Swish (5 page)

And the awkwardness wasn’t confined to the realm of the physical. One pudgy guy kept leaning over as if to do something to me with his mouth but hesitating; I couldn’t reassure him, since I didn’t know what he was scared of. Across the crowded room was a bleach blond with whom I kept making the kind of electrical eye contact that portended great sex, but during the entire evening we never had the matching body parts free at the same time. All of us were starting to reek, because we’d followed protocol and not worn deodorant, in case somebody wanted to lick our armpits, and all of us were clenching our abs the whole time for fear that somebody might notice halfway through that we were fat.

But here was a unity of spirit all the same; it was simply collegial rather than bacchanalian. We all had our reasons for coming here, after all, self-transformational or otherwise, and we were all more than happy to help one another achieve our respective goals. The pudgy guy eventually did—very effectively—the thing he’d been working up the courage to do. I never did connect with the blond across the room, but the only thing that meant was that when the gathering ended I could leave trusting I hadn’t exhausted whatever promise the night held. This trust was borne out when on the subway home I started knitting what turned out to be a really great hat.

After mastering orgies I thought it only natural to expand my repertoire to include sex clubs. These are venues at which one pays a modest entrance fee and takes one’s chances with the other patrons. A sex club is like an orgy to which everybody is invited—democracy taken to its logical extreme, the elitist monarchy overthrown in favor of the all-embracing Republic. Louis XVI would have an orgy; Robespierre would go to a sex club, though not, I hope, on a night I was there.

There are two differences between an orgy and a sex club. First, at a sex club it’s considered bad form to introduce yourself to someone before you start putting parts of his body in your mouth. At an orgy you are allowed to offer your name as long as you do so with an obvious sense of irony.

The second difference between an orgy and a sex club is that at a sex club the snacks are wrapped hard candies, while at an orgy they are cold cuts, or, if the hosts are really classy, canapés.

During the period of Dionysiac frenzy I had entered I did not abandon the more intimate tête-à-têtes with which I had begun my journey, though these continued to be of a woefully inconsistent quality. There was the man with the fabulous apartment in the West Village who told me after we were done that I wasn’t enough of a top for him, a complaint that would have held more validity if the heading on my
men4sexnow.com
profile hadn’t read “Tight Bottom.” Then there was the man in the eerily familiar apartment; I realized halfway through our assignation that it was familiar because I had gone on an actual
date
date with its previous occupant disastrous enough to leave me in tears for hours (we made out for ten minutes and then he said, “Um, I’m not really into this” and kicked me out). The sex the second time around wasn’t particularly memorable but I felt I had conquered the genius of the place, and I left whistling. There was Biff, who made me call him Sir and whose harsh “I didn’t
tell
you to suck it” sent thrills down my spine surpassed only by the thrills sent down my spine by what he did when I did what he
had
told me to do.

But at some point I noticed with surprise that my energy had begun to flag, my enthusiasm to wane. I found myself inviting men to my apartment—something I had almost never done before, in case of serial killers—because I couldn’t bear the thought of the subway ride. There was Vlad, for example, who smelled bad but whom I slept with anyway simply so as to be able to make jokes to my friends about Vlad the Impaler. He left my apartment and instead of the joy I had learned to take in reshaping my character I found myself just feeling annoyed. Well, annoyed and smelly, but while a shower took care of the latter it left the former untouched. There were the orgy hosts who proved to be a hard-lived ten years older than they appeared in the photo they had sent me. I didn’t know how to excuse myself gracefully, so I threw myself into the festivities with as much gusto as I could manage. My discomfort increased considerably when I realized that the only other participants were going to be a man with a disfiguring birthmark and another man who kept up a running monologue about his wife, but by this time it was too late for me to leave, as I had already committed myself at both ends. And I spent the whole time wondering whether I was on row five or seven of my sweater pattern, and wanting ice cream, and wishing I were reading
Pride and Prejudice.
Not that this encounter was so materially different from earlier ones like it; but somehow I went home feeling not invigorated but exhausted.

