All Over Him Read online

  All Over Him

  (The Early Journals of Will Barnett)

  Ronald L. Donaghe

  A Two Brothers Press e-Book

  All Rights Reserved © 2009 by Ronald L. Donaghe

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.

  Two Brothers Press

  For information address: 603 W. Las Cruces Avenue, Las Cruces, NM 88005

  www.twobrotherspress.biz

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and incidents described are strictly the creation of the author, and any resemblance to real people, living or dead, or real incidents of similar nature is purely coincidental.

  ISBN-10: 0-9823503-2-5

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9823503-2-4

  Contents

  Prolog 4

  Part One

  The Long Parting 6

  Chapter One:

  Starting Over 6

  Chapter Two:

  The University 12

  Chapter Three:

  The GPA 19

  Chapter Four:

  Mama’s House 27

  Chapter Five:

  The Parade 32

  Chapter Six:

  Uncle Sean 36

  Part Two

  Time, Temptation, and Distance 46

  Chapter Seven:

  Lance 46

  Chapter Eight:

  Temptation 51

  Chapter Nine:

  What Happened 57

  Chapter Ten:

  The New Boy Friend 65

  Chapter Eleven:

  ZZ Top and the Nightmare 68

  Part Three

  All Over Him 76

  Chapter Twelve:

  Hank 76

  Chapter Thirteen:

  Charlie, Lee, and Renato 82

  Chapter Fourteen:

  Waiting 91

  Chapter Fifteen:

  An Old Habit of the Season 98

  Chapter Sixteen:

  A Turn in the Weather 106

  Chapter Seventeen:

  At Last 113

  Chapter Eighteen:

  Saying Good-Bye 121

  Epilog 126

  Prolog

  Slices of real life are not like the stories we get in novels. There’s not really a beginning, middle, climax, and then a neat, tidy end. Yet biographers structure their books about real-life people like novels. In fact, while conflict and resolution are essential to a novel, even biographers choose people whose lives contain conflict and who have overcome great odds. Biographers show how the conflicts have been resolved so that readers are inspired by these real-life characters, just as they are often inspired by the characters in a novel.

  And so it is that I worked out the structure of this third Will Barnett journal. I had to pick a beginning, middle, and end. In the beginning, Will and Lance are separated. Lance is off living in San Francisco, and Will is finishing up his first semester at the University of Texas in Austin and living with his beloved Uncle Sean. In the middle of this third book Will is muddling through his new life, inventing himself as he goes along, and sharing it with us through his journals.

  Readers have sometimes faulted me for leaving them hanging at the end of Lance. And while I chose to leave them hanging, I’ve had to make a hard decision on how this third book “ends.” I wanted it to be satisfying to those who like neat, tidy endings; and yet, as with Will Barnett’s life, his story continues—and will continue—beyond the pages of this book. It’s just that this third book is going to be the last for a while, so I didn’t want to leave anyone hanging.

  As Will has matured, so has his writing. These journals have become much more difficult to handle, because there is so much more in them. So the amount of work required to sort through it all was also massive. Only one reader I know of didn’t like the brevity of Uncle Sean or Lance, seeming to equate length with quality—as if Leo Tolstoy’s unabridged War and Peace is qualitatively better than Annie Proulx’s 58-page saga, Brokeback Mountain. So I want to explain the length. The first book was written from the contents of a single Big Chief Tablet and a single spiral notebook. A young teen’s hand was evident in the brevity of the material. The second book was also short, because it ended one phase of Will Barnett’s life—namely the end of his life on the farm in southwestern New Mexico, his graduation from high school, and his separation from Lance Surfett. And while there was much more material to work with in this present book, Will did not write in his journal with a view to one day having it published. He wrote in it, as he has said, to explain his experiences to himself. So, as one might expect, he threw in everything, including the proverbial kitchen sink. As the storyteller, it was up to me to make a story out of it.

  Some biographers have unlimited access to their subjects. I didn’t. Will Barnett is a polite and engaging adult, but he is also reticent. Although he is enthusiastic about my work, he told me I was on my own as I worked my way through his journals, because he didn’t want to color my impressions of his past with his present-day circumstances. As I finished up this portion, I can’t help but agree. Who Will Barnett was in 1974 is quite a bit different than who he is in 2003.

  When Lance was going to press, I had convinced Will to at least allow me to include an email address for him, so that readers could communicate directly with him. After I sent him the manuscript for this third book, however, he sent me this note:

  Dear Mr. Donaghe...Ron,

  You know how I am by now—kind of close-mouthed. Although I spilled my guts in these journals and have allowed you to publish them with my blessing, I think the email thing was a mistake. Not that I regret having heard from some of my readers (they’re great)—but I can’t do them justice. They ask for too much information about me, and all this was such a long time ago, I’ve grown a little less inclined to blather. You know that. I’m tight-lipped, so I’m going to take my email address down. I’ll send out a note to each of those great people who have corresponded with me, probably before this book is published, to let them know I’m disappearing.

