Toxic Bachelors

Unlike Charlie and Adam, whose families were traditional, respectable, and conservative—Adam's on Long Island, and Charlie's on Fifth Avenue in New York—Gray had grown up all over the world. The parents who had adopted him at birth had been part of one of the most successful rock groups in history. He had grown up, if you could call it that, among some of the biggest rock stars of the time, who handed him joints and shared beers with him by the time he was eight. His parents had adopted a little girl as well. They had named him Gray, and her Sparrow, and when Gray was ten, they had been “born again,” and retired. They moved first to India, and then Nepal, settled in the Caribbean, and spent four years in the Amazon, living on a boat. All Gray remembered now was the poverty they had seen, the natives they'd met, more than he remembered the early years of drugs, but he recalled some of that as well. His sister had become a Buddhist nun, and had gone back to India, to work with the starving masses in Calcutta. Gray had gotten off the boat, literally and otherwise, and went to New York at eighteen to paint. His family still had money then, but he had chosen to try and make it on his own, and had spent his early twenties studying in Paris, before he went back to New York.

His parents had moved to Santa Fe by then, and when Gray was twenty-five, they had adopted a Navajo baby and called him Boy. It had been a complicated process, but the tribe agreed to let him go. He seemed like a nice child to Gray, but the age difference between them was so great that he scarcely saw him while Boy was growing up. His adoptive parents had died when Boy was eighteen, and he had gone back to live with his tribe. It had happened seven years earlier, and although Gray knew where he was, they had never contacted each other. He had a letter from Sparrow from India once every few years. They had never liked each other much, their early life had been spent surviving the vagaries and eccentricities of their adoptive parents. He knew Sparrow had spent years trying to find her birth parents, maybe to bring some kind of normalcy into her life. She had found them in Kentucky somewhere, had nothing in common with them, and had never seen them again. Gray had never had any desire to find his, some curiosity perhaps, but he had enough on his plate with the parents he'd had, he felt no need to add more dysfunctional people to the mix. The lunatics he was already related to were more than enough for him. The women he went out with were just more of the same. The disruptions he shared with them, and tried to solve for them, were more of what he'd seen growing up, and were familiar and comfortable for him. And the one thing he knew without wavering was that he never wanted to have children and do the same to them. Having children was something he left to other people, like Adam, who could bring them up properly. Gray knew that he couldn't, he had no parental role models to follow, no real home life to emulate, nothing to give to them, or so he felt. All he wanted to do was paint, and he did it well.

Whatever genetic mix he had come from originally, whoever his birth parents were, Gray had an enormous talent, and although never financially viable, his career as a painter had always been a respected one. Even the critics conceded that he was very, very good. He just couldn't keep his life together long enough to make money at what he did. What his parents had made in their early years, they had spent on drugs and traveling around the world. Gray was used to being penniless and didn't mind it. What he had, he gave to others whom he considered more in need. And whether on Charlie's yacht, in the lap of luxury, or freezing in his studio in the Meatpacking District in New York, it was all the same to him. Whether or not there was a woman in his life didn't matter to him much. What mattered to him were his work, and his friends.

He had long since proven to himself that although women were appealing sometimes, and he liked having a warm body in his bed to comfort him on cold nights, they were all insane—or the ones he found in his bed always were. There was no question in any-one's mind, if a woman was with Gray, more likely than not, she was nuts. It was a curse he accepted, an irresistible pull for him, after the childhood he'd had. He felt that the only way to break the spell, or the curse that had been put on him by his dysfunctional adopted family, was to refuse to pass that angst-making lifestyle on to a child of his own. His gift to the world, he often said, was promising himself never to have kids. It was a promise he had never broken, and knew he never would. He said he was allergic to children, and they were equally so to him. Unlike Charlie, Gray wasn't looking for the perfect woman, he would have just liked to find one, one day, who was sane. In the meantime, the ones he did find provided excitement and comic relief, for him and his friends.