The Last Goodbye: Sonny Noir's Story

By D. C. Chambers

THE LAST GOODBYE - SONNY NOIR’S STORY

by D. C. Chambers

The Last Goodbye shows a complex relationship between twenty-five-year-old Sonny Noir, a gay man feeling beaten by the system, and forty-two-year-old Jacqueline Svenson Skylar, a newly transplanted wealthy New York socialite who recently moved to Chicago carrying a lifetime of unhappiness on her shoulders. Sonny Noir’s Story opens with a riveting quadruple homicide at the Miami International Airport on February 13, 1981, which the news media quickly labeled as the “Friday the 13th Massacre at MIA.” It circles back in time with him telling his life story from his teen years to the day he and Jacqueline witness the unfolding scene at MIA. He searches to find a balance between his love life as a gay man, desperately tries to understand the mounting complications of his friendship with a straight woman whose life has fallen apart, and the struggles of social injustice against the lesbian and gay community he encounters along the way. Through all his ups and downs, he fights to stay true to his own identity. He’s not exclusive to surrounding himself with men. He also cherishes the comfort of women as friends. Sonny and Jacqueline find a connection within the first few minutes of meeting while attending The Oak Park School of Hairstyling, even though they come from opposite ends of society and the money spectrum. Sonny is driven and worked hard to achieve a great education to pull himself up from his lower middle-class roots. But after five years in his computer career, he became disheartened and began to lose hope in the American Dream. He encounters many disappointments in his life, but he’s a fighter. Sonny and Jacqueline’s lives are filled with never-ending trials and tribulations, alcoholism, and cheating. It leaves you asking the question many times over—Why can’t they part and go their separate ways?—leading up to the realization that saying goodbye may be their only way to survive.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Sep 7, 2017
• ISBN: 9781546207054

D. C. Chambers

D. C. CHAMBERS is an American author, poet, and artist born in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1952. He has never wavered in his dedication to promoting protection against oppression, social injustice of humanity, discrimination, and intolerance against hate crimes. He has been a lifelong advocate for LGBTQ rights and worked three years as a volunteer in the Legal Department at Whitman-Walker Elizabeth Taylor Medical Center in Washington, DC, ensuring people with HIV received Social Security and Medical Benefits. In June 2017, he was a guest speaker at the World Out Games in Miami Beach. His speech against oppression and discrimination was dedicated to the forty-nine lives lost as the victims of the Pulse Bar terrorist attack and massacre on June 12, 2016, in Orlando, Florida, as well as to all LGBTQ people worldwide. Included was his highly acclaimed poem “I Used to Dream about the Day of Equality.” Several of his published poems are registered with the US Library of Congress.

Book preview

THE

LAST GOODBYE

SONNY NOIR’S STORY

D. C. CHAMBERS

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© 2017 D. C. Chambers. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 09/19/2017

ISBN: 978-1-5462-0706-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-0704-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-0705-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017913701

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Afterword

I would like to

dedicate this book to my life partner, Paolo, who has stood by my side and supported me with his undeniable love and patience over the four and a half years it took to write The Last Goodbye - Sonny Noir’s Story. I would also like to mention my beloved sister, Kathy O’Neal, who has always been my number one supporter. Carolyn Martin, Corrina Holunga, and Annalisa Cammarata were instrumental with their guidance in helping me complete The Last Goodbye - Sonny Noir’s Story. A very special thank you to Marisela Bozo (Mi) for her dedication and tireless help with the promotion of The Last Goodbye - Sonny Noir’s Story.

Do You Know Me?

I am you.

I am them.

I am everyone.

I am everywhere.

I have had your thoughts and your dreams,

Held onto the same hopes that you have.

Felt your sadness, pain, and joy.

I have had many loves and many heartbreaks,

Seen humanity at its best and at its worst.

I have seen wars, but I cherish peace.

Struggled at times with life

and made many sacrifices along the way.

