Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir (18 page)

“Sure. Be my guest.” As he placed his coat on top of mine, I remembered the dime bag of coke in my pocket. “Be right back.”

I took my drink and popped into the bathroom for a snort or three. For another thirty minutes or maybe an hour, I boomeranged from the barstool to the bathroom and points in between. After the coke dried up, I decided I had had enough. Actually, I had had enough because I’d had all there was to have.

The crowd had thinned a bit. I headed back to my stool. The leather bomber jacket had been replaced by a peacoat. I lifted it to get my Persian-lamb coat. But it wasn’t there.

Hey. Wha’ happened?

A beefy, mustached, bald man appeared. “Excuse me, but that’s my coat.” He pointed to the peacoat I was holding.

“Oh, sorry. I was looking for mine. It was right here.”

“I just put mine there. There was no coat there.”

I panicked. Maybe it was the wrong stool. I looked left and right. The stools on either side were empty.

“Hey,” I yelled at the bartender. “I had a Persian-lamb fur coat. Right
here
.” I pointed to my stool.

“A what kind of coat?”

“A black, furry coat with a mink collar.”

“Haven’t seen anything like that in here.”

I careened around the bar looking for the coat or anyone wearing it. I ran out to the street to see if I could spy the thief casually sauntering off in it. Nothing.

I went back inside and did what I knew how to do best in a moment of crisis: I ordered another drink. In the time it took to finish two gin and tonics I went through the five stages of grief:

Denial:
It can’t be gone. Okay, it’s got to be here somewhere. I’ll find it.

Anger:
Who in the Rawhide would want a Persian-lamb fur? Where is he going to wear it? Motherfucker!

Bargaining:
If only I had carried it with me. If I ever find it, I’ll never let it out of my sight, and I certainly won’t wear it in a place like this.

Depression:
You idiot! You didn’t even get a chance to wear it to a party. You blew it all on a nothing night. You might as well have handed it wrapped in a red ribbon with a complimentary cocktail to the first guy you spoke to. You’re such a fuckup!

Acceptance:
God
damn
it! It’s gone and was never meant to be. Maybe I never deserved it.

As I left the dark cave of the bar, a gust of frigid wind hit my coatless body, a final slap in the face.
Damn, it’s cold outside.
“Taxi!”

SEVENTEEN

Forgive Me, for I Have Sinned

I scanned John’s plywood-and-cinder-block shelves, heavy with titles like
Sexuality and the U.S. Catholic Church
,
The Case for Clerical Celibacy,
and
The Vatican and Homosexuality
. I’d met John, last night’s hookup, at the witching hour in a dark corner of a Lower East Side, poultry-themed bar, the Cock.

As John handed me the two Advil I’d requested and a mug of black coffee, I said, “Judging from your library, I’d say that you’re either a lapsed Catholic or a priest.”

John sat opposite me on his futon, curling his long legs under his six-foot-two, meatless frame, and took a sip of his coffee. “Actually, I
am
a praacticing Caatholic”—his
a
’s were pronounced long and flat—“but a laapsed priest.”

His shrug of the shoulders and so-sue-me grin told me that he wasn’t joking. Besides, his goofy, puppy-dog, fortyish face instantly conveyed that he didn’t have an ironic bone in his lanky body.

“If I’d only known, I would have called you Father John last night.”

“Oh, Gad,” he said with a roll of the eyes. “I’m glaad you didn’t. I’m actually on leave from my church in Minnesota.”
Minnesota. That explains the accent.
“I’m at Fordham getting my maaster’s. My thesis is on sexuality and the Caatholic Church.”

“You’re doing some
excellent
fieldwork.”

“Ha. I’m making up for lost time. I’ve been a priest for fourteen years. I wanted to be a priest my whole life. When I was a little boy, I used to pretend to be a priest and say Maass in the basement with a makeshift altar and everything.”

“Wow. I grew up Catholic too, but I spent my make-believe time pretending to be Ann-Margret falling off of a Vegas stage. I don’t know what’s gayer.” He laughed. “Were you celibate the whole time you were a priest?”

“Well, I’m
still
a priest, just on leave. Yep. I was celibate. The
entire
fourteen years.”
Fourteen years? I can’t imagine being celibate for fourteen hours.
“A lot of my fellow priests used to sneak over to Minneaaapolis and spend entire weekends at the baaths. But I never strayed.” He took a sip of coffee from the mug he held with both hands and looked past me with a blank stare. “Celibacy fucked up my life.” Then he broke the mood by scolding me. “I was pretty drunk laast night, but
you,
my son”—he shook his index finger at me—“were
very
drunk.”

