Where The Boys Are (6 page)

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Authors: William J. Mann

BOOK: Where The Boys Are
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I accompanied her that night for the first time to meet Alex. He’d wanted to attend the lecture himself, but had felt too weak. Eva bought a cassette for him and set it up where he could listen to it. When she inquired how he felt, Alex told her he was “taking baby steps back to life.” She seemed to love that line, and repeated it to me on the way out for coffee later.
“That’s me, too.” she said. “My volunteering, going to the seminar—they’re my own baby steps back to life.”
Me, too, I realized. We talked for hours that night about grief, about how to live with it, even make friends with it. She said I inspired her with such talk; I told her she was the true inspiration. In the ensuing months, we attended many workshops together, and I saw her brighten, emerge from her shell of grief and despair. She told me that my friendship was a beacon of light to her, offering her a direction, a promise that life wasn’t over.
And she’s provided similar hope for me, too—especially a few nights ago, sitting in her living room, musing about the future, when she was suddenly struck with the idea of a guest house, and I jumped on it. “Let’s do it, Lloyd!” she said. “You and me!”
Does it really seem so impulsive? It doesn’t to me. It feels right. I think of Eva’s strength, her compassion, her wisdom. People come into your life for a reason, I truly believe. This is fate. We’re meant to do this together.
All at once, she stands. “Lloyd! Come with me!”
She takes me by the hand and leads me across the room. We climb the stairs to the second floor. “This was Steven’s room,” she says, opening a door at the far end of the hall. It’s the one room of the house I’ve never seen. I look around. A canopy bed with a very gay white veil. In a silver frame hangs an enormous photograph of a flower’s bright yellow stamen. I recognize it immediately as a Mapplethorpe original.
“You and Steven had your own rooms?” I ask, and immediately regret the question. Of
course
they did—at least for the last few years, after he told Eva he was gay.
“Yes,” she says softly, looking down at the bed and patting the blue velvet comforter. “We thought it best.” She takes a deep breath. “This is where he died. I sat here, in this chair, holding his hand.”
She walks over to the closet and slides back the mirrored door. My jaw drops. There’s an array of leather jackets, some with shiny chrome chains on the shoulders. Next to them are dozens of pairs of blue jeans, all neatly pressed and folded over hangers. I can’t help but smile. Javitz pressed his jeans, too, and hung them up like that. The mark of a generation. Steven had been the same age as Javitz.
“I want you to have Steven’s clothes,” Eva says. “My goodness, all this beautiful leather just hanging here untouched. Steven loved leather. He had jackets, pants, shirts, chaps...” She reaches in and pulls out a pair of black motorcycle boots. “And the footwear! My word! You
did
say you were a size eight-and-a-half, didn’t you?”
“Yes, but Eva, I couldn’t just. . .”
She looks at me earnestly. “Of
course
you could. You’re the exact same size as Steven. This will all fit you marvelously.”
I smile. “That’s very kind of you.” I can’t stop my smile from turning into a broad grin. “But Eva, you never told me Steven was a leather queen.”
She laughs. “Oh, he wasn’t into sadomasochism or anything.” She’s blushing. “He just liked how he looked in leather. See?”
She picks up a framed photograph from the bureau and hands it over to me. A dark-haired man with a walrus mustache in leather motorcycle jacket and cap, a harness and no shirt, chaps over his jeans.
“Very Tom of Finland,” I observe. I noticed a cardboard box in the closet, a shiny flash of chrome from within. I bend down and extract a pair of handcuffs. “Not into S and M, huh?”
She looks down at the cuffs. “I’ve never gone through that box,” she says in a small voice.
I feel suddenly uneasy standing there with Steven’s photograph in one hand and his handcuffs in the other. I toss the cuffs back into the box and return the photo to Eva.
