And then, on occasion, there is that positively perverse blend of both.

It was only a matter of time, of course, before my curious, scientific mind would lead me to find out what formula would result from the combination of these two very different yet equally combustible men.

The occasion was a house - or, really, an apartment - warming party for Paul and his new boyfriend, a vacuum cleaner salesman named Max. Max was the second serious relationship Paul had in the five months I had so far known him. Paul’s previous beau, Nathan, though often a “fun guy”, bore the yokes of alcohol and crack cocaine addiction. Kellerman, who shared the same penchant for the sauce and the rock, hoped to find stability in the sober and professional Max.

Since moving into Max’s spacious one-bedroom roost at the edge of downtown Minneapolis, Paul was managing to enjoy a relatively healthy life by staying away from the glass pipe. However, he continued to worship the aluminum can, usually in the form of twelve packs which he would slam the entire contents of in one sitting before staggering to bed, and then waking up in a

The night of the festivities, I met up with Jeff at the bar of The Nankin, a Chinese restaurant at the other end of downtown. Because Mr. Scotian was slightly apprehensive about spending an evening as one of two straights in a room full of gays, he insisted we summon up courage with the bar’s signature drink, a concoction of fruit juice, fruit slices and five slugs of alcohol called The Wanderer’s Punch. As we sipped the bright red fluid through straws from enormous brandy snifners, Jeff went into a tirade about what, by then, was one of his favorite subjects: “Can you believe it? That fucking Clinton and those pasty liberals are trying to pass another bill against law-abiding gun owners like me! When will those fuckers give up?”

Ever since Bubba’s election two years before, I had been made painfully aware of how obsessive Jeff was about the threat the new Administration theoretically posed to his two most cherished hobbies: collecting and shooting firearms, and renting and copying pornographic videos.

reach (though definitely not out of their own), and that a large number of Democrats support some gun owners’ rights, did not prevent Scotian from voting for people who were otherwise his worst enemies.

As Jeff came closer and closer to a full boil under the hot lights of the Nankin’s paper-shaded lamps, I cooled him down with a promising tid bit: “You know, Paul’s boyfriend, Max is a Republican.” That was no lie, as Max was a lifelong, card carrying elephant member. This, of course, despite the fact that his chosen party not only wants to ban the adult films Max, himself, might have favored, but also dictate whom he could sleep with on his urine-soaked bed.

Suddenly calm, if still sweaty, Jeff smiled and nodded his head, which, combined with the sunglasses he seldom took off even indoors, made him look like a futuristic highway patrolman. He replied, “Now that you say that, I guess I’m looking forward to this party.”

With that he and I took long, deep, finalizing sucks of our Wanderer’s Punches.

Paul was himself sucking on something, in this case a bong filled with pot - the one drug he was allowed to consume in Max’s presence - in the hallway of his apartment building, when Jeff and I arrived after taking a long, sobering walk from The Nankin. Gliding past the other guests commingling in the hallway, we approached Paul and the men and women circled around him. I announced to everyone, “Hi, I’m John, and this is my special friend, Jeff.”

At that, everyone laughed - including Jeff, who even relaxed enough to remove his sunglasses and slip them into his jacket pocket. As Paul continued to laugh, he looked Jeff up and down in a way that suggested my “special friend” lived up to his many descriptions.

For some weeks prior to the party - which had been planned before Paul even moved in with Max - I had promised my associate I would bring over “My Friend, The Terminator.” I had now and again alluded to Scotian’s wardrobe choices, gun fetish

and porno consumption, either at work or at The Brass Rail, a watering hole we repaired to on most pay days. At that time, “The Rail” was one of three gay-oriented bars in Minneapolis, all of which were clustered in a three block radius in downtown. Since it was the only one of those establishments that did not have ear-splitting dance music, distracting drag revues or suffocating hordes of tanned men, it was the bar we usually ended up at for ruminating about work and other matters. We seldom visited the many dives that catered to my sexual orientation, as Paul tended to get flirtatious when drunk, and tended to get drunk when he was drinking, and a room full of men he vastly preferred to gay ones could get him into trouble. At “The Rail”, at least, he could get bombed with impunity, with me generally just as soused but still on high alert to any stray male hands that might land on my knee - be they my co-worker’s or somebody else’s.