I have fought to save lives,

and yet, I have seen death many times over.

Experienced fear in all of its different forms.

I know poverty, but I know how it feels to rise above it.

I know weakness,

yet I know all about your quest for strength.

You are no different from anyone thousands of years before

or thousands of years after.

I know this because I have always been here,

and I will always be here.

Your thoughts, your dreams, and your hopes will be theirs too.

They are the same ones that humanity has had for all time.

You may wonder who I am and how I know this.

I am the wisdom learned from the cycle of life.

I am the knowledge of all mankind.

I am you.

I am them.

I am everyone.

I am everywhere.

I am life!

CHAPTER 1

Saying goodbye is always hard, but this farewell was especially so. When we arrived at the Pan American terminal of Miami International Airport, I knew in my heart that it would be best to get our goodbyes over with as quickly as possible, but I had promised Jacqueline to walk her to her departure gate. I kept wiping away the tears flowing down her sullen face while we were walking toward the escalator. Her return to Chicago was an emotional ordeal. As we neared the check-in counters on the second floor, my partner decided to stay back a few feet to give us a moment to say goodbye alone. I just wanted to get her to her gate, hoping she wouldn’t make another scene, begging to stay like she had in the car on the way to the airport. She was shaking so badly that I stopped and gave her a kiss on her cheek and a hug for moral support. She held me tightly. When Jacqueline let go, she looked at me and started to say something, but at that same moment, commotion broke out all around us. Someone yelled, Oh my God, he’s got a gun! A couple of women ran by us screaming. The escaping crowds were frantic, pushing one another out of the way. A man tripped and took several people down with him as he ran down the escalator the wrong way. Then six shots rang out, one right after the other.

Security ordered an immediate shutdown of the terminals. Except for police, medical responders, and news media, everyone was told to wait outside. All flights had been put on hold until there was an all clear. Loud, screeching alarms were going off, and a recorded announcement blared over the speaker system, repeatedly informing people, This is the airport emergency authority. Miami International Airport has been placed on heightened alert. Please exit all terminals now. This is the airport emergency authority. Miami International Airport has been placed on heightened alert. Please exit all terminals now. The advisory, along with the deafening sounds coming from the rotor blades of multiple helicopters that filled the sky, only added to the chaos both inside and outside the terminals. Fleeing travelers were running and screaming. In the melee, dozens of people were trampled while trying to exit. Soon, the place was filled with police. They began yelling through their megaphones, ordering everyone to exit in an orderly fashion. The police tried hard to keep some semblance of calm, but they lost control of the crowd within the first few minutes.

The shooting was the latest murder scene of the day in Miami, but that was the first time one ever happened inside Miami International Airport. It was Friday, February 13, 1981. When the shooting stopped, four people lay on the floor in pools of blood. Within minutes, a team of medical emergency responders and the news media arrived. Soon afterward, reporters had taken over the terminal. They talked quickly into their live television cameras, speculating on what had just happened and announcing multiple deaths. It was immediately labeled by the media as the Friday the 13th Massacre at MIA. When the coroner arrived, he pronounced all four dead. He tagged each body with a number, and ever so carefully, he covered each with a sheet.

I had moved to Miami a month before, on Monday, January 12, 1981. I’d heard lots of stories about the city’s problems with drugs and murders, but I didn’t let it bother me. I figured the violence only affected the people who were involved in the drug cartels. I couldn’t stand the damp, cold, northern weather any longer, and I loved Miami’s climate, especially the warm winters. It seemed like the logical place to escape to—a place to begin building my new career. A fifteen-month emotional journey of ups and downs had brought me there. I was ready for a major change in my life. Jacqueline soon followed.