And then I actually started
turning down
sex. He lived too far away, I told myself, or it was late and I had to get up early the next day. Or it was early and I didn’t want to deal with the rush-hour crowd. Or I was tired.

Tired?
I asked myself. Tired of traversing a self I hadn’t even known existed? Tired of searching for the unknown and, once I had found it, letting it sit on my face?

What was happening? Was my soul, until recently so expansive, shriveling and calcifying by the day? Was I losing the capacity to remake myself?

Was I getting old?

And then I stopped. I wish I could say it happened dramatically, one fateful day, but it was more a gentle dwindling. I canceled my subscription to
men4sexnow.com
. I stopped answering e-mails from men who had enjoyed the pleasure of my company and who wished to do so again. I stopped going to orgies and sex clubs. I went back into the low life.

And I ached with loss—but loss of what, I didn’t know. I fought it by filling my time with productive activity. I wrote more, I composed more, I worked more. At first such pursuits didn’t ease the ache at all but gradually, over the three or four years that have passed since then, it has subsided to the point at which I don’t notice it anymore.

Mostly.

Last week, though, my computer informed me that its memory banks were almost full and that, in order to avoid risking the integrity of my hard drive, I ought to divest myself of all unnecessary data. A cursory inventory of the largest files revealed several video clips the deletion of which would have been foolish given the frequency with which my boyfriend is on overnight call at the hospital, so I went in search of other potential jetsam.

Further exploration led me to a number of folders the contents of which I hadn’t examined for years. Among the masterfully snide letters of complaint and the drafts of college papers I’d kept because they reminded me of the TA with the cute ass I came upon a file called ship.jpg and was suddenly overcome with nostalgia.

During my gradual adieu to the fleshpots, I had deleted most of the pictures men had e-mailed me along with offers to have their way with me; since very few of these images showed their subjects’ faces they had been more or less indistinguishable anyway, with a few impressive exceptions. But ship.jpg, along with a handful of other photographs, had escaped its fellows’ fate. Though I hadn’t looked at the picture for years I did not have to open the file to remember it well: It depicted a young Latino man standing in some sort of festive gathering area, his hands grasping the lattice of the low ceiling above him, a wide enough gap on his left side between the hem of his shirt and the waist of his pants to reveal a small but tantalizing expanse of smooth skin stretched taut over cut muscle. The viewer had but a moment to consider this feature, however, before being practically blinded by the stunning face above it, upon which was fixed a smile of utter sweetness that yet managed to convey a sense of depravity the depths of which one is lucky to dream of encountering. I was not so naive as to pine for this gentleman as the One That Got Away, but I had spent an occasional moment or three over the years wishing that he and I might have enjoyed an afternoon together, or at least a lunch hour.

As I double-clicked on the file I felt a frisson of regret at the thought of all the potential in the world. There are men to be had, I thought, men who will pull me into their arms and their apartments and spear me without knowing my name or, possibly, how to spell; but I have lost the knack for reshaping myself, and they are beyond my reach.

I sat back in my chair as the file opened and prepared for the fond reminiscence of a time long gone. The man whose memory had given me so many pleasant moments appeared on my screen.

And he was totally plain.

He had mediocre teeth, and, though the photographer had caught his face at a good angle, two seconds of further examination revealed a visage no more comely than average, and from certain angles less so.

The units did not exist capable of measuring my disappointment. How could ship.jpg have betrayed me so? Or was it my critical faculties that had betrayed me by changing their standards as I aged? The frisson of regret I had felt before opening the file was slipping away moment by moment, but I could not help suspecting that it was taking with it my sense of possibility.

I deleted the file, put my computer to sleep, and left my desk. On the way upstairs I caught sight of myself in the hallway mirror and realized that, no matter what shape I took, the raw material would remain the same and that, no matter who I imagine myself to be, my reflection will never show me anyone better than I am.

I knew I had to take strong measures to keep from sinking further toward despair, so I hurried to the bookcase for some Austen. After a few seconds’ thought, I settled on
Sense and Sensibility,
but though I searched the shelves for twenty minutes,
I’m looking for Mr. Right but I’ll settle for Mr. Right Away
was all I could find.