While I was more than happy to down pitchers at the bar, as well as share the pot pipe in the back alley, I had no interest in inhaling any crack fumes, something which Mr. Kellerman would do on nights when he and I did not socialize. For the most part, Paul never encouraged me to tag along as he was none too happy about his own habit, which caused him to frequently miss work and wake up in bedrooms, living rooms and alley ways in unsavory parts of town.

He had picked up this supremely vicious monkey from a fellow he volunteered to run
errands and do household chores for, a home-bound AIDS sufferer who was supplementing his disability payments by dealing the stuff. Soon after taking his first curious sampling of the coca lump, Paul found himself smoking away paycheck after paycheck, to the point where he frequently came to me for loans. He had succeeded in getting three twenties out of me over the course of a month, until one day he approached me and sheepishly asked if he could now have a fifty spot. Agog, I replied “No way! And I want that other sixty bucks back!” More importantly, I began to make strong hints that he was on a speedway towards death. Fortunately, Paul got the message and soon ceased contact with the AIDS-ridden dealer as well as with his boyfriend, Nathan, who wasn’t interested in dismounting his own white horse.

Around this time Paul met Max, a chubby, mustachioed ex-football player from Ohio who was not at all into drugs, and drank at a gentlemanly rate. I, myself, wasn’t too taken with this guy, who had the overbearing persona of an auto showroom dealer and was fond of telling Elks-Lodge style jokes that, when they didn’t make me laugh, would cause him to say, “What? You don’t have a sense of humor?”

Nonetheless, I was happy that Paul found

happiness and health with his new mate, and I was looking forward to seeing what a vacuum cleaner salesman’s home was really like. I also decided to use the party as an occasion to bring together two friends who had heard about each other for some months, but never had a chance to be in the same room. The fact that their sexual orientations were as disparate as their party affiliations was beside the point.

Or perhaps it was the point. As soon as Jeff and I placed our jackets on the (presumably dry) mattress in the bedroom and received two squeezably soft plastic cups of beer from Max, we returned to the hallway where Paul was still blowing weed. There, the two men began a discussion about a past time they not only shared, but pursued in earnest.

“I love porno,” declared Paul, sounding like John Malkovich seducing Michelle Pfeiffer in “Dangerous Liaisons.”

“Oh, yeah?” replied Jeff, sounding like Clint Eastwood humoring John Malkovich in “In the Line of Fire”, “I’ve got a few tapes in my collection.”

Scotian was being modest. By that point in his life, he had an entire shelf in his apartment filled with over one hundred VHS tapes, each labeled “Porn” followed by a volume number. Every one of these editions had six hours of highlights, from the adult films he rented on a weekly basis from practically every video store in town ... at least, every store that had that section where the door slams shut loudly enough to get all the other customers’ attention.

Apparently, whatever it was must have been more than just “cool”, as I found myself waiting in the hallway for several minutes. I was just about to head back to the bedroom when Jeff emerged, sweating profusely and frantically putting on his leather coat and sunglasses.

As we walked away from the building, it didn’t surprise me that what had captured Jeff’s fancy was an enormous dildo on the bedroom bureau. What did surprise me was that this object somehow sparked a drunken tug-of-war between himself and Paul, ending with Paul grabbing Jeff’s crotch and Jeff making his hasty, perspiratory exit. Far from being angry, though, Mr. Terminator regarded the experience as “interesting.” However, it was not interesting enough to prevent him from resuming the tirade he began at The Nankin about Super Bill, Janet Reno, the ATF and anybody else who threatened the security of his arsenal.

