by Ben Peller
“Got you excited at least,” she squints at me. “So what’s your story with this Shawn Michals, anyway?”
I look over at the bar. It’s deserted, with a young woman manning it. She has a dragon tattooed across her left shoulder. Suddenly I feel very thirsty.
“Buy me a drink, and you’re on.” I tell Pumpkin.
She hoots and punches another button. An ABBA song, “Boomerang,” springs to life. “You’re fucking on,” she says.
We have a round, and then another. She tells me her life story, about growing up sexually ambiguous in the Midwest, and then coming out to Los Angeles and finding love with women.
“It’s not that I’m necessarily opposed to settling down with a man,” she says. “But most of them are assholes.”
She tilts her head toward the stage, where by now a few more patrons have occupied some seats. Beefy men, most of them with beards. They’re making some noise, hooting at the dancers.
I suggest that maybe she shouldn’t consider the makeup of men who choose to visit a strip joint in the Valley at one in the afternoon a coherent representation of the male species.
“I guess,” she downs her third drink. “Hell, I guess maybe I don’t really feel like settling down with anybody.”
“What about Doe?”
“Doe was different,” she muses. “She was the kind of woman who could dance with someone, make them feel special, but not really touch them. Know what I mean?”
I nod.
“So what about you and Shawn?” she asks. “You’re looking for him. He must be someone special to you.”
“I guess…” I remember Shawn, our conversations back in locker rooms back in the days we were pro wrestlers. “I guess he’s the same way. He’s trusted me with his stories, maybe showing me what I can become. I’ve always wanted to be a writer, but could never quite come up with stories I thought worth telling. With Shawn guiding me, it’s like he’s dancing for me, but not quite touching me. That make any sense?”
Pumpkin pats me on the shoulder. “Drinks are on me,” she says. “One more thing Doe mentioned about Shawn. She said he seemed like one of the loneliest people she’d ever met.”
We exchange a kiss on the lips, and as she leaves she murmurs, “First time I’ve kissed a guy in years.” Pumpkin has a disarming demeanor, one that makes you feel special, and I see now what Doe must have seen in her. That even though Pumpkin must easily tip the scale at 300 pounds, she’s one of the most attractive women I’ve ever met.
I order another drink, open a lonely man’s thoughts, and begin to read…
There are times when it’s perfectly appropriate for a man who’s always considered himself reasonably straight to nonetheless be accused of being a “latent homosexual.”
I’d accused myself of being one often enough. After all, didn’t I cry every time I saw The Fox and the Hound? Even more perplexing was I still had the thing on a VHS tape, some obscure wish to cling to my “inner child” I suppose. Back when things were simpler…
Another particular obsession of mine raised the issue. While musical tastes aren’t indicative of one’s sexual tastes per se, when I found tears welling up in my eyes at a song called “These Are the Days,” a wonderfully melodic tune about heartbreak and loss which just happened to be sung by a group called O-Town, a boy band which was about as boy as a boy band could get, I became intrigued at some of my musical choices. I decided to play a joke on my buddy, Steve, a professional musician.
I called him on the phone and confessed that I had a secret to share with him.
“I think I’m a homosexual,” I whispered into the phone. My plan was that Steve would then be curious as to how exactly I came to this conclusion, and then I’d confess to liking O-Town. We’d share a good laugh, then turn to other subjects such as the teams in our Fantasy Hockey League.
The only problem with my plan is that after my “confession,” Steve just replied, “Yeah, no shit, Sherlock. So what’s this big secret of yours?”
I stared at the phone as though it were a foreign object. “Wait, I mean… I’m… I’m just kidding.” I said.
“Whatever,” Steve chuckled. “Don’t sweat it, bro. I’m not gonna judge you.”
“Wait a minute! Wait a minute!” I cried. “I haven’t even told you about liking O-Town yet!”
“O-Town?” he asked. “What the hell is that?”
“Never mind,” I grumbled. “I’m not gay. Now what about my Drinkers. They’re second in the league, last I checked…”
Our conversation dissolved into threats about how each of our fantasy hockey teams was going to kick the other one’s ass, and ended with a friendly wish to have a good night. I’d been known to sometimes end phone calls with my male friends with “Love you, brother,” but on this particular night was too shaken to do so.
