Where The Boys Are (40 page)

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Authors: William J. Mann

BOOK: Where The Boys Are
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One Month Later, The Folsom Street Fair, San Francisco
Jeff
S
an Francisco. Is there any gay man on the planet who, on his first visit to the City by the Bay, hasn’t fallen in love with the place?
Anthony sure does. He’s standing here on top of Twin Peaks, his arms outstretched, the wind in his hair, looking down at the city, turning all at once in a circle, marveling at the panoramic vista of sea and sky and rolling land. “So
open,”
he says, his voice choking up. He’s actually getting emotional over it. “So
free
. Nothing in the way. You can see forever up here!”
We’ve come to San Francisco for the Folsom Street Fair, and I’m giving Anthony a tour of the city. From Twin Peaks we head down to South of Market, where the fair stretches from Seventh to Twelfth Street. We’re hardly what you’d consider leather guys, but the Fair is a wide-open, inclusive event, three hundred thousand strong. Everyone is leather for a day—kind of like St. Patrick’s Day, when everyone becomes an honorary Irishman for twenty-four hours. Just as I did last year, I proudly strapped on the leather harness Javitz bought for me so long ago. It does make my pecs look pretty good.
Anthony attracts the lion’s share of attention, however, wearing a pair of my leather pants and no shirt. Strangers come up to him to run their hands down his torso, marveling at his abs. He’s in his glory. It’s still summer here, eighty degrees without a pinch of humidity; back home the weather has already turned chilly. San Francisco seems a Shangri-la to Anthony, a gay paradise of love and sex.
And isn’t it? We started our tour in the Castro, where Anthony was struck by the history of the place, just as I had been over a decade earlier, when Javitz first showed it to me. This was ground zero for queer-dom, and Anthony drank up my tales of gay history with a voracious thirst.
“This was where Harvey Milk had his camera shop,” I told him.
He looked through the glass, then back at me. “Tell me again who he was.”
So I filled him in, recounting Milk’s legendary out-of-the-closet career in the seventies, and how the riots after his assassination proved once and for all what kind of collective power angry queers could wield.
“One more gay man killed by the forces of reaction,” I mused, looking up Castro Street toward Market, thinking of the generations of gay men who had crossed at that intersection, so many now gone.
Anthony was looking over at me, the sun highlighting his hair. “What happened to Harvey Milk’s killer, Jeff?” he asked softly.
“They let him out,” I spit. “He served only a few years. Finally he killed himself.”
“Is that what he
should
have done?” Anthony asked me. “Was that only right—that he took his own life?”
I remember thinking it was an odd question. “Yes,” I said. “I suppose given that justice hadn’t been served by the courts, it was the only way the whole tragedy could ever come to a close.”
Anthony just nodded. What was he thinking? Why didn’t he talk?
Why
, after all this time?
Despite my playing tour guide for him, things haven’t really been all that rosy between us. Not for over a month, really, not since my meeting with Mrs. Riley. I mean, here I am, knowing about his past but unable to talk to him about it. I’ve wanted so much to convey Mrs. Riley’s message to him, but after Brent’s death it seemed impossible. Anthony became a high-strung bundle of nerves, easily rattled, quick to dissolve into tears. Raising anything I’d learned risked setting him off. I’ve come to realize just how emotionally fragile he is.
“Do you want to talk, Anthony?” I’ve asked several times, trying to get him to open up. “About the
real
reason Brent’s death has so upset you? Do you finally want to talk about your past?”
“No!” he’s cried. In his eyes I’ve seen—what? Terror? Shame? Madness? Maybe all of them, but mostly it’s desperation. I let the matter drop.
So the distance has only grown, and Anthony surely feels it. He’s gone back to sleeping on the couch, a move I made no attempt to change. I’ve begun writing, the first tentative pages of a story, the first attempt I’ve made in almost two years. I spend my days at my computer, while Anthony watches television alone. He knows things have changed between us. On the flight out here, he looked over at me with those puppy-dog eyes of his and said, “Jeff, I have a feeling when we go back to Boston, you’re going to want me to get my own place.”