I hung my head in mock shame. “Forgive me, Father John, for I have sinned, and I have the hangover to prove it.”

I chuckled at my mock display of contrition while I winced inside at having pulled another all-nighter. Michahaze and I had classified our marriage as “modern” years ago. We went through couple’s therapy for a brief time after the Zurich trip. Neither of us could stand the therapist, an Ernie the Muppet of a man whose earnest smile hovered over praying hands while he spewed a litany of therapy jargon—“comfortability,” “anger transference,” “projecting”—in hushed tones. But he did get us talking to each other about what we wanted. It came out that Michahaze was no angel either, just not as sloppy in his transgressions. (My drinking never came up. At that time I didn’t get the equation that too much booze equals you never know where you’ll end up. I was always bad at math.)

End result: we loved each other and our life together, but wanted the excitement of other men, so, like many gay couples we knew, we decided to have an open marriage. Old salt that I was at thirty-three, I believed from experience and observation in two kinds of long-term gay-male couples: those who fuck around and are open about it, and those who fuck around and lie about it. Whenever I espouse this theory, I get three different reactions: straight women’s faces fall; gay men nod in agreement; straight men are jealous.

But the deal was no love affairs, and no sleepovers—always come home. I repeatedly broke the “always come home” part of the bargain. Once I was out there and a couple of drinks became half a dozen, I couldn’t stop until I found sex. I had to have it. By the time I found it, it was often so late, I’d pass out in the strange bed I was in before I could pour myself into a cab. It meant my head hung in
real
shame, profuse apologies, a couple of days of silence from Michahaze, and a slow thaw over the week. A social engagement could melt the ice into manageable cubes, when we’d put on a good face for our friends, pour some booze over those rocks, and by the end of the evening have put on good faces for each other too.
Wash. Rinse. Spin.
Until the next dirty load piled up.

After that first night with Father John, I remember slinking home soiled with guilt and shame, hoping Michahaze had already left the apartment to have his Sunday alone so I wouldn’t have to face him.
Oh, shit.
I remembered that my friend Kelly and her nine-year-old son were coming over to retrieve that filthy, caged rabbit they called a pet. Michahaze and I had kept the rabbit for a week while they were on vacation.
Great. What’s Michahaze going to tell Kelly?
I turned the corner onto West Eighty-second Street, and Kelly and her son were walking down the stoop of our building carrying the rabbit in its cage. They could have been a photo in a real estate brochure for the family-friendly Upper West Side. I felt naked. I ducked into the entrance of a closed restaurant and hid.
How long should I hide here? How long
can
I hide?

*   *   *

During the rest of that autumn I helped Father John make up for those barren fourteen years. We usually met during my lunch hour, so no more all-nighters. And sex only. Some heavy affection, but no love. Then he disappeared until right after the New Year. He called me at the office with a nervous catch in his voice. “I’ve got the claaap. Gonorrhea.”
Ah, that explains the silence. Nothing kills a beautiful thing like an STD.

“Oh, dear. I’m so sorry to hear that.”

“Have you, um, noticed anything?”

I told him that I hadn’t.
Glad we always used condoms.
I promised to get checked out, but I never saw Father John again.

EIGHTEEN

Lost in Rio

“I’ll make this book a bestseller if I have to suck every cock in Manhattan!” I said to my boss, Liz. She doubled over in laughter and let her auburn bob fall across her broad face. She composed herself and grinned with a twinkle in her half-moon eyes, which resembled lunette windows, and replied, “Use whatever works, I always say.” I was in her office discussing the publicity campaign for a book that we had huge bestseller dreams for, the kind of book for which I had been hired as publicity director.

I had been born again two years prior when I left the dismal employ of Duh Wah. Not only had I landed back in publishing, but at the top of my field as a vice president, executive director of publicity, at a respected publisher of serious nonfiction. I was going to bring razzle-dazzle to its dusty shelves with my glossy r
é
sum
é
. It was a bit highbrow for my taste—the likes of Joan Collins and Eddie Fisher would never spill ink there—but I was running the show. And there was Liz. Harvard-educated, robust, former lover of black men, current lover of one woman, Karen, self-described “gay man trapped in a woman’s body.”

