Dear Sue,

This morning, I saw your boyfriend. He was wearing one of those fake leather jackets, worn open, with his work uniform unkempt and unbuttoned underneath, showing his wrinkly t-shirt. He was chinless and balding. He could be Santa with the right beard. Of course, I have always seen your boyfriends outside of java joints and there he was outside of Joe's this morning looking like you'd already ravaged him.

I got a double mocha this morning and while I was standing waiting for my coffee from the latest example of bohemian 18-22 year olds in the area -- the flaming gay man with the black curly hair just got me off on this brain tangent, remembering the boytoy we hooked Eric up with, who you wanted so badly to be straight because damn, he was cute! You were shattered when I talked to him and discovered what I believed all along, that he was very very homosexual.

I wonder how things turned out for him...if he avoided contracting AIDS because he was kind of slutty and not always careful. I sure as hell hope so. I remember talking to Eric a year or two back and hearing that a couple he'd known and introduced me to, were both dying from AIDS -- Baby was one of the names and then I remembered Dan Foster, the guy next door who did die from AIDS and how he let us be part of his life and his death. I'll never forget as long as I live how he cried when I hugged him because everyone had been afraid to touch him and I wasn't afraid and it had been so long since he'd been touched that he burst into tears. I remember when he came to my poetry reading and that you'd given me the "fuck me now" black dress, so I could be a bit Bohemian because afterall it was a poetry reading in a coffee shop. He'd been able to sit through my reading and we sat through a few more and he just couldn't hack it any more because it hurt for him to be up for too long. I remember offering to share a soda with him and him freaking out that he might give me his disease through saliva because the research was so sketchy still and he didn't want to take any chances and how sobering that felt.

Remember Mr. Kennedy whose poetry was all about fucking his girlfriend and was so hideous that we had to stifle laughter as he screamed it? I still have the limericks we wrote that made fun of him in one of my books.

I will never forget how we found out about Dan. He simply wasn't at the halfway house any more. We weren't family, so they wouldn't tell us anything other than Dan wasn't there to visit. We checked the hospital and he wasn't there either. We both knew he'd gone.

Sometimes, being an adult is hard. I feel odd walking into my java shop in my suit and hose. I want to scream at all those kids dressed in black with purple hair reading poetry,"This isn't really me! I am just as Bohemian as you!" Then, I add sarcastically,"Yeah, and look how I turned out. Married to an engineer, two kids, and a suit job." I have a hard time reconciling my old life with my new life, as the married computer nerd domestic goddess meets the Bohemian poetry writing political activist ex-prostitute.

Anyway, I saw your boyfriend today and thought of you over mocha.

Love,
RN Ruby