with a low-velocity, plastic-pellet BB gun while we were deer-hunting. He nicknamed me Bullseye.

Then, when I was 10, I was run down by a bicyclist while walking home from Sunday school. I’m not certain that’s why my family stopped attending church, but at the time it seemed a just reason to me.

My father moved us from El Paso, Texas (The Land of Fire-Ants) to Salt Lake City, Utah (The Land of Holy Garments), when I was 11 years old, with a newly reestablished lack of divinity. “When people in Utah ask you if you’re a Mormon, tell them you’re a Texan,” my father instructed my brother and me.

I’ve lived in Utah mostly ever since, less the two short-term relocations to Seattle and Farmington, New Mexico. The first, Farmington (which wasn’t thoroughly thought out, as the town is apparently a dumping ground for registered sex offenders), was supposed to be a journey of self-discovery. Sufficed to say I discovered I was freaked out and ran screaming all the way back to Utah. The second, Seattle, was an awkward attempt to lead a “normal” life with a girl that lasted only three months. The experience was so traumatizing — we had sex — I came out of the closet at 23.

My coming-out party — an event I choose to remember as a sophisticated Texas-themed Cotillion — began with me blubbering incoherently to my mother, “I’m gay!” and speeding off to The Deerhunter, the only gay bar I knew about at the time. I was fawned over the entire evening, gifted with handfuls of “free-beer” tokens, usually handed to me with a conspicuous palm-tickling. It was so damn romantic.

By last call my sexual inhibition was as far north of my southern region as Greenland is to the Equator, and so I rendezvoused to the wooded area of Memory Grove with Daniel, a strikingly handsome man with a tight swimmer’s body, and his “best friend” (I can remember neither his name or his features). It was my first threesome, of sorts, if you count hanging back nervously gawking at “best friends” undress, fondle and relieve each other.

That experience, inadvertently, I believe, has led most of my sexual encounters to occur outdoors, in public, or at the very least, in the backseat of a car. OK, maybe I am a dirty whore! But still a miracle.
I’ve turned 40 years old, against all odds. Yes, the dramatic is one of my strong suits. According to the statistics, I have approximately 35.7999 years left to live — a feat, if you evaluate my history, will either be a miracle in itself or filled with many miraculous moments. Obviously, I’m leaning toward the latter.