CHAPTER 2

Let me circle back in time and tell you about my life from my teen years to witnessing the scene at Miami International Airport. During my teen years, after puberty arrived, I always knew that I was different from my friends, and it was a constant challenge. The hardest part was trying to understand why I had an attraction to guys while all my friends liked girls. I’d thought about it a lot, but I didn’t know anything about people who were queer. That’s the name society gave those people years ago before they were labeled as gay. I always heard queers were all very effeminate and psychologically confused. It seemed as though opinions about that subject might change because the United States was in the middle of the sexual revolution, among a lot of other chaos. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen. Hate crimes against gays and police harassment were higher than ever. It was okay to beat up a queer or faggot (whichever word you chose and whichever pejorative was the new flavor of the day). The police would set up traps and sting operations to round them up by the dozens. They would be arrested, photographed, and strip-searched—which sometimes led to physical and sexual abuse by perverted police who taunted and laughed with insults while spitting on them. They were treated as less than human and thrown in jail. The police would immediately release all their personal information, along with their mug shot from their arrest report, to the media. It didn’t matter if you were guilty or innocent—the law of the land (innocent until proven guilty) didn’t apply to faggots. Sometimes, members of the media were invited to go along with the cops for the roundup.

The first time I saw that was on April 10, 1969. I’d just gotten up out of bed and gone into the kitchen to eat a bowl of cereal. My parents were sitting at the table, sipping their morning cups of coffee, holding onto the newspaper together as my father read the shocking morning headline out loud to my mother. They shook their heads in disgust, and he continued reading the article to her with a venom-laced voice.

There were twenty photos of the men arrested. The article told all about the raid the night before at a popular late night gay cruising area in Lincoln Park next to Belmont Harbor. It included some explicit details of what the undercover police did to lure the men in. The negative comments of my parents and the journalist’s salacious writing sickened me. I didn’t want to stay and listen to my father any longer so I got up, took my half-filled bowl of cereal to the sink, dumped it out, and left the room.

The newspaper story reminded me of game hunters going on a trophy hunt, looking for a particular noxious breed of an animal species—dangerous to all mankind. They had a heyday reporting on it; next to their mug shots were their names, their professions, where they worked, and their addresses. It was the stuff that ruined many people’s lives, but that kind of stuff—where suffering was involved—sold lots of newspapers and brought in high ratings for the television channels. Many people lost their jobs, their families disowned them, and most of all they lost their dignity. Some committed suicide, and others were forced to move away to try to restart their lives.

Societies and individuals around the world used all that hate being spread about queers in their churches and governments as permission to kill them. Societies labeled them as freaks of nature. There was little—if any—guilt that followed that kind of treatment against precious human life. Society’s intolerance of queers escalated during the late 1960s. There was not much compassion for or use for them. Very few people cared. Everything came to a head on June 28, 1969, in New York City. That was the day gays united and began a revolution. They rebelled after the terrible beatings and multiple arrests they encountered at the hands of the police during the early morning hours at the Stonewall Inn Bar in Greenwich Village. The famous Stonewall Inn Riots erupted that night because gays had had enough of the abuse, name-calling, bullying, arrests, torture, and killings happening all over the world. That’s the night the gay movement for equal rights began in earnest in the United States, and it soon spread worldwide. It was never easy, and it continued to be a monumental struggle because the majority of people never stopped using the words queer and faggot when referring to them. Television shows and comedians still made constant innuendos about them. They always painted gay characters as very effeminate.

Cruel words had always been used to try to dehumanize anyone who was different from what society or the church considered the norm. Those things scared me because I never saw myself as being like that. I didn’t know anyone else like me I could talk to. I felt all alone. I remember that I prayed to God every day not to let me be queer. I didn’t see myself as being a freak or anything like they described those people as being. In the years that followed, most of my gay friends told me they used to do the same thing.

When I was thirteen or fourteen years old, I was so scared of being labeled a queer that I would go out into the woods near my house for days on end and yell as loudly as I could in hopes it would strain my vocal chords, making my voice deeper than it was meant to be. I didn’t want anyone to think I was one of those people.