“Steven taught me a great deal,” Eva says, carefully replacing the photograph back on the bureau. “When he told me he was gay, of course I told him he was free to go and find himself—and another man if he chose, someone with whom he could spend his life.” She’s gazing down at the picture but then turns quickly to focus again on me. “But he chose
not
to. He chose to stay with me. He
loved
me, Lloyd. He may have been gay, but he loved
me.”
“Of course he did, Eva,” I reply gently.
“It was a great blessing, really, that Steven turned out to be gay. It meant no children, of course, but I learned so much about the human condition by getting to know Steven as a gay man. Oh, Lloyd, how I wish you could’ve known him.”
“He sounds like a wonderful guy.”
“Not any more wonderful than you.” She beams at me. “Here. Try on this jacket.”
“Oh, I don’t know...”
“Don’t be silly. It was his favorite.” She pulls a heavy black coat off its hanger. Long fringe dangles from its sides. I hate it immediately but obediently slip my arms into its sleeves. I look ridiculous as I stare into the mirror, but it
does
fit. Perfectly.
“Well, pick out what you might want to take with you tomorrow,” she tells me. “I’ll have the rest shipped up to Provincetown.”
She’s trying to do something kind. These clothes mean a lot to her—such an intimate connection with Steven. Idly I pull open a drawer from the bureau. Steven’s white brief underwear are still neatly folded there. I quickly shut the drawer. The man’s been dead
five years.
I look at myself again in the mirror and shiver.
She’s been hanging on to his memory,
I tell myself. I’m a psychologist; I know this isn’t healthy. But we all handle grief differently. By giving the clothes away she’s taking an important step toward healing.
I replace the jacket on the hanger.
Somewhere in the interior of the house, a cuckoo clock heralds five
A.M.
“We should get some sleep,” I say gently.
“I’ve just been too excited to sleep these days, ever since we decided to do this.” She wraps her arms around herself. “This is
our
millennium, Lloyd.
Ours.
”
I smile at her.
She points out the window, where the purple sky is starting to fade into the first glow of dawn. “It’s a whole new chance for us,” she says. “Oh, Lloyd, I am just so
consumed
with passion for our project! Do you realize just how much you’ve offered me? How you’ve given me a life again—a life I never imagined I’d see? Can you possibly grasp how grateful I am, how
honored
I feel by your faith in me?”
“It’s mutual, Eva,” I tell her, and she suddenly rushes to embrace me. Her breasts wedge between us like large cantaloupes. She tucks her head under my chin against my chest.
You’re thinking she’s a bit dramatic. Okay, I’ll grant you that. But see, I’m drawn to Eva for
precisely
that quality. I’ve been adrift, and the person once closest to me—Jeff—has made himself unavailable. Eva is demonstrative where Jeff is distant, and now, watching the sun come up, holding her in my arms and remembering how Jeff has pulled away yet
again,
I’m as glad to have her in my life as she’s glad to have me.
“A penny for your thoughts,” she says, looking up at me from our embrace.
I smile, a little sadly. “I was thinking of Jeff.”
She pulls out of the embrace gently and walks back over to the window. She seems a little hurt. “Do you think he might want to live there eventually?” she asks, not looking at me. “Our guest house?”
I sigh. “Jeff doesn’t share my passion for Provincetown, at least not since Javitz died. And besides, I just don’t know where Jeff and I stand right now.”
She turns to face me. “For me, Provincetown is the most exciting part of all.” She’s hugging herself again. It’s a gesture she does often, I’ve noticed: a way of almost hiding her breasts. “Ever since Steven died, I’ve told myself that I wanted to leave the city and go somewhere where the air is pure, where there are long stretches of nothing but earth and air and sea, where I can find my soul.”
It’s uncanny how closely our paths have converged. That’s exactly how I view Provincetown: that sandy peninsula where the land ends, crumbling into the sea. There I’ve found another way to live. I’ve become more aware of the sun and the stars and the wind than ever before in my life, reveling in the light that’s like nowhere else on earth.
“We still haven’t decided what we’ll name our house,” I say quietly.
