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Thank you so much Jadette for letting me come play in the
inspirational sandbox!
I wrote Hot Head on a dare from a dear
friend who I was helping with structure questions on her own novel. I’ve been
writing for 20 years in film and theatre, but fiction has never been my
favorite form; she told me if I didn’t write an M/M I was “a lazy idiot.” I
laughed and agreed, but then I needed an idea. I didn’t want to write something
porn-y, which is the criticism often leveled at male writers in the genre. I
wanted angst, and heightened, compressed emotion. And then I remembered an
intense confession I’d heard…
See…starting in the late 90s, my best galpal in the whole
universe went through this compulsive, sex-n-drama addiction in which she
became obsessed with and only dated a string of gorgeous, tormented firefighters.
For seven years or so, she found hysteria very romantic and for that stretch of
time she only had eyes for unfaithful troublemakers with eight-packs and cocks
like waste baskets. Most of these relationships lasted under a year, operatic
tragicomedies with dildos and screaming. Most ended with three a.m. arguments
in which she hurled crockery and birthday-gifts out the window at the “cheating
lying asshole” she’d just dumped while he begged for forgiveness with crocodile
tears in the street below her window. Lots of agita, lots of broken promises, incendiary sex, but (safe to say) completely unhealthy.
For those seven years, I logged untold hours on porches
and barstools listening to crazy heroics, sleazy anecdotes, and odd confessions
because these hot mooks wanted to impress my friend with how hip and “cool”
they were with her gay best friend. They all loved telling stories, and they
had stories that defied belief. The FDNY is insane and its members take
pride in that. Full stop.
One night in about 2002, she and I were writing in a
house upstate. She was editing a novel, I had to finish a screenplay because a
play of mine had won an award and sold to film folk. We go away every summer for intense marathon writing, and on the
weekends our men would visit.
That weekend, my boyfriend was working a case
somewhere. Her boyfriend, let’s call him G, had arrived after dinner a little
drunk and horny.
While I did the dishes they had loud, hilarious sex
upstairs. My friend fell asleep after, and then G clumped downstairs in a pair
of sweats because he hadn’t eaten. He fixed a plate and I poured us a couple
whiskeys and we went out to the porch so he could smoke. Now, this guy was a
career fireman: 30ish, Irish mutt, probably wore a size 52 suit, hands like
roast beefs, big open face and doe-eyes on top of this wall of muscle. I
remember we were telling gross dating stories, NC-17 stuff about sex we’d had
and things that freaked us out. He mentioned to me that I didn’t “seem all that
homo” and joked about his “crappy” gaydar but made sure I knew he had no
problem with folks doing their thing. He mentions a meathead couple at his gym who
gave him pointers and a no-bullshit female podiatrist who he likes; he’s pretty
sure all of the above are “homos” but he thinks they’re “so cool.”
At this point I felt tired and thought it high time G go
upstairs for hokey-pokey round two, so we could all get some sleep. Before I could
say my goodnight, this sweet mook kind of thumped me on the back; his face got
serious and he didn’t say anything… but I could tell he wanted to.
Very quietly, looking at the dark yard, he confessed that
he had once loved a man. “Like that,”
he said, a guy as straight as he was. I had NO idea what to say but I nodded in
support of the idea. (HOT! Was the thought I had actually.) G explained that the
man was his best friend and fellow fireman, a legendary golden-boy around the
FDNY… a courageous nutjob working at the worst houses, so gorgeous he was date
bait for the other crew members, and a habitual cheater who got away with
everything because the world loved him.
Both of them were “totally straight,” G said. Hell, they’d
tagteamed “broads” together, puked on each other, bailed each other out of jail
after bar fights… but at a certain point G had realized that he loved-loved his friend. Affection had
grown into attraction, but he never confessed his feelings. Speaking would have
jeopardized the friendship, the FDNY, their families, their lives.
Even worse: one horny drunken night, G and his
then-girlfriend had asked his buddy to join them in an ill-advised threeway
that wrecked the friendship for a long time. Up close and personal, G had
gotten tense and weird and wouldn’t explain why. G broke up with her the next
day; the friends fought and then spent a horrible August not hanging out at all…
even though they were supposed to go on vacation together down the Jersey Shore.
G slowly went out of his mind trying to decide what to do, what to say about
what he felt.
And then his best friend was killed at the World Trade
Center on September 11, 2001.
They had both worked the scene but only G made it out
alive. He had been outside when the first tower went. He had no idea what had
happened to his buddy, couldn’t find him in the chaos, didn’t even know how to
try because they hadn’t spoken in over a month. Command had been wiped out in
the collapse and thousands were lost while the world burned down around them.
That
day, without ever knowing the truth, his best friend simply vanished into thin
air.
Even now, retelling this, I can see the stricken look on his
big baby face … the pain and grief and anger and regret churning inside of him while
he sat smoking a cigarette with a shaking hand on a porch at night. I will
never forget his stare, creased with a terrible, patient longing he’d carry
until he died himself.
I knew. It was so clear to me that he wished he had died on
9/11. That’s what he was saying, what
he confessed to me. He vibrated with the desire dig and dig and dig until he’d
dug his rut into a grave. I don’t know how else to explain it. At that moment,
I knew he was pretending to be alive and taking stupid risks on purpose, I knew
how he would die, and (maybe) only I knew why.
In a way, he buried his secret in me. I think G needed so badly to confess the truth to someone
sympathetic it had just slipped out. The thing is, he couldn’t tell anyone his secret except some gay writer he barely
knew, because his life had no room for that unspoken love, or those unlikely
lovers. No one could ever know. When he and my friend did split up she admitted
that she felt like she’d using him like a big dildo, a hung fireman with sad
eyes and a dead heart, and that they’d openly joked about when she’d get tired
of him being a visitor in his own life.
So when my friend dared me and I needed a germ of an idea
for an M/M that could support the angst, sexiness, and drama I crave in my
books, G’s face on the porch came to me like a handsome ghost. I wished more
than anything that I could answer a question he’d never asked and wanted to
give a happy ending to two men who could never have found it outside the pages
of a romance.
So Hot Head grew out of that night I
sat listening on the porch with no way to help a man who’d been punished for
loving… if I succeeded at all, it’s because of the pain and truth he shared. Writing
the book was a chance to rewrite their lives the way they might have been, unspoken
love given time to grow and the happily ever after those men deserved.
Available
June 15th from most online retailers including Dreamspinner
Press, Amazon,
All
Romance Ebooks, Rainbow
Ebooks,