I guess you can say I had an epiphany one day that was much stronger than my willpower not to be gay. His name was Jimmy Mahoney. That’s when I got my first big crush. I also realized that day that my biggest fear came to fruition. It hit me—I was one of them, one of those people I feared the most of becoming—a queer—and you know what? All that damn praying and all that damn worrying I had done didn’t work!

Jimmy was the first person I ever met like me. He was the only one I could talk to about my sexuality. With everything I’d heard and read, I knew that if I was going to make it through my life, I would have to toughen up to protect myself. I would have to be very cautious about my surroundings and those I picked as friends. Jimmy helped ease those fears, yet we both knew that we had to be careful being together. We felt like two normal people, but we never forgot that society didn’t look at us like that. It took me a few days to realize there wasn’t nothing wrong with us. It was society who had problems with it. Many people had been brainwashed over thousands of years from religious teachings, along with the fear they were taught that we were all sick, psychologically and morally. It was a well-known fact every religion has groups of fanatics who are so deep-seated in their beliefs that they can become dangerous to anyone or anything they oppose. They were the ones who preached the most hate and intolerance against us. They were the ones who taught their followers that it was alright to hurt us. Fear of the unknown had always been the culprit to social struggles in civilization. That helped empower the ego of certain races and cultures to feel superior over other groups. There have always been sectors in society that have been hated for one reason or another. It’s human nature to hate a certain group of people because they look different, their religion is different, their skin color is different, or they chose to believe in something different from you.

I accepted the fact I was born gay, and I didn’t have any control over that part of my destiny, no matter what anyone said. The one thing I found out for sure in life—everybody had to believe in something; be it a religion, spirituality, or their own thoughts on how they wanted to live in order to get through life. We are all different, but it became very clear to me that not everyone understood that because of all the hate that exists in the world. Too many people are easily persuaded to follow the popular theory of the era of society they are born into.

I knew I had a long fight ahead of me, but from that day on, I embraced it. I understood who I was. After meeting Jimmy, I never doubted my sexuality again. He was real nice, a typical red-haired Irish Catholic import whose family had just immigrated to Chicago from Dublin, Ireland, in March of that year. We met on May Day—Thursday, May 1, 1969. We were in the same grade at St. Bartholomew Catholic High School. My parents were devout Catholics, and their minds were made up from the time my siblings and I were born; we were all going to a Catholic grade school and a Catholic high school. They worked extra hard to save enough money to make that happen. It was very expensive to send your kids to those schools. None of us wanted to go to St. Bartholomew. We fought them, kicking and screaming, during the weeks leading up to the beginning of each school year. In the end, they always won out. We all wanted to go to the local public high school where most of our friends went. The best thing I got from going to that school was meeting Jimmy. He was in Sister Mary Edwin Joseph’s classroom, and I was in Brother Paul’s. St. Bartholomew was a Jesuit high school with a mixture of Franciscan nuns and Jesuit priests. There weren’t enough priests to teach all the classes. Jimmy and I met in the school cafeteria about three weeks before school let out for summer vacation. I’d noticed him a couple of weeks before because he always ate lunch alone. None of the other kids had warmed up to him, and I assumed he was too shy to ask if he could sit with any of them.