O
N
C
HEERLEADING

“L
et’s watch ESPN,” said my brother, grabbing the remote control. It was Thanksgiving morning, and we were lolling around the apartment we shared, whiling away the hours before dinner with my friend Debbie. We had no interest in watching the repulsive Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. I had lobbied for
The Christopher Lowell Show,
a program in which a flaming homosexual redecorates houses using only Elmer’s Glue and staples, but Jeremy would have none of it.

As the TV flickered on, I opened my mouth to start complaining so insufferably that he would be forced to change the channel, but before I could speak I was silenced by what I saw on the screen in front of me. It was a college cheerleading championship. Thirty fresh-faced cheerleaders, boys and girls, were running around in perky uniforms, grinning like madpeople, shouting cheers as they flipped their way across a mat and threw one another thirty feet in the air and caught one another on the way down. It was like
Bring It On,
only real.

I was instantly filled with self-loathing. During the activities fair in the first week of college, years before, I had stopped at the cheerleading table, but by the time they called to let me know about the informational meeting I had already scheduled a conflicting choir audition, so I decided not to become a cheerleader. (I also decided not to become a fencer or an appreciator of modern dance, and though I did go to a meeting of the Theosophical Society because I had a crush on one of its members, in the end the fact that nothing anybody said there made any sense proved stronger than my attraction to Jason’s cheekbones, and I didn’t go back.) But now, watching these children, practically children, flying into the air as if adulthood weren’t waiting on the ground to pounce once they came down, I was overwhelmed with regret that I had squandered my youth in serious pursuits. Choir, indeed. I should have been a cheerleader, and now it was just too fucking late.

But after half an hour or so of vicious self-excoriation, I stopped short.
Wait a second,
I thought.
I’m a twentysomething gay man living in Manhattan. There’s
got
to be a cheerleading squad I can join.

And, as if it had read my mind, Google took me posthaste to the website for Cheer New York. More alive with joy than I had been since seeing my first opera at age six (
The Marriage of Figaro
), I left a giddy voice mail saying I was interested in joining the squad; on the way to dinner I made Debbie hold my keys and wallet and change while I executed a front handspring, the most complicated move I remembered from the gymnastics I’d done at Jewish Community Center summer camp when I was six. I landed precariously—I’d forgotten most of what they taught me in camp about equilibrium—but in the end I kept my balance. “I’m going to be a cheerleader!” I said, and when we got to the restaurant I was so inspired by my new life as a cheerleader-elect that I almost ordered a salad for Thanksgiving dinner. Then I saw the pie the waiter was bringing to somebody else’s table and I figured I could just as easily start my life as a cheerleader-elect the next day. During our meal I could barely concentrate on the conversation, so enthralled was I by fantasies of doing flips and getting thrown in the air and being caught on the way down by a fellow cheerleader who would fall in love with me and get me a dog named Spiffy and make me happy forever.

Unfortunately, when I visited the Cheer New York website again after dinner, I realized that joining the squad wasn’t going to be quite as easy as I’d expected, because, according to the bios on the “About Us” page, every single member was either a gymnast, a professional dancer, or a former college cheerleader. The rudimentary front handspring I had performed for Debbie and my brother on the sidewalk was the most difficult gymnastic feat of which I was capable. I had taken some dance classes the summer after I finished college, from a woman named LaToya who kept a studio behind her hair salon. I would show up on Tuesdays and Thursdays at noon and spend an hour and a half attempting to plié and pas de chat and pirouette. The only other student in the class was twelve, and she was better than me. After class one day I asked LaToya if I could get a haircut; I may have been the first white person whose hair she had ever styled, but she did an excellent job. After brushing the stray hairs off my neck, she told me she was putting the dance classes on hold for the rest of the summer. I suspect she simply didn’t have the heart to tell me that I was not cut out for a life of kicks and chaînés.