Liz. I think I fell in love with her the first time I noticed a signature look of hers. She gave this look when someone was talking to her and spewing drivel—saying outrageously stupid things, inane things, crazy theories, offensive remarks, blah, blah, blah. She would cock her head in disbelief, her already-narrowed eyes turning to slits, her eyebrows raised, staring at the oblivious person who was prattling on. The look was almost involuntary and for the benefit of the person behind the person talking, usually me.

Our conversation turned from my bestseller-making strategy to Lent.

“Are you back on Lent?” she asked.

We had been out the night before with colleagues after an author event, and Liz asked me if I wanted my usual martini. After a slight hesitation, I said, “Sure, why not? But I’ll be breaking my Lenten vow to abstain from firewater.”

Her infectious grin had dissolved into a look of panic as she extended her hand like a stop sign. “By all means, don’t break your vow for me.”

“No worries. One night won’t hurt.” For a few years running, I had given up alcohol during the forty days of Lent, but it was getting harder to keep the vow.

“Last night is behind me,” I assured her now. “And I have the headache to prove it. But I’m back on the Lent wagon. It’s always good to give up something you love.”

“Good for you. My aunt Joan couldn’t. She’s been sober for years now and made tons of money as a stockbroker.”
Just like Mama Jean,
I thought.
The money part, not the booze part.
“She’s pretty fabulous. A striking, rail-thin woman with a shock of spiky, silver hair and Lucille Ball–blue eyes. Oh, but the stories she told me about her drinking days. She did crazy things, like give away fur coats to strangers.” I didn’t mention the much-lamented Persian lamb. “Aunt Joan always said that with her, there was a giant dial for booze that was either all the way on”—Liz pantomimed turning a dial to the right—“or all the way off.” When Liz turned the dial to off, she cocked her head and made a clicking sound with her tongue. “Sad, really.”

As soon as Lent was over, I turned the dial back on. I had another of those Persian-lamb-coat nights where two drinks after work turned into twelve. Whenever I told Michahaze that I was going to have a “quick drink after work,” I wasn’t lying. I had every intention of only having two—or three—martinis.

I started where I usually did, across the street at Mesa de Espa
ñ
a. This Spanish restaurant served mediocre paella and had murals on the dining-room walls, red vinyl booths, and a front, L-shaped bar with knotty-pine paneling and a large mirror behind it. The geriatric waiters in red dinner jackets were from the same school as those at the Gramercy Park Hotel. I had made this place my watering hole and routinely took my staff there. We’d make fun of the sad-sack regulars, many of whom drank alone, staring through their reflections in the bar mirror.

I left Mesa around eight-thirty. Somehow eight-thirty fast-forwarded to three in the morning across town, where I was deep in a wintry mix at a seedy Greenwich Village bar. I was doing coke (which I had paid for) with four young guys. When I returned from the bathroom, they were gone and so was my wallet.

I raced after them. They were a block away. I screamed and pleaded with them to take the cash but leave me my wallet so I didn’t have to cancel my credit cards and get a new driver’s license.
Again.
This sort of thing was happening so often that on some evenings I acted as a sober minder of my inevitable drunk self by stuffing twenty dollars of security money in my shoe and removing all but the necessary credit cards from my wallet. This was not one of those evenings.

The boys laughed at my plea and ran away. I stumbled to a pay phone and called the credit-card companies to cancel the cards. I’d become expert at this. Sometimes I’d call the credit-card companies the next morning only to be told that “someone” had already canceled them the night before.
Oops.

The bars had just closed and the streets were crawling with lonesome men who had scattered like cockroaches when the lights came on. Here’s the insane part: I had a sniff or two of coke in my pocket and five dollars, just enough to pick up someone, have some fun, and get home.
The night isn’t lost!
I staggered along the streets searching for a playmate like a diviner who, instead of locating water, can find the debauched and willing. It didn’t take long. We passed each other on the street and spoke. I don’t remember what we said, but “Hey you” was the gist of it. He was cute.
I think.
I had the coke. He knew of a party. We hopped into a cab. I spent my last five dollars on that cab ride. We got to the party and bypassed the bawdy revelry in the filthy living room and went straight to the bathroom. He started to undress. I pulled out the dime bag of coke. Almost nothing was left.