Dear Linc,

I don’t understand book collectors. They call the store all the time with their impossibly detailed requests. It’s not necessarily that I mind doing the extra work that requires me to access expertise I don’t sharply possess and is beyond my pay grade, but also sometimes I just want to interrupt a customer and inquire with curiosity and admittedly a little unkindness: “Excuse me but have you actually ever read the book?” I would presume that book collecting is much like art collecting, in that people also like to be in possession of art that they don’t necessarily appreciate. As a hobby, collection means prestige and money and not necessarily passion. I appreciate books, am a fan of them, but am no collector. To me, the idea of a first edition is nice, even cool; but all of the books that I own are worn, tattered and decrepit from age and love.

I got some bad training early on, Linc: I never learned to fall in love with men, only with their words and promises, hopes and dreams, their observations of life and ability to shoot the shit. Recently I have come to realize that I don’t know how to love a man for a man. Could I take his flaws? Could I withstand his disappointments and judgments? Thus far, the notion of a man has been easiest for me to process only in the form of his words. This started with those letters from Pop. Our relationship was one of sharing experiences through the channels of distance and time. We did not have shared lives so much as accounts of them. When we finally reunited, we could not immediately make solid those wistful billows of longing. The irony of our reunion was that we needed more time.

The second boy I ever had a crush on was not in my fifth grade class like the first one. The second boy was named Dean and he did not even live in the state. Looking back with the learned cynicism of today’s era, there was certainly the possibility that Dean was not in fact a grade schooler like me. The articulate and expert technical support postings he made to Prodigy, which at that time was the jewel in a narrow selection of internet access, made him sound much older. Even when we became friends and he provided me with photos and handwritten letters that went beyond our message board posts and instant messages, when he “snail mailed” the evidence that confirmed who I thought he was, it certainly could have all been made up. But it wasn’t, and even though our friendship existed online, we went through the routine motions of such. College would bring estrangement when innocent and endless hours online were reduced to a shadow in the light of freedom and the approach of adulthood.

Last year, Facebook worked its social networking magic and we found each other again. I looked at Dean’s profile photos and experienced the same twinge of adoration that I felt the first time I ever ripped open an envelope from him. The picture inside had been one of those wallet-sized deals that you order on school picture day. Dean was draped in a red football jersey. He’s cute, I thought and then anxiously stuffed the picture back in the envelope, for in those days I honestly believed that I was hellbound.

Although his Facebook profile did not list a relationship status, the posted photos showed him in a variety of happy life events with the same pretty blonde woman. It was a bittersweet revelation, not because he was straight, but because with Selma we had been a trio and now I was the only one who was single. Years before, in college, Selma still had Dean on her AIM buddy list. (Remember those?) Not long after I came out to Selma, she’d seen fit to fish Dean for his opinion on the matter.

“What would you do if you had to play football with a gay guy?” she’d asked.

I still vividly remember the text of Dean’s reply because it was itself as memorable as Selma sneaking it to me as a cut-and-paste: “I don’t care if he is gay or straight. I just want him to play well.”

Dean has now taken those early years of giving tech help to Prodigy customers into his own successful consulting. For a week or so after we connected on Facebook, it was like old times. I was shocked that age had not tempered his epistolary aptitude of childhood. I cannot tell a lie: so moving were his words that I wished our old friendship could have blossomed into love.

One day when we were twelve, we were wasting time as usual chatting online when Dean’s instant messages suddenly devolved into random characters and then, finally, “fuck you.” I stared at the screen and waited in stunned silence for a very confused couple of minutes before the explanation finally arrived that Dean’s computer had been momentarily commandeered by Earl, the boy who is today Dean’s true best friend in the way denied me by space and cyberspace. The rest of our conversation reached a plateau even after Dean assured me that Earl had gone back home. To be honest, I was a little jealous that I had not been the center of Dean’s attention and I lost interest in generating new conversation. Being twelve-years old, in my passive aggression I decided to express my sorrow by filling the instant mesage window with drivel.

Moo. Enter.

Oink. Enter.

Neigh. Enter.

Dan typed back: “Stop acting like farm animals. (G)” The capital ‘G’ in parentheses means “grin,” back then a fixture of online lingo that today is equivalent to :) or in the context of Dean’s reply a much more fitting :p .

I did not type ‘LOL’ in response because I was too busy laughing out loud for real. To this day it is still one of the most charming things a guy has ever said to me.

Joe