  As for your questions about this third book. You nailed it, as they say. 1974 was a confusing year for me, fun in ways, a great year too. But every once in a while, I sigh with relief that it was only a year. I wouldn’t want to relive it!

  In reading over the manuscript, I can’t say any more than what you’ve got down. My husband and I will be passing through Las Cruces this January on our way back from Texas. We’d both like to meet your husband, and mine wants to meet you.

  Your bud, Will

  Part One

  The Long Parting

  Chapter One:

  Starting Over

  Uncle Sean knew I was hurting by the time I got to Austin, Texas, in January of 1974. That’s why, when the weather warmed up and I was still moping around, he took me to see all the naked people at Lake Travis. Only he didn’t tell me that’s what we were going to see. He just said we were going to the lake. “A part they call ‘Hippie Hollow.’“ He flashed me one of his beautiful smiles.

  “What’s so special about it?” I asked. But he wouldn’t tell me.

  It was May, and I was about to finish my first semester at the University of Texas. Being new to the demands of college courses, I had struggled to earn a high average, but mainly, I had struggled to keep from crying right there in some of my classes as I thought about Lance, wondering how he was doing in San Francisco. We had been living apart now for almost five months. We called each other almost every day, and even though I had a scholarship and a good sum of money in the bank from the share Mama gave me when she sold our farm, I took a job in the
geology department to help pay the long distance bills I was racking up on Uncle Sean’s phone.

  The weather was fine as we headed to the lake. I was still in awe of the Texas hill country after coming from Hachita, New Mexico, which is nothing but desert and sun and sand. Uncle Sean was right, too—just the drive out to the lake had perked me up a little, though I still felt that empty spot in my heart waiting to be filled with Lance. But he still had a year and a half of schooling at the Academy of Art College in San Francisco before I could go get him and bring him out here, bring him home.

  It was a little early in the season for water skiers to be on the lake but, according to Uncle Sean, I would soon see all the people who filled the rocky, scrub-oak hillsides of Lake Travis any chance they got. Of course, I still didn’t know this as we drove out of Austin. Uncle Sean had just told me he was taking me to the lake and told me the name of the place we were going. He didn’t tell me anything else, so besides the beautiful drive on the highway mottled with light flickering through the trees as we drove, my curiosity was rising, wondering just what he thought would be so special about our trip that day.

  I had already seen much of the hill country around Austin, because Mama and my sisters, Trinket and Rita, live in a cozy old house in Dripping Springs, just a little south of Austin. They’re far enough away to be out of the big city, but close enough that Uncle Sean and I can visit on Sundays for one of Mama’s home-cooked meals and be with our family.

  Besides all the trees everywhere you look, I was still struck by all the rivers and streams that run through the hill country. No wonder when Lance had come out to New Mexico from New Orleans, he was shocked at how dry and barren the desert was. I was just as struck with the wetness of this place after living all my life in the desert. The one thing I couldn’t get used to was the lack of distance—never being able to see more than a few miles in any direction, and on the little winding roads in the country outside Austin, you usually couldn’t see around the next curve in the road.

  On our way to the lake, I scanned the unfolding countryside, craning my neck to get a look at the top of a hill where some huge house sat with a commanding view of the green lushness. I was also struck by how many little towns the size of Hachita—or bigger—there were about every ten miles. Back in southwestern New Mexico, towns were thirty or sixty miles apart—little ones—and some of them were ghost towns. In this part of Texas there were big cities every sixty or seventy miles. I had been here a little over four months and I was still amazed at how many people there were.

  So when we got to the lake, I wasn’t surprised that there was a parking lot out in the middle of nowhere, and even though it was only around nine in the morning, the dirt lot was half full.

  “But I thought you said it was still too cold to water ski, Uncle Sean. What are all these cars doing here?”

  “You’ll see,” was all he said, trying to smile mysteriously. I just thought he was as beautiful as ever. When he had come from San Francisco during Christmas of 1972, he’d let his hair grow out from the shaggy but short way it had been when he was fresh out of that psychiatric army hospital in San Antonio. Now his hair was short again, cut for his job. It was still thick and blond, and I could tell he’d spent many days out in the sun because it was bleached out and glistened with honey-colored highlights.

  We’d pulled down into the parking lot from the highway, but from up on the road I had got a glimpse of the blue water of the lake and a good view of some distance as the lake disappeared on the horizon, swallowed up by the tree-covered hills.

  When we got out of the car, I tried to see the lake, but a stand of trees and a small rise of land cut off my view, and then we headed down a dirt path through a thicket of trees. Every once in a while, I caught a glint of light on water and wanted to head straight for the lake, but Uncle Sean held me to the path. “We’re going to a special place, Will.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. “Hippie Hollow.” Whatever that was.