“Nirvana,” she announces, suddenly looking up at me with wide, eager eyes.
“Wow.”
“It just came to me. What do you think?”
I consider it. It feels a bit extreme, but I trust moments like these.
“Nirvana,” I say, smiling. “Nirvana it will be.”
New Year’s Day, Chelsea
Jeff
“T
his way, boys.”
Our waiter is a harried queen covered in glitter. Whatever he touches, like my shoulder, is left graced with a sprinkling of red and silver and green. A throng of gay men stands waiting for their tables, their eyes puffy, their cheeks shadowed with morning stubble. We pass through them, getting a whiff of the cold January air that still clings to their leather jackets and wool scarves. The poor waiter looks exhausted; he’s probably been showing people to tables ever since the restaurant opened at six
A.M.
Now it’s three-thirty in the afternoon, and we’re all still looking for breakfast.
“Here you go.” The waiter hands us each a menu and gestures toward a table near the kitchen. The smell of bacon snaps through the air. “I’ll be back for your order in a minute.” Glitter sprinkles onto the table as he flits off to seat the next people in line.
I take the seat next to the wall. Anthony sits opposite me, transfixed by the residue of glitter on the table. He presses his forefinger onto it, lifting his hand to show me. “Like sparkly snowflakes,” he says, grinning like a little kid.
In the past twelve hours, I’ve discovered he’s filled with a wonder rare among gay men, usually so worshipful of irony and cynicism. Anthony gets excited by little, ordinary things, like the way the exhaust fan in the bathroom quickly evaporates the steam on the mirror, or the sight of kids with a puppy on a leash. With undisguised glee he gazed into store windows, ginning at their moving Santas and elves. He laughed without affectation at the antics of a street vendor and his pet monkey. He caught snowflakes on his tongue, something I would never, ever consider doing on the sidewalks of Manhattan.
Looking across the table at him now, I observe the deep dimples that indent his cheeks when he smites—a precious little detail I’d failed to notice in the darkness of the night before. I can’t help but smile myself as I watch him study his menu, his forehead scrunched up and his lips pursed in thought, as if choosing between eggs and pancakes were a life-or-death decision.
“So what’s your last name, Anthony?” I ask, breaking the silence.
He replies something like “Sobby,” without lifting his eyes from the menu.
“What?” I ask. “What ethnicity is that?”
His blue eyes peak over his menu. A few specks of glitter sparkle in his dirty-blond hair. “I think it’s some kind of Middle Eastern,” he says.
“Middle Eastern?
You don’t look very Middle Eastern to me. How do you spell it?”
“S-A-B-E.”
“I see.” I frown. “So are you adopted?”
“No. I don’t think so, anyway. Why do you ask?”
I shrug. “It’s just that... well, never mind.”
Anthony sets his menu down, folding his hands on top of it. “Blueberry pancakes,” he announces. “That sounds
awesome.
Do you think they use real blueberries?”
“Well, I imagine they might be frozen this time of year.”
“Still.”
He beams like a kid at an ice-cream shop. “So what do you do?”
Now, it might strike you as unusual that it’s taken us this long to finally get around to exchanging such trivia as last names and occupations. But hey, we’ve been
busy.
Dancing, kissing, then going back to the apartment on Nineteenth Street where Anthony was crashing with a friend. I figured that was the best choice: the way Henry had been dancing with the Windex queen, it was pretty clear where things were going with him, and I did
not
want
Shane
walking in during an intimate moment between Anthony and me. So down to Nineteenth Street we’d walked, happily discovering Anthony’s friend fast asleep with his door closed.
You’re probably expecting me to describe an incredible sex scene here. Okay, I’ll do my best. From the hollow of his throat down the line between his pectorals straight through his abs, I licked his honeysweet skin, following the treasure trail of blond hair that leads from his navel to his dick, which, when I pulled down his underwear, sprung up to point at the ceiling. A good-sized piece of meat, with a thick mushroom head, and no hair on his balls at all—natural, not shaved. I found his ass tight and hard, and Anthony was an eager bottom. For an hour we fucked on a mattress on the living room floor, and when it was over we drifted off to sleep with our cum drying between us.