Something drew me toward him (probably his good looks and his heavy Irish accent), but I didn’t figure that out until I went over and introduced myself to him. Then I understood. It was an immediate attraction. After that, it felt as if we were connected at the hip when we weren’t in class. We had a lot of serious talks, mostly about us, acknowledging our feelings for each other. Jimmy and I were very naïve when it came to understanding our sexual emotions. It was first love for both of us, and we weren’t going to let anything or anyone separate us. We’d never kissed except for a quick peck on the cheek because we were afraid of getting caught, but that all changed on Friday, May 23, 1969. We lost our virginity to each other on that late spring night. It was Memorial Day weekend, the first weekend of our summer vacation. We spent the weekend house-sitting for one of my parents’ friends. We didn’t have any books with instructions to tell us what two people of the same sex should do in bed, but it wasn’t too difficult. We did what came natural to us. We had already pledged our love to each other a week before, but we never had any place to go and consummate it until that weekend. My parents’ friends’ house had a wine cellar, and it overflowed with bottles of wine. It was the first time I’d ever seen one of those. Jimmy asked me if I’d ever drunk wine before. He said that in Ireland, his family, including the kids, had a glass of wine with every meal. He said it was very common in Europe. I told him I’d never tried anything with alcohol in it, but I would love to try it for the first time with him. We didn’t think they would miss a bottle or two, so we opened one up. Of course, being two teenage boys, we didn’t stop until the bottle was empty. After our first glass, Jimmy looked at me with a tender glance, and when I looked back into his eyes, I became hypnotized by them. Then he gave me the most loving kiss. I remember our first kiss more than anything else because it was a feeling I never had before. I never knew a kiss could make you feel so warm and so good. Even at my age, I knew that kiss was the special kind of kiss people who were really in love talked about. We professed our love to each other over and over that night and the next one too.

Jimmy and I made love many times that weekend. I was making love with a guy who was in love with me, and I was in love with him. He was my equal. It was the greatest feeling I’d ever had, and I never wanted it to end. Life was never the same at St. Bartholomew after that.

We had a beautiful relationship and friendship that lasted throughout our senior year of high school. It continued into our first year and a half of being separated while going to different universities. There wasn’t a lot to do during summer vacation at that age, except go to the mall or the cinema. We both liked films, so we went to a lot of movies, especially R-rated ones. Lucky for us, one of our friends worked at the neighborhood cinema, and he let us in for free. We never got busted by any of his bosses. We took advantage of the situation and made it our goal to see as many films as possible.

Jimmy was very much the romantic at the movies. Being that young, we were too inexperienced to understand all the hate and prejudice that was waiting for us out in the world. We were still innocent young hearts, experiencing first love together. He would always grab my hand and hold it during the entire film. It would be risky if we got caught, but he’d always cover our hands with one of our jackets. In Chicago, many summer nights were cool enough to warrant a jacket or a sweater. We brought them with us even if it was warm outside because it was always cold in the cinema from the air-conditioning.

The last couple of years in the late sixties, Hollywood put out some great films because of all the turmoil going on in the world. With the sexual revolution, the struggle of the Vietnam War, the protest against it, the recent assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. as well as all the racial tensions in the United States provided a lot of material to work with. People needed entertainment, and the movies gave it to us. Jimmy and I got to see the two biggest films of the summer. I’ll never forget them. I’d just finished reading the book Goodbye Columbus by one of my favorite authors, Philip Roth, and it had been made into a film that came out that year. It was one of the hottest summer films along with Midnight Cowboy. They were different in every way except that they had one common thread, and that was sex. Both films showed skin and had several good love scenes. We were very excited about that! Midnight Cowboy was the more hardcore of the two. As a matter of fact, its original rating was R, but soon after its opening debut, the church interfered and put so much pressure on Hollywood that the rating was changed to X. That worked out great for the film studio because it drove more people to see it. Hollywood fought back hard, and within a short time, the movie’s rating returned to R. It was all about freedom of speech. Everything during the late sixties seemed to be about freedom of speech. That spring and summer of 1969, I learned a lot about life. I discovered my sexuality with Jimmy, and I learned a lot from both of those films. He and I were proud of the bragging rights we earned, and we embellished the hell out of those two movies to our friends. It was a big deal for two teenage guys. We thought we were something. Our friendship and our teenage love affair helped us get through the doldrums of the last year of high school when you’re not quite old enough to do what you want and all you can think about is how wonderful life must be when you go off to college or move away from home.

Looking back, I don’t think either one of us understood how deep our love for each other was. We were two young guys in the height of our sexual awakening, trying to figure out life and wondering how to get to