I agreed it might be best.
I just can’t keep up the pretense with him anymore. You
have
to understand what I mean. How can I go on being intimate with someone who doesn’t trust me enough to share the most basic facts of his life—
and
who continues to disappear one night a week without explanation?
And there’s something else, too. Lloyd’s been coming to Boston fairly regularly. Things between Lloyd and Eva have deteriorated pretty rapidly over the last month. He jumps at any chance to get out of Provincetown and come up to Boston—and not just to see
me
, as it turns out. He and Henry, wonder of wonders, have become quite the buds. Lloyd even went with Henry and Shane to the Russian River a few weeks ago.
Lloyd
, at a circuit party, dancing all shirtless and sweaty with several hundred other guys. I admit I felt a little piqued, given how Lloyd would never, ever consider doing that with me. “It was awesome,” he told me. “I felt such a bond, such a connection with the guys there.”
“What have I been trying to
tell
you?” I asked, exasperated. “The circuit isn’t just about mindless drug abuse.”
Still, I tried not to act all pissy about it. That would totally backfire. Lloyd would get aggravated, and I’d give Henry the satisfaction of thinking I’m actually
jealous
of their friendship. Isn’t
that
a crazy thought? So I just said I was really glad Lloyd had had a good time and that maybe he’d cut me a little slack in the future about the whole circuit scene.
Besides, it wasn’t like I could’ve gone with them or anything, not with Anthony on my hands. He’s really been a mess these past few weeks since Brent died, and he’s always worse right after one of Lloyd’s visits. Twice Anthony came in to find Lloyd and me hunkered down on the couch watching old movies, Mr. Tompkins snoring between us. He just headed into the bathroom and stayed there until the movie was over and Lloyd left for Provincetown.
In many ways, I think both Anthony and I view San Francisco as a good-bye trip. Sad, maybe, but inevitable. At least we’ve managed a few smiles together over the past few hours. Anthony’s thunderstruck by the fair: all the leather, the whipping demonstrations, the boys in studded collars being led around on leashes by their masters. Anthony’s eyes bug at the sight of a rubber-clad woman dripping wax on the upturned nipples of a bound girl-slave. His head keeps whipping around to watch the hundreds of butts, some tight and hard, others flabby and hairy, protruding from black leather chaps.
“You’d never see anything like this in Boston,” he gasps.
“Sodom by the Sea,” I tell him.
The trip was planned months before, back when we all envisioned it to be a happy excursion. But the flight out here had been miserable. Not only had Anthony pouted the whole way, but Henry was still distant: cordial but aloof, as he’s been for months. I’m not even sure if we’re friends anymore. He and Shane have plans to stay elsewhere, while Anthony and I are crashing with Zed, the guy I dated briefly last year. That, of course, has made Anthony even more insecure, fearful that I’ll end up sleeping with Zed again. All in all, a wretched flight, made worse by turbulence from Cincinnati to the Rockies.
But once we landed in the fabled Golden City, our spirits rose. I even permitted myself to take Anthony on the tour. It’s a glorious day, the Golden Gate sparkling in the sun. I remember my own first visit to the city, as a bright-eyed twink on the arm of Javitz. How I loved the place; never, not even in New York, had I seen so many queers. Even then there were still a few Castro clones walking around, in their tight jeans, flannel shirts and handlebar mustaches, though most would be extinct, due to AIDS and the fashion revolt against them, within a few years.
I loved just as much the topography of the place. Turn a corner and suddenly you’re at the top of a hill, looking down a long, long lane that rises and falls to the water below. Behind you, mountains scrape the sky, and it’s rare that anything obstructs your view. Anthony, too, was in awe of this as he stood atop Twin Peaks, tears in his eyes, like a Jew on Mount Sinai, or a Muslim finally arrived in Mecca.
