Give My Apologies to Guam

It was some years after my relationship to Tom ended that I learned Guamanian culture has a don't ask, don't tell, keep your private stuff private and don't embarrass anyone cultural policy. Tom was extremely respected there and they will no doubt be offended at me speaking of the many dirty secrets he had which I kept for years.

But I can't tell this tale without airing some of that and I hope when I'm done, other people will see him through my eyes as a better man than I appreciated when I knew him.

Tom was one of many children and his mother died when he was something like six years old, leaving him an orphan that the family passed around to different relatives to care for without ever anyone in particular taking full responsibility for him.

He once described it in ugly terms as being treated like slave labor while he was there and then abandoned by them, passed on to some other relative who did the same.

He was a Vietnam Vet.

I wasn't the first Doreen he knew. I halfway want to say his mother may have been named Doreen and I more firmly remember him saying he dated a woman named Doreen and broke up with her while he was in Vietnam which bothered him and he said he must have made the right decision because he lived. She was a distraction and he needed to focus on the war he was mired in while contemplating the Ten Commandments and where thou shalt not kill fit into his life and ethics as a Catholic soldier.

I was going by Michele at the time and he asked once if he could call me Doreen and I didn't know how to react to it nor why he was asking and I think I didn't really give him an answer but he dropped it, too polite to argue his case at the slightest evidence the question made me uncomfortable. I was very ill at the time and I don't know what I would have said if I had grasped why it mattered to him. I later felt bad that my illness interfered with this relatively small detail that probably mattered more to him than he wished to admit.

He married his first wife because she turned up pregnant. They didn't really love each other, yet he made sure she got an education and career even though the marriage produced four kids.

His second wife was much younger than him and I imagine people judged him for that, but she pursued him, not the other way around, and he again made sure she got an education and career while having three more kids.

His obituary indicates he had a wife, presumably his third, and twelve kids. I have two children and we spoke of having one together and I would joke that "I'm just going to tell people I always wanted ten kids." so I'm guessing some of those additional five are probably step children.

People these days, like to use polite terms like open relationship or polyamory for nonmonagamous situations. When Tom lived that way years before I met him, the term was swinger.

He didn't talk much about it. He knew I wouldn't really understand.

I thought he still lived that way and only later realized that probably wasn't true.

He introduced me to a few of his friends and he was mad if I hit it off with them and he was mad if I didn't. I was angry that I was going along with what he wanted and no matter what I did, he was pissed.

He told me once he was jealous and had never been jealous before to try to explain his behavior.

Seemingly unrelatedly, he once mentioned without much elaboration that he worked as a part-time sex therapist in conjunction with a local couples counselor.

I got along well with only one of his friends, someone seemingly best known by everyone for being hung. It was this man who told me Tom was nearly as hung as he was.

Years would go by before I managed to add two and two to get four. 

Tom wasn't a pervert introducing me to his wild lifestyle. He was someone with an uncommon professional skill set -- he knew how to fix someone like me who had been raped as a child and was afraid of being hurt again -- and chose to help me without telling me that was the goal.

And he did fix my problem in that regard and then never knew how to adequately explain his mixed feelings about the choices he made to help me.

Because he knew if he met me in person without addressing that, it would be an issue.

Even though I never once asked about his equipment as that wasn't relevant in my mind to anything of importance.

I don't typically ask how tall a man is either. He's as tall as he is and he's as hung as he is and neither of those are reasons to be intimate or emotionally attached.

I was treated like a sex object as a child and told it was my fault. I don't get involved with men for details of that sort and typically don't ask. I learn it more organically because if his height and the size of his junk are primary reasons to accept or reject a man, it's not much of a relationship. He's just a sex object to you.

I wasn't grandstanding about some abstract principle. I didn't DECIDE to not ask. It just never crossed my mind to do so.

Anyway, years later I realized I was taking too much credit for my own recovery and misjudging Tom as an asshole when his supposed "assholery" is why I put down a great deal of baggage about a great many things, fear of someone being hung being just one of them.

He's dead. My words can't really help nor harm HIM.

But it's been food for thought for some time concerning the thorny issue of trying to judge a person's character and essential goodness in this deeply fucked up world and it's a debt I can never repay to a man who deserved better than he got in life.