Swish (17 page)

The party, to be held in the outdoors on a pier by the Hudson River, celebrated the opening of a gay media conference. I would not actually be dancing; instead, I would just wander around in my underwear. It rained the whole day of the party and after it stopped raining the air was still bitter cold, so Daniel wrote and told me I didn’t have to come if I didn’t want to, especially as the gig didn’t pay. I ignored this, since I would have shown up if the party had been in Pompeii and Vesuvius had been showing signs of disquietude.

When I got to the pier and stripped down to my thong, however, I panicked. This was my first official engagement as a go-go boy and I had no idea what to do. I called Mike, frantic.

“You’re going to be great,” he said.

“But what if they hate me?”

“You’re so sexy. They’re going to love you.”

“You have to say that, you’re my boyfriend. What if I have to
talk
to people?”

“Just act like a very sweet, very nice, not very intelligent twink. Pretend like you’re pretending to know what they’re talking about. You know”—here his voice turned vacuous—“‘Oh, really? I think my cousin did that once. Where did you get that jacket?’”

This sounded exactly right, so I went back to the party and within twenty minutes had ensnared myself in conversations about the differences between Judaism and Shinto, the virtues and flaws of two different productions of Handel’s
Acis and Galatea,
and the constitutionality of jury nullification.

Then one guy started talking to me about the party he’d been to recently on the tugboat tied next to us on the pier. “It’s a really cool boat,” he said. “Do you want to go see it?”

“Sure,” I said, and for five seconds I actually thought he wanted to show me the tugboat. Then we stepped aboard and he pulled me to him and started biting my neck.

I had never found the romance-novel phrase “he pulled her to him” credible when it described the action the arrogant yet compelling nobleman performed upon the plucky serving-maid heroine, but now, in a flash, I understood. The power of attraction calls to something deeper than human volition, and more shadowed. Though I found the fellow in front of me moderately sexy, I had no interest in being unfaithful to my boyfriend. Yet this man’s desire was a tractor beam, drawing me not just toward him but also away from an existence in which I had ever been the object of anyone’s derision, away from the kindergarten room in which I had crouched on the floor picking up pieces of the puzzle map, cheeks burning, trying to remember whether Zaire went above or below Angola and hating Samara Zinn’s guts.

If I had the opportunity on this tugboat to leave her behind, even for a moment, how could I not seize it?

So my new friend bit my neck and ran his hands over my back and squeezed my ass and tried to kiss my lips, though I wouldn’t let him, and I watched the misshapen self he couldn’t see grow fainter and fainter, until it was almost more fantasy than reality, instead of the other way around. But when he became more daring, I forced myself to say, “We need to stop; I have a boyfriend.”

“I’ll behave myself,” he said, “I’ll really behave myself,” which I took to be about as honest as “He won’t mind if you eat the apple” or “We found the weapons of mass destruction.” Then he reached down between us and I said, “No, we really have to stop, ’cause you’re so hot I’m not going to be able to control myself otherwise.” This is my standard lie when I want to deflect a man’s advances without offending him, except that it’s never completely a lie, even if he isn’t somebody I want to spend the rest of my life with, because the specter of Samara is always with me and any chance to forget her seems a chance worth taking.

So I pulled away from him, regretfully but firmly, and led him back to the party, which lasted another couple hours and during the busiest part of which I was given the job of leading performers to the radio-show booth after their sets were done. Then I went home, fell asleep, and woke up the next day racked with guilt that I had let a man touch me who wasn’t my boyfriend.

During the aerobics class I taught that morning, I was so worried about how Mike would react when I told him what had happened that I paid no attention to what I was doing and almost caused one of my students to fracture her tibia. At lunch afterward, however, what Mike said was, “I don’t have a problem with it. I know how that world works, and I understand the difference between what you give them and what you give me. If you started engaging these guys sexually, I’d feel uncomfortable, but that’s not what this was about. I feel secure in our relationship, and I trust you.”