How was that? Hot enough?
Yet all that aside, truth be told, the sex was just okay. Nothing spectacular. Maybe Anthony was just too inexperienced in knowing how and when to move, to give back, to take initiative. And maybe I was just tired and distracted. I found sleep welcome, and I’m pretty sure I dreamed of Lloyd, for I woke up thinking about him.
“At the moment,” I say, bringing myself back to the present to answer Anthony’s question, “I don’t do anything.” I smirk. “I’m independently wealthy, as they say.”
“Wow,” Anthony says, wide-eyed.
I set my menu down. “Have you no sense of irony, absolutely none at all?”
Anthony shrugs. “Guess riot.”
I smile. “How long have you been out?”
He seems suddenly defensive. “What do you mean? Out from where?”
“As gay.” I feel a little impatient. “Out as
gay.”
“Oh.” Anthony does some calculations in his mind. “About six months, I guess.”
“Well, then.
Six months.
That explains it.”
“Explains what?”
The waiter has come back for our order. More glitter rains upon us. I order poached eggs on rye toast, no butter. Anthony asks for the blueberry pancakes and a side of fried eggs and bacon. How does he manage such abs with such fatty foods?
“Explains what?” Anthony asks again after the waiter has left.
“I don’t know. It’s just that you come across a little—oh, I don’t know—
green
.”
He smiles. “Maybe that’s because I am. Gay culture fascinates me, but I admit I feel a little out of it.”
I study him. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-nine.”
“So you’re no kid. Why’d it take so long for you to come out?”
“I don’t know. It just did.”
I frown. “So what were doing with yourself all that time? Did you have a girlfriend?”
Anthony shakes his head. “I was just—by myself.”
The waiter sets down two coffees. Both of us drink them black. I let the coffee revive me, feeling it settle down inside. Around me the faces of the people reflect their hangovers: the dull headache behind the eyes, the dry mouth, the lethargy. I’m grateful I did just the one bump and drank only one beer. I remember what it feels like to be sick and still be craving more of the substances that made you sick. How had I ever let myself get in so deep? Why do people do that to themselves?
I turn back to Anthony, not wanting to remember that time. “So what do you find so fascinating about gay culture?”
He beams. “Everything. I never imagined there was so much going on. All these parties all across the country. How awesome it is.” He blushes a little. “I never realized how good-looking gay guys were, and how
friendly
everyone is. I think I thought gay life was just a bunch of drag queens. But it’s really all these awesomely built guys. And everyone is so friendly. So embracing. I met this guy a couple of months ago who took me to the White Party in Miami—”
“You were there? So was I.”
Anthony laughs. “Yeah, you and me and a couple thousand other guys. That’s what was so
awesome.
All these
men.
And everyone was so friendly.”
I don’t doubt it. Circuit boys have reputations as being major attitude queens, unless of course you have speed bumps for abs like Anthony here. If you look like Anthony, a circuit event can be the most powerfully positive introduction to gay culture you could ever imagine. If you look like the Windex queen, however, it can send you scrambling back to your closet as fast as you can run. As much as I love the scene, I’m not blind to its realities. Yet Anthony’s truth is as real as Shane’s or anybody else’s; I can’t take that away from him.
“It’s been incredible meeting people at parties,” Anthony’s continuing. “I’ve made so many friends so quickly. One of them is the guy I’m crashing with here.” He pauses, seeming to consider something. “Though. . .”
“Though what?”
He sighs. “I think he’s started liking me too much. Do you know what I mean?”
I smile empathically. “Oh, yes. I know exactly what you mean.”
Anthony frowns. “He wanted me to stay in last night with him. To celebrate the New Year, just him and me. But I wanted to go out. I can’t stand being inside, cooped up for too long. Especially in places as small as that apartment.”