The following Monday at the insurance firm, I was summoned by Paul over to his work area. There, he related his own version of the events in the bedroom, and asked if Jeff was at all enthusiastic in his recounting. All I could report was that my high school classmate invested as much feeling in his one-word appraisal - “interesting” - as would his childhood idol, Mr. Spock.

Paul was nonetheless encouraged enough to request Jeff’s phone number and detail the plan he had in mind: some night, when Max was at one of his out-of-town sales conferences, Paul would invite Jeff over to the apartment for a conference of his own, lubricated by beer, pot, heterosexual pornography and, hopefully, the discovery of tendencies Jeff never knew he had.

Laughing, I gave Paul the phone number and said, “Good luck. By the way, I’m glad to see you and Max are so devoted to each other.”

About a week later, I was working at my post when Paul walked up to me, a giant grin on his face. I asked him what would inspire such giddiness on a Monday. He merely said, “Heard from your little friend, lately?”

With that, he swiveled around and sauntered back to his station. After taking a moment to figure out what the hell he was talking about, I gasped, and nearly bellowed, “Oh - my - God!”

Or, perhaps, Max walked in on the two of them and a three-way started.

Or ...

Well, as you probably figured out ... long before I did ... the night of shagging Paul related was just a shaggy dog story, one that, in addition to being meandering and pointless, was completely untrue. Though I had known him for a few months, I did not yet catch on to the fact that my co-worker was a habitual liar who wove fantasies for no other purpose than to get attention. Unaware that this is a tendency in certain people over twelve (or thirty!) I swallowed this dog whole. Paul even closed the highly detailed account with a very sincere warning: “It’s really important that you not tell anybody, because Jeff swore me to secrecy on this!” I swore my own secrecy up and down and returned to my work area.

Of course, within a few weeks, I had related Paul and Jeff’s rumble to virtually everyone I knew. I have to say, everyone was as fooled by this tall tale as I was. And I must add that when I ran into Scotian at one of our watering holes a week after the night in question, his manner practically confirmed the supposed tryst. He was visibly nervous, and again sweaty, his voice breaking like a pubescent’s when he asked, “So, have you seen, uh, whathisname lately?”

"Yeah, Jeff, I work with 'whathisname." I reminded Jeff.

His eyes - uncharacteristically free of sunglasses - flared up. He gulped and replied, with a notable giggle, “Oh, oh - yeah.”

As time went on, Paul became aware that I had broken my pledge to the point where the newspaper’s Town Tattler could have reported on his night with The Barbarian. He began to express concern there might be repercussions for his cold lie ... ones that might involve hot lead.

But what finally dragged the cat out of the bag were the details Paul kept adding to the account (“He asked me to get that dildo out and I used it on him.”; “He was so excited he shot that pistol he brought with him into the air.”) which drove me to ask, “Man ... did any of this shit happen?”

Paul chuckled, shook his head and replied, “I haven’t seen Jeff since the party.”

I laughed for several moments, praising him for pulling the wool over my eyes, and the eyes of so many others. Paul smiled, proud of his utterly hollow accomplishment, but then added with great seriousness, “But, still, it’s really majorly important you not tell Jeff about this.”

“Okay, Paul, I won’t.” I replied. Sincerely.

Two weeks later, Jeff and I were gulping down Wanderer’s Punches under the heated paper lamps of The Nankin. Finishing my sip, I said to him, almost in passing, “You know, Paul made up some story about you and him getting drunk, smoking pot and watching pornos - and then him indoctrinating you in the ways of gay sex! And wouldn’t you know it, I believed it!”

Jeff looked up from his snifner and stared intently at me through his sunglasses. He then smiled and laughed for several seconds, before replying, “That’s pretty good, actually.”

His laughter then died down, as did his smile. He raised his right hand upward, his index finger extended authoritatively, and declared, “I never want to see that fuck again.”