Daddy Venison

The stranger who broke me

I looked at him, and I thought "I just can't do this anymore".

His kindness and gentle nature. His full but neatly trimmed beard. His wide, open face, etched with benign curiosity. His mixture of friendliness and slight diffidence. His hairy legs, as he wandered across the living room barefoot in grey cotton shorts. (The heat from Rian's crypto rigs meant the apartment was always too warm.) He was so... unassuming.

Three hours later, he left. I can't claim to know him. And if I see him again, he might not even remember me. It was typical of Rian to invite a guy like this to his party. One of these days I might ask him: "Why are all your straight friends so attractive?" It's ruining my life.

I haven't had a monster crush on a straight man since my early twenties, an age at which I think it's a perfectly normal experience. If 97% of people belonging to the sex you're attracted to are heterosexual, and those are the people you're surrounded by in day-to-day life, then of course it's going to happen - especially pre-internet. It isn't until gay men and lesbians start dating and forming friendships within their own social spaces that I think the unproductive crushes on straight people stop, or at least wane. You internalise pretty quickly that there's no point in having them anymore when you could instead be attracted to someone who's attracted to you back. They're a hurdle, a fantasy, a necessary phase to be overcome on the way to a real relationship with another gay person.

But then I spent an evening at that party in the company of Benedict, an almost clinically precise rendering of my dream guy, and I thought "What's the fucking point of it all?" A decade plus of dating disasters - a miserable man-child merry-go-round - and then I walk into my friend’s apartment and find the loveliest man in the universe sitting there on the sofa watching BBC One with a tequila in his hand. I’m the wound and he’s the salt.

It's unusual in itself for me to be bowled over by a 30-year-old, as I'm normally - and notoriously - attracted to guys older than myself. At the end of the party after Benedict and the other guests have gone home, Rian and I talk for an hour or so, as usual. Rian has been stuck in his apartment a lot recently due to his disability, and I always feel like he never wants me to leave, he'd rather just keep talking and talking to delay the inevitable moment when I have to drive back. And I don't mind. I enjoy his company.

He tells me more about Benedict - he plays the keyboard in a local covers band, and works as a quantity surveyor. ("I'd survey his quantities anyday," I immediately think.) Rian says that what slightly mystifies him about Benedict, who he's known for a decade, is that "I don't know what he wants out of life." He has a sense that Benedict is going along with the flow, happy but passive, not seeking anything out, bobbing along aimiably on the edge of their friendship group. ("I could give him some, erm, direction," I again immediately think, and bite my tongue.) "He's dated a couple of girls but never for very long." I’ve heard that before. Maybe, in that case, I’m not going crazy but am picking up on something real. Maybe he’s in the closet and I’m getting latent gaydar, a tremendously faint ping. Maybe he doesn’t even realise it himself. Maybe I have a saviour complex. Maybe I’m overthinking it.

Halfway during the long drive home, I almost start crying with frustration because something about Benedict has really got to me. It seems completely absurd. Why am I attracted to him? I know almost nothing about him. He's probably not that interesting a person. He’s just Default Nice Man. He seems to have had a fairly smooth life with few major challenges.

The next day, I google the name of his band and find their Instagram, then find his Instagram, then his Facebook account, all of which he barely uses. But there are enough photos for me to get more of a sense of his life over the years. I feel like a stalker looking at family photos of him from almost a decade ago, his university graduation day celebrations, his shirtless holiday snaps on the beach. (Why don’t people use their privacy settings?) I'm not going to go full Martha - he's not my baby reindeer. But I am starting to turn into Daddy Venison.

I snap myself out of it, make myself dinner, and ask Bing Image Creator to generate a picture of a woman on a mobility scooter being chased by a giant sentient pineapple in front of a Finnish supermarket.

I know exactly why I’m attracted to Benedict. He represents everything I haven’t had to go through. He’s the walking personification of this. He’s physically very attractive in a wholesome, oblivious way, in contrast to how pornified our culture has become. There’s nothing hotter than people who don’t realise how hot they are, who haven’t thought about their own erotic capital for a second yet have it in spades. And because I barely know him, I can project onto him… he’s a canvas for unmet hopes and dreams, lost lands of might-have-been. If I were talk to him for a few hours to the point where I actually knew him as a rounded human being, the crush would almost certainly dissipate. A projection wall has to be two-dimensional.

I feel like Betty in Mulholland Drive. Somewhere on the A50 near the Meir Tunnel, I found the blue box, the one that fits the key. But I’m not going to put the key in. I still don’t want to wake up. The box and key sit there ominously on the passenger seat. I turn at Meir Park; the way ahead is closed due to resurfacing. Somehow, I will find my own route.