Yet Anthony’s emotion, like so much about him, remains curious. His wonder is perhaps understandable to anyone from the East, where towns are tucked into valleys, not spread over hills, and where buildings reach so high and cluster so tightly together that even a view into the next block is often impossible. But why the tears? Why did Anthony weep at such a vast expanse of freedom, at seeing the wideness of the world, the limitless opportunity in front of him?
A snippet of conversation comes back to me:
“I can’t stand being inside for too long. Especially in places as small as that apartment.”
“A little claustrophobic, eh?”
“Yeah. Actually, a
lot
claustrophobic.”
“Look, Jeff,” he’s saying now, pulling on my hand. “This guy’s eating fire.”
In front of us, a burly man in leather overalls is swallowing flames from a stick as if they were cotton candy.
“Anthony,” I tell him, suddenly conscious of the time, “you can stay and watch, but I need to hustle if I want to catch Varla Jean.” Varla Jean Merman, Provincetown’s own drag queen for the new millennium, is performing in a few minutes on the stage at Seventh Street. “We can meet up later.”
“No,” he says, running after me to catch up. “I’ll come with you.”
So like a child . . .
That’s what Randy Phillips had said about him. You know who I’m talking about, don’t you? Randy Phillips.
R. Phillips
, from the apartment in Chelsea. The guy Anthony had been with in New York before he met me.
“He was always afraid of getting lost,” Randy explained. “He stuck to me like glue—until New Year’s Eve, that is, when he met
you.
”
There was bitterness in his voice. I guess I can understand it. In his view, I took Anthony from him. Stole him away from his very house.
Yes, my investigations have continued. Lloyd’s idea was a good one, and as soon as we returned from New York, I found the phone number for R. Phillips online. I called and left a message, explaining I was a friend of Anthony Sabe’s; not surprisingly, he didn’t call me back. But I was persistent, finally catching him at home on a Sunday morning. He wasn’t too happy to hear from me, especially when he realized who I was.
But he didn’t hang up on me. He seemed curious to know what had become of the golden boy he’d met in Miami, who’d so briefly brightened up his winter.
“Have you found out much about him?” he asked me.
“No. Actually, I was hoping maybe you might tell me a few things. You see, I’m worried about him.”
“He know you’re calling?”
“No,” I had to admit.
“You’re out of line, dude, going behind his back like this,” Randy said.
I acknowledged I probably was. “But I wouldn’t be calling you if I felt there were any other options. You see, I’ve come to care for him a great deal, and his state of mind has become very fragile of late. A friend of ours died, and he’s been really upset. I was simply hoping you might have some insight.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Well, to start, maybe how you met.”
He laughed. “At the White Party in Miami. Where else do gay men meet these days?”
That much fit with Anthony’s story. He told me he had come back to New York with this guy after meeting him in Miami.
“So tell me,” Randy said, clearly no longer concerned about crossing any lines. “Does he still disappear once a week overnight?”
When I told him that yes, Anthony was still pulling his weekly disappearing act, Randy Phillips recounted a pattern of behavior that I recognized immediately. No talking about the past, a mysterious silence whenever the subject was pressed too hard.
“You ought to tell him to be careful with that ID I got for him. He’s lucky I’m an old softie and didn’t turn him in.”
“What ID?”
Randy laughed. “He had nothing when I met him. He was just a total bum, getting by on his looks. If he was going to fly back to New York with me, I had to get him an ID. Good thing I have connections in Florida. With all the illegal aliens there, they’re experts at whipping up fake IDs. We had one for Anthony in a day.”
His New York nondriver identification card. It was
fake
. I said nothing, just let Randy Phillips keep talking. I could tell as I listened that, despite the fact that they’d been together only a couple of months, Randy had fallen hard for Anthony. And in his questioning of Anthony’s past, he’d been much more aggressive than I’ve been.

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