And so now it was with a heavy heart that I shut my computer down, made three cups of chocolate pudding, and turned on the
Golden Girls
marathon on Lifetime Television for Women and Gay Men. I would obviously never make the cheerleading squad. I was barely able to brush my teeth without tripping; what could I hope to contribute to a cheerleading squad populated by experts? I finished the pudding and considered making more. The best dream I had ever had was dead, and in its place I felt a void that not even the Golden Girls’ biting insouciance could fill, not even in the episode where they sneak into somebody else’s high school reunion so they can meet men and Rose has to pretend to be the school’s Korean exchange student Kim Fung-Toy.

But the next morning, when I went again to the Cheer New York website immediately upon waking up not that I was obsessed or anything, I understood that fate had spoken, because there was a new section that said they were having tryouts in a week and a half. If I had to claim to be a gymnast or a professional dancer or a former college cheerleader in order to make it onto the squad, then so be it; neither mortal nor god was going to keep me away from the Alfred E. Smith Recreation Center come Monday week.

When the appointed day arrived and I walked into the huge gym on the second floor of the dilapidated building, it appeared empty at first, but then through an open door at the back I saw a group of homosexuals filling out pieces of paper en masse. I joined them and started answering the questions on the form they gave me. Mercifully, it did not ask anything about dancing or gymnastics or prior cheerleading experience. There was a section for “Special Skills” in which I wrote “speak French, German, Italian proficiently; have eliminated gag reflex.” This was a lie; I had not eliminated my gag reflex, but I figured that if they insisted on a demonstration I could always say I was still three days away from being officially STD-free. The form also asked for my weight, and I wrote it down honestly, possibly for the last time in my life.

Once the co-captains of the squad, who introduced themselves as Horace and Javier, had collected all the forms, they led us over to the bleachers, where the coach, a queeny, mous-tachioed martinet the size of Tinker Bell, welcomed us to the clinic. His name was Christopher, he told us, though on the squad people referred to him as Princess. “But calling me Princess is a privilege,” he continued sternly. “You have to
earn
the right to call me Princess.”

He went on, but it became somewhat difficult to concentrate on what he was saying when a dozen guys and one woman in startlingly bright but uncampy uniforms (shortsleeved shirts and long pants for the men, a short halter top and a pleated skirt for the woman—all, lamentably, polyester, but I came to learn that this was standard fabric for cheerleading uniforms) began practicing behind him on the other side of the gym. My heart leapt within my breast to see a grown man jump into the hands of two other grown men who hurled him up into the air, where he executed a complex maneuver that had undoubtedly required years of study to master but that filled him in this moment with the grace and fire of a sub-Saharan predator or a bird long dead even to myth. Then he fell back down into his protectors’ arms as if they had been formed to fit him.

Watching this, I became, if possible, even more determined than before to become a part of the squad. I tore my gaze away from the practice and unobtrusively surveyed the other homosexuals gathered around me. There were a couple of women and perhaps two dozen men, all of whom I hated. Who knew how many new squad members would be accepted? What if they were looking for ten new cheerleaders and I was number eleven? Two or three of the hopefuls were unspeakably beautiful and I hated them most of all. To my left in the row in front of me sat a gorgeous Latino with a Japanese character tattooed on his arm; I wanted him to ravish me and then die.

We started the tryouts, in which we had to perform complicated cheers like “Go, New York, let’s go!” and “New York, let’s hear it! Yell ‘Go, fight, win!’” I spent the entire time with a look of grim concentration on my face, hoping that my cohorts would trip and fall while I got everything right. Every once in a while I would remember that I was supposed to be cheering and freeze my face in a rictus of joy for a minute or two. Then I would forget again and go back to using my psychic powers to give my competitors acute appendicitis.