(When I relayed this conversation to my friend Jim later on the phone he was silent for a moment and then he screamed into the receiver, “DON’T YOU DARE FUCK THIS RELATIONSHIP UP!”)

The next day, Daniel asked whether I could be the regular go-go boy for his Saturday-night radio show; apparently I had performed my task of walking people twenty feet in a straight line with such aplomb as to make clear that here was someone who could be depended upon. “I can pay you a hundred dollars a show,” he said. I did not understand why a radio show needed a go-go boy—were people supposed to
hear
me running my hands over my pectoral muscles?—but it was clearly a leg up and I needed the money and besides who wouldn’t want to be paid for sitting around in his underwear? My chief responsibility turned out to be mixing drinks for the guests, a duty I discharged admirably, since I believe the correct way to make a cocktail (learned from my mother) is to fill the glass to overflowing with spirits and then wave the mixer somewhere vaguely near the rim.

At my first show I had a moment of panic when I mentioned the book I had written,
Gay Haiku,
and Daniel’s cohost, not aware that I was claiming to be single, revealed that his next-door neighbor had told him her brother was dating the author of that book. “Are you still going out with him?” Matthew asked, threatening unwittingly to expose my deception.

“Um,” I mumbled, “it’s complicated,” and refused to say any more. The next morning I called Mike’s sister and forbade her to mention me to anybody until further notice.

But over the next few Saturdays I realized I’d been completely wrong about Daniel and that he couldn’t have cared less whether I was single or not. The better I got to know him, in fact, the more generous and genuine I realized he was. (“You think too much,” he said genially as he bought me dinner one night. “It’s not attractive.”) Furthermore, working for him brought me into contact with people I could never have predicted I would meet and admire. The aptitude test I had taken in tenth grade did not suggest that I would one day be all but naked in a radio booth laughing as I handed piña coladas to drag queens and bons vivants and lesbian punk-rock bands. “You have weird jobs,” Mike told me one evening, but I heard pride in his voice.

Yet I still felt like a failure. I was wilting in the shadow of Go-Go Boy. I had danced in my underwear and been tipped, and I had been paid to take most of my clothes off, but the two had yet to be combined in the same endeavor, and I understood that it was because I wasn’t good enough and I never would be.

But then Daniel finally called and asked whether I could dance at Splash the following Wednesday, and relief washed over me like a very small, benign tsunami. There was no W-2 to fill out, no photo ID to process, but I would nevertheless be a real live go-go dancer.

On the appointed night I set out for Chelsea at eleven; I arrived late, but within thirty seconds of my getting up on the bar, somebody had reached into my underwear, given what he found there a quick squeeze, and pulled his hand out, leaving a twenty behind. Clearly this was not going to be a five-dollar night.

I went on in this manner until the wee hours of the morning. I moved lazily from one end of the bar to the other, smiling coyly at men until they pulled out their wallets. Every so often my underwear would fill up and I’d have to stuff most of the money in my socks. Then my socks would fill up and I’d have to go put most of the money in my locker. Occasionally men would ask my name and tell me theirs and we would spend a few moments talking, but mostly they chose to tip in appreciative silence.

And for three and a half hours, I wasn’t worried.

About anything.

Because no one was weighing me in the balance, eager to find me wanting. No one was trying to determine whether or not I was sexy, because somebody in charge had obviously already determined that I was; otherwise, without the imprimatur of a professional, how would I have been permitted to do what I was doing? And so nobody needed to figure out whether I was smart enough or funny enough or nice enough to be worth his interest. Men were interested in me the moment they set eyes on me. This had never happened to me before.

I wish to make it very clear that I was no more attractive than anybody else in the club. If I’d gotten off the bar and put my jeans on, nobody would have given me a second look—an assertion I know to be true because the one time I’d been to Splash before nobody had given me a second look—and I would have spent the entire evening wishing to be anywhere on the face of the earth but here.

Tonight, however, with my pants off, men were taking it for granted that I was cute and giving me money for it, and in return I was giving them the promise of sex, the promise of
if only.
If only I could get off this bar, if only I didn’t have a boyfriend. If only you and I could be together.