“A little claustrophobic, eh?”
“Yeah.” He looks off at nothing in particular. “Actually, a
lot
claustrophobic.” He looks back at me and continues. “I
had
to go out dancing; I just had to. So he went to bed early.” He pauses, seeming to have arrived at some conclusion. “I don’t think I should stay with him for much longer.”
I nod. Ah, how the world turns. I think of that poor guy behind that closed door. He never came out the whole time we were there, but I’d seen his underwear in the bathroom and his toothbrush in the holder. There was a photograph on the refrigerator I assumed to be him: a typical circuit queen, torso shaved and chiseled, a gad of love beads around his neck. How many years ago had that been taken? Did he still look like that? I imagined him lying there in his room, listening to us fuck on the living room floor. Poor guy. Everyone’s in their own little dramas, aren’t they? Even as this faceless, nameless guy probably lay there
hating
me for “stealing” Anthony from him, there I was, screwing Anthony but never once really thinking about anyone but Lloyd.
This morning, I considered heading over to see Lloyd. I still had this Eva lady’s address, after all, but by the time I was up and showered, I figured it was too late. I knew Lloyd was anxious to get back to the Cape, especially now that he has a closing to plan for and furniture to buy and a whole new fucking life to build.
But if I was looking for a distraction, I couldn’t have found a better one. Waking up this morning, I looked over and there Anthony was, stretched out on the mattress wearing nothing but a pair of tight white 2(x)ist briefs, still sleeping like a baby, his perfectly sculpted chest rising and falling in sweet, soft breaths. Just why he’d put his briefs back on after we’d had sex, I wasn’t sure, but it sure did make him look like a model on an underwear box.
So you can understand the impulse that led me to wake him up and initiate sex again—it was still just okay, not great—and then we showered together and headed out for breakfast. Anthony pulled on the same jeans he’d worn the night before, and the same socks. The stale odor of smoke and sweat still clung to them, but I figured it was all he had. At least he extracted clean underwear and a sweatshirt from a backpack on the floor.
I lean in toward him now. “Let me tell you something about gay culture, Anthony,” I say. “It can be just as you experienced it. It can be awesome and empowering. It can also be cruel and shallow. You just have to learn how to navigate it.”
He blinks his eyes a few times as if trying to understand. “Cruel and shallow? How do you mean?”
I sigh. “Come on. Are you really as innocent as all that?” I take another sip of coffee. “It’s no different from straight culture. Beauty trumps wisdom. Youth triumphs over experience. It should be the other way around, but the human condition doesn’t seem to allow it.”
“So in other words,” Anthony says, stroking his smooth face, his stubble hardly worth the bother of shaving, “I should enjoy my time at the ball because it ain’t gonna last?”
Finally. A spark of insight. I laugh. “You got it, pal.”
“Well, for now I think it’s awesome.” He smiles. “That feeling I got on the dance floor in Miami—it was like I was part of some great, big brotherhood or something. You don’t know how long I’ve wanted that. To feel a
part
of something. To be... accepted, you know?” He blushes. “Does that sound really dumb?”
Actually, it sounds absolutely endearing.
“I know what you mean,” I say fondly. “That is part of the scene. Despite what everyone says, it’s not just the drugs. There’s definitely more than X bonding people on the dance floor.”
“So then, what’s the shallow part you’re talking about?”
I laugh. “Anthony, I’m thirty-six years old. When my dad was this age, he had three kids to support. He got home at six o’clock every night and watched television until nine, then went to bed. On weekends he mowed the grass and fixed the roof. Any extra money was used to pay for our dental expenses or school clothes. And maybe once a year a trip down to Sound View Beach on the Connecticut coast.”
I lean back in my chair and cross my arms over my chest. “Meanwhile, here’s my life. I just reserved hotel space for Gay Days at Disney World in June. My friends and I are already planning what Speedos to bring so we can splash around with a couple hundred other guys in Typhoon Lagoon.”

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