At the end of the tryouts we were given the opportunity to show off any special skills we might have. Since I suspected that my proficiency in foreign languages wasn’t particularly relevant to the duties I would be asked to perform as a cheerleader, and since, looking around, I thought it likely that
everybody
on the squad had long ago extinguished all traces of a gag reflex, the only thing left to display was my front handspring, which went beautifully until I landed and fell on my ass. Humiliated, I asked to try again; a lanky homosexual who looked to be about twelve years old grabbed my arm and hissed under his breath, “Lean forward when you land.” I did, and I stayed upright. Figuring I should quit while I was at least not behind, I fled as soon as the tryouts were over. “Phone the hotline after noon tomorrow,” called Princess as I made good my escape, “and there’ll be a message with the names of the new squad members.”

The next morning, I showed up trembling for my wretched day job. (I spent hours every weekday transcribing tapes of interviews in which people said things like, “Yeah, as I told you, we are a very vanilla house, even, as I told you, futures are mainly used to hedge some positions or to implement continuing duration strategies, but not as an important distinction or asset class.” I did not know what any of this meant but it was clear to me that I was helping rich people become even richer while I had to pull out a calculator to see whether I could afford to buy peanut butter.) At the stroke of noon I tore off my headphones, ran to the phone, and dialed the Cheer New York hotline. My name was the third or fourth that Princess’s voice lisped on the message, and the instant I heard it I began jumping up and down and running around the office shouting, “New York, let’s hear it! Yell ‘Go, fight, win!’” and doing toe touches. I tried to figure out a way to insert an
i
into my name so I could dot it with a heart, and I started making plans to be really mean to all the unpopular kids.

The next day, unfortunately, I had my first cheersetback. There are two cheerleading positions, flyer and base; flyers are the people who get thrown in the air and caught on the way down, and bases are the people who do the throwing and catching. On a traditional squad, the flyers are petite girls and the bases are burly boys. However, since there were only four girls on Cheer New York and only two of them were petite, we had to bend the rules a little bit and let men do some of the flying. I am under five-six and 140 135 pounds, not as tiny as Princess or the bird long dead to myth, but still much smaller than most of the other guys on the squad, so I looked forward to lording my position as a flyer over rivals and loved ones alike. All my friends would be stuck on the ground and I would float above them.

Except that Cheer New York had assigned me to a new category, that of “mid-base flyer.” In the e-mail Princess sent out to the squad informing us of our positions, he explained that mid-base flyers would indeed fly, but never above the bases’ heads. I understood immediately that this meant he thought I was too fat to be thrown in the air. I sent a brittle response saying that I thought more useful positions to designate would be “top” and “bottom.” Princess replied, “LOL!!!!!!! But seriously, we discourage squad members from sleeping with each other, for the benefit of team morale.” And I was like, why the fuck didn’t you mention this at the orientation?

That weekend there was an LGBT athletic team Christmas mixer, to which Cheer New York was invited, at a bar in Chelsea called XL. I hate bars with a deep and abiding hatred: they are loud, so I can’t have a conversation; often smoky (depending upon city ordinances), so I can’t breathe; and full of intimidating people with stylish haircuts, so I spend a lot of time in the corner repeating over and over the words “I will not die alone.” I went to the mixer fully prepared to spend an anguished hour failing to mix with anybody before going home and eating a pound of M&M’s.

Instead, I had a totally great time.

From the instant I walked in, the cheerleaders were so welcoming that I felt as if I were at a party with old friends where the music just happened to be too loud. It was also heartening to see that, of twenty-five squad members there, perhaps seven were white, a marked contrast to the racial segregation that pervades even the gay community. Furthermore, the cheerleaders were so flaming they could have melted granite. Nobody who spends more than three seconds in my company can say that I am a paragon of traditional masculinity. But next to some of these guys I was Arnold Schwarzenegger. And, to top it all off, there were presents: a “Cheer Loud, Cheer Proud” T-shirt, which I immediately put on and tied very tightly to expose my midriff, and a really gay silver sparkly Santa hat. The cheerleaders were the most touchy-feely group of which I have ever been a part, and within moments I was leaning all over people, hugging them, putting my hands in their pockets, and being swishier than I had allowed myself to be in fifteen years of being out, sucking my teeth and saying things like, “She’s such a bitch!” while pointing dramatically at a big, beefy man holding pom-poms and a cosmo.