And on some level I meant it, just like I had meant it in the tugboat at the party on the pier. The person these men saw had never been asked to leave the floor during the fast skate at the roller rink at Randy Cohen’s tenth birthday party because he hadn’t been skating fast enough, and Charity Barnett had never told the entire school about it during show-and-tell the next day. The person they saw had never been anything but hot.

Emancipated thus from my crippling past, I was free to interact like a normal human being—to accept what these men offered and to offer what I could in exchange. No, I didn’t want to start dating every guy whose hands grazed my ass, but the emotional generosity each one displayed inspired a reciprocal generosity in me. I don’t think there was a single guy there I wouldn’t have had sex with if circumstances had been different. It wasn’t that they were all muscular and sexy; many of them were in fact quite the opposite. But, along with the crumpled bills, they were offering me their own vulnerability. When two gay men meet under potentially romantic but public circumstances, the default dynamic is for each one to appear to want the other less than the other wants him, which is why often people who are dying to sleep together end up not looking at each other for hours at a time. But evidently this rule doesn’t apply when one of the two men is a go-go boy, and so these guys were allowing me to see them want me. And I felt deeply honored; I was only sorry to be limited in my recompense to an ass shake or two (or ten, depending on how much they were tipping). How could I not brim with gratitude toward the agents of my liberty?

By the time I staggered out into the street—I had not seen 2:30
A.M
. of my own volition since the Clinton presidency—I had made $214 (this number would have been higher, I was told, had patrons not been avoiding Splash after the recent spate of drug busts). It took me three days to recover from the lack of sleep, and after I returned to the land of the living the first thing I did was to e-mail all my friends urging them never to touch singles with their bare hands again, because they had no idea where those bills had been. I left the money I had earned on the coffee table and a few days later, when Mike’s parents were visiting us, they asked whether the overflowing plastic cup was my tip jar from tickling the ivories somewhere. The only way I could think of to avoid answering was to pretend to have an embolism, but just as I was about to start faking muscle spasms my dog ran in dragging a stuffed cow, thereby allowing me to effect a graceful change of subject.

But I finally had to face the fact that, fully clothed and standing on the ground, I was once again the timorous, shrinking violet I had been before filling my socks with legal tender. The cup full of wrinkled cash was no match for Samara and Randy and Charity; their power far overshadowed any ephemeral strength lent me by the tender night.

It was obvious that to regain the freedom I had felt so briefly I needed to dance again; luckily, now that I would be performing regularly at Splash, I would be able to feel that freedom weekly. All that remained was for Daniel to tell me to come back, so I waited patiently for his call.

Very patiently.

Very, very
why the fuck isn’t the goddamn phone ringing?

Apparently go-go boys with regular gigs are few and far between, and the rest work freelance. I was horrified to learn this, as it meant that the only way for me to become a fixture in the go-go world—anything less would be a debacle—was either to keep asking party promoters to hire me or to make them love me so much they would move me to the top of their call list. Either proposition would exert enough pressure on me that after three minutes I would turn into a lump of coal.

Nevertheless, I went back to calling and e-mailing and being ignored. Once I even went to Splash on a Saturday and asked the guy running the party whether I could audition for him—watch out,
Feminine Mystique
!—and he said sure.

That night I started to get to know some of the other go-go boys, who were neither haughty nor aloof nor unapproachable but totally friendly. Michael, for example, who had a) no discernible day job but b) the lithest body I had ever seen, won my heart by tipping me even though go-go boys never have to tip one another; I won his in turn by giving him my drink tickets. Later, as we waited offstage to do the shower show (a nightly Splash event in which all the go-go dancers cavort under the water cascading onto them from a mechanism above the stage) he grumbled in frustration at the limited time he had to achieve erection. “Do you have any Viagra?” he asked.

“Wait,” I said, “do you have to have a hard-on for this?” I was wearing very well-constructed underwear, so I doubted I would have trouble maintaining the appropriate illusion, but still I was concerned.