  So we continued to walk along a kind of ridge with the hill rising to our left and falling toward the lake on our right. It was nice and warm even though the air was still cool. I looked above me, too, at the clear blue sky. I had learned quickly that in this part of the country it rained a lot compared to back home. So I was glad to see that today the sky was bright and crisp and clear.

  Then we rounded a bend in the path and the lake opened up in front of us. I had never seen such a large body of water except for a glimpse of the Pacific Ocean when I took Lance out to San Francisco in January; so if it was just this that Uncle Sean wanted to show me, I would have been happy. But he tugged at my arm and said we still had a ways to go. We kept walking back up and away from the lake then back down, where I caught a glimpse of a rocky cliff face with large boulders jutting out and places where the lake came right up to the cliff. And then I saw a naked woman standing as clear as you please on one of the overhanging rocks. A moment later, she dived what looked to be nearly twenty feet into the water below. I shivered with a sudden chill knowing that even in May the water was probably cold.

  “Did you see that?” I asked, turning to Uncle Sean.

  “What?”

  “That streaker!” Around campus, students had been streaking almost every day for a couple of months. Sometimes, we’d be in the middle of a class and a student nearest the window would call out ‘streakers!’ and the whole class, including the instructor, would run to the window for a look. I usually thought it was funny, but kind of dangerous. I’d seen one naked girl get blindsided by someone on a bicycle, and all the fun went out of it that day. Still, I had thought about streaking myself, but figured I’d wait. I was embarrassed by the idea that I might get a hard-on. “They’ve been doing that on campus,” I said. “I just never thought they’d do it out here for anybody to see.”

  But Uncle Sean just laughed. “Come on, Will. We’re almost there.”

  We walked on a little farther and came around another bend, and there in front of us were dozens of naked people lounging around, walking on a shore of sand, climbing over the rocks, men and women and children. It reminded me of some nature show of a gathering of seals I’d seen on television or in an issue of National Geographic.

  “Welcome to Hippie Hollow,” Uncle Sean said.

  I was dumbstruck. “But they’re all naked! Whole families! This is bigger than streaking. Is it legal?”

  “I guess it is,” Uncle Sean said. “But we still have a ways to go.”

  So I followed him looking down at the people, all of them skinny dipping, and my jaw just hung open. I have to admit that I was getting a little turned on at the thought of just walking around naked in public like that, and then as soon as I thought about it, I was embarrassed because I was afraid I’d get a boner and that didn’t seem too cool.

  After about a hundred more yards we left the naked families behind and came to a place where I just stopped and stared. There were more naked people here, too, but they were all men.

  “This is the gay part of the lake,” Uncle Sean said. When we’d left the car he had shouldered a bag. I didn’t think too much of it because I thought it was probably sandwiches and soda pop. So when we chose a spot to sit, I was surprised to see Uncle Sean pulling off his clothes and then stuffing them into the bag.

  When he was completely naked, he told me to go ahead and get undressed.

  I did it, but I was afraid I’d get a boner a foot long. I was relieved to see that I didn’t, even though we were now both naked. I couldn’t keep my eyes off his body. Or those near us. And several of the guys were looking back at us. Here we were, Uncle Sean and me, naked like we got on the farm back home to skinny dip in Old Man Hill’s pond. The difference was we were surrounded by other men—all of them gay—and I got a sweet feeling in my chest. I couldn’t believe any place like this could exist. Lance would be surprised, too, I thought, wishing he were here.

  I didn’t want to risk walking around because, even though my little buddy was behavi
ng itself, I was afraid it would spring into action if I didn’t stay put next to Uncle Sean. So we sat down on a beach towel he’d pulled out of the bag, and I just sat back feeling how neat it was with the warm sunlight on my skin and the coolness of the air tickling the hair on my legs at the same time.

  After a while, I looked around at the other men nearby. There were a few couples, I supposed, as well as loners. I didn’t know what to think of all this, except it was kind of neat to see so many gay men. All body types, too, not just good-looking guys like Uncle Sean. Occasionally, someone laughed loudly or splashed into the lake, and farther out, a few people were swimming, again causing me to shiver at the thought of how cold the deep lake water was. The opposite shore was far away, but I saw that people had built houses along the lake and I wondered if they had a clear view of all the activity on this side.

  It just made me smile and I lay back on my elbows and closed my eyes for a minute, listening, thinking, every once in a while feeling a twinge between my legs as a breeze blew across my genitals.

  “Sean!” someone called in an excited voice. I opened my eyes and saw a tall, slender man who looked to be several years older than Uncle Sean’s twenty-seven years, approaching us from below. Maybe a guy nearing forty, though I never was very good at judging old people’s ages. Uncle Sean got up off the towel.

  “Hey, Bryce!” he said, and I could hear the pleasure in his voice, too, like they were good friends, though he’d never talked about this guy when it was just me and him at home. I stayed quiet as Uncle Sean and Bryce shook hands, then kissed each other on the lips, then hugged, pressing their whole bodies against each other. I almost laughed because it looked kind of funny, since both of them were naked, but it was kind of neat, too.