“Show me a happy
homosexual and I’ll show you a gay corpse.”
- The Boys in the Band
“Throw a dog a bone,
I’ll take it if I have to.”
-Miranda Lambert,
“Desperation”
As usual, this one
was four times the size he’d appeared in the picture. Actually, no, the picture was deceitfully
cropped close-up of his face, his cheeks stretching to either side of the tiny
frame and his chin drooping lazily to the point at the bottom where text
spelled out his name, so it wasn’t so much deceit as a deliberate withholding
of information. His weight and height
he’d pointedly left blank and his age, 24, was probably also a lie. Another anonymous fat Mexican with a one-inch
dick that I didn’t want as soon as he arrived but, desperate for any semblance
of the physical contact I never got I decided to make the best of the
situation. He smelled pleasant, a
combination of cheap wet hair gel that got on my hands and an underlying
gaminess indicative of a long day. He’d
parked across the street, called me, and I’d come outside to fetch him for fear
that he’d accidentally knock on the door of the old woman across the street who
had been eyeing me disapprovingly the day before for drinking from a mostly
depleted handle of Jim Beam in my front yard as I smoked cigarettes and talked
loudly on the phone. “Hi, I’m Richie,”
he said, shaking my hand limply. I don’t
know if his name was actually Richie or if that’s just the name with which I’ve
mentally labeled all the fat Mexicans I’ve hooked up with in moments of drunken
desperation at 3 AM.
“I’m
Jack. In here I guess.” I fumbled with the CD player for some music
that would make the situation seem funny or ironic and inject me with the
necessary level of detached energy I needed, the sense that I was living in a
movie, that the pathetic follies of my youth were being recorded for posterity
to be described charmingly in my future autobiography after I’d become
famous. Accidentally placing one CD on
top of the other in the disc tray, I eventually gave up and flopped onto the
bed. Richie automatically removed his
pants and underwear. There was no
indication of a penis anywhere on his body, just a massive pubic mound with no
prescribed gender. God, he was fat. This was the type of person my well-meaning
friends tried to get me to date; whenever a female friend said that she “had a
friend I just had to meet” I knew that it would invariably be a grotesquely
obese Richie type, indicative of the level of attractiveness my friends
ascribed to me. Though overweight myself
I still clung to my television-instilled denial fantasies of dating or fucking
only traditionally attractive dreamy young hipster types. I’d rather date no one and fuck the fatasses
my friends delivered in secret than have anyone know that I’d lowered my
standards one bit. Then I’d complain
over lunch about how gay men were all so superficial, shallow, and appearance
obsessed, and why was I the only one that saw past all of that?
I
waited for Richie to undo my pants; I didn’t want to put forth any effort with
this one. I was merely participating in
the unending cycle of self-destructive sexual humiliation that all gay men set
up for themselves. I’d been at the receiving end of it many times myself, in
bed with someone who clearly had much higher expectations for the take-out
they’d ordered that night while I marveled and drooled at the fact that I’d
ended up with such a catch. The common
factor in all male homosexual experiences is that there must never be an equal
distribution of mutual attraction; there must always be one ravening, starving
slob designated as “the ugly one,” and another person who has, through sheer
force of will, imagined himself to be on a higher plane of attractiveness and
has convinced himself that he isn’t hungry.
There is never that sense of love and a mutual exchange of affection
that is present in fictional depictions of homosexual relationships intended to
instruct straight people that we’re Just Like You--only a sweaty, brief,
paranoid entangling of limbs and body parts on which, for one brief shining
moment, you can project, mask-like, the face of the one person you truly
believe you have loved.
I am once again on
the road to San Marcos with Bull. I
stare out the truck window thinking of all the things I should be doing instead
of tagging along with him as he drives thirty miles to purchase two pills with
the $20 his parents have given him for gas.
“I’d buy one for you, I just don’t have any money. And I’m addicted,” he says good naturedly.
“Oh
it’s fine, I don’t have any money either,” I smile back. I roll down the window and the air is
unexpectedly brisk. I’d do opiates with
him if he gave me one just so we’d be on the same level but I can’t for the
life of me understand why he loves them so much. The one time I snorted them with him I felt
pleasantly high for a while but woke up panicked and unable to breathe. I’ve had a crush on him for three years, been
friends with him for six months, and been in love with him for two.
Driving past
downtown he gestures to the skyline and says, “I wish I could remember all the
hotels I’ve had sex in. The Omni,
definitely. And the Radisson…”
“I’ve
never had sex in a hotel. You manage to
hook up with a higher class of men than me,” I respond.
“You
need to get on Adam4Adam is why.
Grindr’s bullshit.”
He
is gorgeous—that effortless, messy, dark gorgeousness of lost young men—greasy
brown hair falling on his forehead in an artful, messy array, brown,
heavy-lidded chocolate lozenge eyes, a musty, warm odor of unmade bed and
ashtray. His father is Mexican and his
mother is white. He used to be
perilously thin, wan, wasted, but graduation and unemployment have added forty
pounds to his tall frame giving him the sturdy, manly comportment that mothers
desire when they tell their sons to “put some meat on their bones.” An ambiguous red lesion on his upper
cheek—opiate addicts are constantly itching themselves—is the only clue to the
strain his body is undergoing.
After
endless deliberation in traffic we arrive in San Marcos. He’s always in such a busy, optimistic, talkative
mood when it’s assured he’ll have drugs in the near future. We enter a gated apartment complex near
campus and he drives to the back building and parks, knowing exactly where to
go. We ascend a nearby staircase and
knock at the door of an apartment I’ve been to with him once before. A thin, hippie-looking girl in a large
sweater answers the door and greets Bull, gesturing for us to come inside. “Hi, I’m Mark!” volunteers a red-faced,
portly young man on the couch. There is
an advertising banner for Smirnoff vodka the size of a door hanging on the
wall.
