On November 30, 1990, I moved to Madison from Birmingham, AL with TWO dogs and a new boyfriend in tow. Two days later, December 2, 1990, Madison experienced the worst snowfall/blizzard in over a decade. 17 inches of snow in 8 hours was the final tally and CUNA Mutual closed for the first time in the company's history.

On my first day of work in the home office, I was not greeted with the usual "Welcome to Madison, John." It was much more like hysterical laughter. The Southern Boy moved to Madison just in time for record snowfall. I was dependent on friends to drive me to and from work for that first week because my Southern truck was TOTALLY inappropriate for sloppy, snowy, slippery roads.

From this point on, the story could take several paths. I could choose to relate my time in Madison in terms of the houses/apartments I've had. I could gauge the time by different relationships or I could go by the different jobs I've had within CUNA Mutual. ALL of the above are really so inter-related, that I'm just going to go with my first inclination and use boyfriends as milestones. (Despite being warned against such.)

We'll start with FRED. Not a single name I use in the re-telling of this part of my life will be real.

A couple of months prior to moving to Madison, I had gotten brave enough to actually meet some real, live homosexuals. Instead of spending untold hours on the Sprint Dial-out service chatting on bulletin boards in New York City, I responded to a personals ad I saw in a magazine. The person I met was certainly interesting, entertaining… and, oh yeah, REALLY needy and clingy. Not a good first experience, but I didn't know better, so I was practically married in the first week. How was I to know that this wasn't how it was supposed to be?

A month or so went by and the jealousy and clinging became more and more of a problem. I had a friend from work visit one weekend, which was my perfect excuse to say I needed the weekend to myself. By Sunday afternoon, Fred had had enough. When Alan (my co-worker) and I arrived back from our afternoon out and about I was greeted by a voice message (that Alan couldn't help but hear) from Fred. He was at one of the downtown bars and had consumed a number of Long Island Iced Teas. He was a MESS. It was my duty to go rescue him.

I saw Alan off and dutifully went to the bar to rescue Fred from himself. Turns out that he wasn't at all interested in being rescued. He wanted to drink some more and I wasn't confident enough at that point to insist on anything different. In the meantime, he had been socializing with someone from Tuscaloosa who he had met at the bar. This new person, we'll call him Joe, was being very patient with Fred and very understanding of my situation

The evening wore on and it became apparent that Fred needed to be getting home. He insisted on driving himself (no lectures please) and I let him. I, on the other hand, was enjoying the attention being paid to me by Joe. Joe had a truck that was missing a headlight and I insisted that he stay over at my place rather than driving the full hour back to his place at such a late hour. This is, of course, after he and I made absolute spectacles of ourselves in the bar(s) in downtown Birmingham.

He stayed and we both headed out the next morning, me for Shreveport to work and him to Tuscaloosa. When Friday came around, I headed directly for Tuscaloosa and called Fred to tell him that I was going to be staying over an extra night and wouldn't be back to Birmingham 'til Saturday morning. I stayed over in Tuscaloosa and headed into Birmingham Saturday morning.

My call to Fred on Saturday morning was the iciest I believe I have ever experienced. I learned from this experience that the gay community is a VERY small one and communications are GOOD. Fred had heard about Joe and me from several people and he was not happy. I don't believe I ever saw him again - nor the VCR I had loaned him. He claimed that he threw it down the stairs, but then several years later when he tracked me down in Madison, he confessed that he had just told me that to upset me. He still had the VCR if I wanted it. I declined.

That leads us to the Joe phase of my life. I have backtracked a little bit here. I brought the story back to Birmingham to re-tell some of what led to the move to Madison. Here is where I began getting REALLY tired of being on the road constantly. It might have had something to do with finally having a social life and finding the constant travelling very inconvenient.

At any rate, I started putting out feelers for openings in the home office that would allow me to build on my career with the company, but not travel as much. The training department was a likely place to look and without too much coercion, I landed a job as a technology trainer. On one of the next training trips to Madison, I received a call one evening in the hospitality room (envision several of my co-workers standing around as I receive this call from Birmingham). Joe was calling to say how happy he was. He had quit his job and he was really looking forward to the move to Madison. Uhm…. Did I invite him? No, not really, but once again, I didn't know any better than to think that things always moved this quickly. Oh did I mention that Joe hung around after the Fred episode? He was spending most of his time in my apartment in Birmingham and had even asked me to allow one of his friends to crash at my place (it was a 2 bedroom) while he looked for a place of his own.

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