We make
uncomfortable introductions. Bull has
left his money in the car so I’m briefly left alone with Mark, the girl, a husky,
and a rat terrier. It’s convenient when
people have dogs because they provide endless fodder for mechanical small
talk. The girl sweeps invisibly into a
bedroom and returns with an orange prescription bottle. Bull enters the door, hands her a twenty, and
says, “I’ll just take two for now.”
Moving to the
counter he begins crushing up a pill with a shot glass. He grabs the twenty the girl has just set
down, rolls it up, snorts the line, hands it back to her, says a quick thank
you, and we’re off.
Our friendship
developed from an intense mutual understanding that neither of us had ever
experienced with another man; an openness about our sexual sleaze, bad
decisions, addictions, and darkest secrets met with a total absence of judgment
to produce a shared comfort that hummed quietly and reliably along like a space
heater. He’d been passing as a
heterosexual virgin under the scrutinizing and confused gaze of his straight
stoner friends, all the while journeying solitarily into the night to have sex
with strange older men and not telling anyone about it. I had been openly gay since middle school but
also felt the intense shame that comes from keeping too many secrets; I felt
like a doomed failure because my early sexual encounters had not been the meet-cute
mutual learning experiences with people of my own age that television
narratives had assigned me. The first
time I had full access to a man’s body it was a moustached forty-five-year-old
pool cleaner whose name I didn’t know, not a loving, monogamously committed
boyfriend. Even as I gained my first gay
friends I felt alien and sordid around them; they were fresh-faced, good-looking young men that either didn’t share my sordidness or concealed and
denied it to within an inch of their lives.
Though he told me
from the start that he wasn’t interested in relationships or guys his own age--a case of reverse ageism that plagued me like a persistent sore in my mouth-- Bull
and I got drunk and fooled around soon after we started hanging out. He suggested we jack off to porn and I took
this as an invitation to suck him off. I
tried to kiss him and he didn’t reciprocate, so I ate out his ass. I ate his ass on a later occasion after he
once again refused to kiss me. It wasn’t
until the night we got thoroughly trashed at the pragmatically named gay
trucker bar Bout Time—complete with a hand-painted illustration of a ticking
clock on the wooden sign—that we kissed on the mouth. A long, passionate, deep kiss that I seem to
remember him initiating, right as I was about to tumble out of his truck to my
front porch. Did he actually grab my
face and turn it toward him like they do in the movies or is that only how I
choose to remember it? That was the
first and only time it happened.
The next day I
awoke feeling ecstatic despite my hangover.
He’d kissed me. My tongue had
finally found its way from his ass to his mouth. Were we now going to act on our admitted love
for each other in a more…traditional way?
Would he give me a chance? I
hedged forth and brought up the previous night online, through the emotionally
leveling filter of instant messaging.
“So what happened between us last night?”
“Fun between
friends I guess. I’m fine with it I just
have no desire for a relationship.”
“Yeah. It’s just funny that we made out, haha. We’ve never kissed.”
“Oh. I totally
forgot that we made out.”
He totally forgot
that we made out.
I’m on the bus to
school and this old gay man that talks to me all the time is sitting in the
seat adjacent eating a Jack in the Box hamburger voraciously, lettuce and
onions tumbling down the front of his shirt, talking while chewing. I think this man has been sent by God to make
me as uncomfortable as I make other people because he’s the only person who’s
managed to legitimately shock me in years.
He tells me about the glory days of poppers and unprotected sex which he
somehow managed to live through and hits on me blatantly. He could probably be pretty cute if he wasn’t
wearing goddamned sweat pants and oversize tee shirts all the time; as much as
I enjoy his company I do not find him an appetizing sexual prospect. He hands
me some rectangular device that’s either a digital camera or a cell phone or some
combination of the two. On it is a
picture of a rail thin young man with long, feathered hair in skin tight high
wasted jeans. “That’s what I used to
look like,” he says.
“Wow, you were
gorgeous. I mean you’re still very good
looking but this is a great picture,” I correct myself.
“Oh, it’s okay, I
know. I fell apart about ten years ago.”
“You didn’t fall
apart,” I argue. I genuinely like him
and am genuinely amazed whenever I meet one of these survivors that somehow lived
through the most exciting and deadly period of gay history—they all deserve
respect and admiration, to be treated like the icons they are. Instead they are greeted with revulsion by
their younger brethren.
“Oh, thank you!”
he camps sarcastically at my compliment, running his hand through his peppery
hair in effete caricature. “I make sure
to moisturize. I use…oh what’s it
called—Nivea cream. I dream of laying in
a bathtub full of Nivea cream. Which
reminds me…one time I went to an orgy—it was these people I didn’t really know
but my friends knew them—and so we got a little drunk, arrived there, and what
are there but about twenty mattresses in this place laid out on the floor and
covered in plastic. And then there are
these trash cans on the side—trash cans full of Crisco. You were just supposed to grease yourself up
and dive in.”
While I’m laughing
nervously and delightedly at his story, he has a sudden realization. He fishes in his bag for his wallet, pulls
some cash out of it, and hands it to me.
“Here’s what I owe you, plus interest,”
“Oh, you don’t
have to give me this much! Those things
cost like 99 cents!” I ended up
accidentally paying for his bag of chips at the convenience store and he didn’t
have cash to pay me back. He’s given me
$6 instead of $1.
“It’s a loan,
don’t worry about it. I mean it’s
interest. I mean…if you should ever need
a loan, need a carton of cigarettes or anything, need fifty bucks or
something…” He clears his throat. “I can
take care of it.” He makes unnervingly
direct eye contact with me.
-November 2011