But these tastes in particular corners of entertainment and what they may or may not have meant paled in comparison to what happened on a summer night with Maryanne, a wildly intelligent woman with an equally wild spirit, a woman I was truly in love with. It was June, and we’d just engaged in a boisterous, sweat-releasing, heart-thumping downright nasty escapade, when she looked over at me as we still touched fingers and said in a soft voice, “I think you may be a latent homosexual.”
I sat up hastily. “How the hell could you say that?” I demanded. “Do you know how long we just fucked for?”
“Right there!” she said, sitting up herself as a lawyer might rise to make an objection. “Just fucked. Not made hot and passionate love. But just fucked. Is that all I am to you? Something to just fuck?”
“Of course not,” I said, unable to ignore the fact that during our last bout of sex I had spent a considerable amount of time wondering about who was going to win the WWE’s Royal Rumble, which I’d already ordered and was looking forward to watching the next night on Pay-Per-View.
“And another thing,” Maryanne crossed her arms. “You never come with me.”
“It’s hard for me to come,” I said. This was true, and there was one person to blame: my cousin’s wife’s mother. She was affectionately referred to by both sides of the family as “Grandma Cooper,” due not only to her maiden name but her bizarre affection for the music of Alice Cooper. I’d had no trouble reaching orgasm during my teenage years, but then had come the fateful day I’d been visiting my cousin during the summer of my Sophomore year at college. My cousin was a Born Again Christian, so out of respect for his home I’d fitfully restrained from masturbating for three days but had finally given in and was pleasuring myself with one of my socks, on the edge of the promised land, when Grandma Cooper opened the door to the guestroom and caught me in the act. Fortunately Grandma Cooper was half blind; later it would be determined she’d come into the room thinking it was the bathroom. My outcry of surprise had startled her; she’d backed away quickly, lost her balance, and taken a backwards tumble. She’d broken her tailbone in the fall, and though she’d never revealed what she may or may not have seen, I’d had severe trouble reaching orgasm ever since. It would be going fine until I started to ramp up to the actual release, and then all I could picture was Grandma Cooper’s face, creased in wrinkles and cloaked in huge glasses, and her mouth shrieking as she performed a reverse head over heels. Ironically, the only way I’d be able to achieve orgasm was to be so blind drunk I’d be able to not picture her, but on the majority of these occasions I’d usually be too drunk to fuck anyway.
A conundrum, to say the least.
I didn’t dare reveal this embarrassment while in bed with Maryanne. All I could say was, “I have issues.”
She flopped back down in the bed with a disgusted sigh. “Duh!” she said. “You’re a latent homo.”
“I really don’t think so…” I began to say.
“What about that late night phone call?” Maryanne rather snarled.
Ah, the phone call. When I’d first arrived in L.A. and was working on my first novel, I’d been in desperate search for an identity so had deci
ded to have business cards printed that announced the arrival of “the newly crowned World Writing Federation Champion.” In addition to this self-aggrandizing proclamation, I’d also seen fit for some insane reason (i.e. I was drunk when I ordered them) to put my home phone number on the card. Though I’d handed out literally hundreds of these cards in my travels through Los Angeles, almost all of them most likely suffered the usual fate of business cards. They were either occupying some drawer or had long since been mercifully crushed into a landfill.
The only person who had responded to my card was someone I’d met at one of those bondage bars in Hollywood. Her name was SinSin, and she’d turned out to be a Tgirl4. Nothing wrong with that, I figured. Surely Tgirls read books just as readily as straights, bisexuals, or homosexuals did.
The only problem was that after talking on the phone with SinSin a few times, I learned the only things she read were Cosmopolitan, Vogue, and L.A. X-Press. She confessed to not like reading books because there were “too many words.”
What SinSin did like to do was drunk dial me at random hours of the early to mid-morning. One Sunday morning Maryanne was sleeping over at my place when SinSin called around three-thirty.
“Shawn,” my answering machine blasted her slur into my studio apartment. “One of these days I fuck you good, Shawn. I make you come while I pump you, my baby doll.”
By the time I’d yanked the phone’s cord out of the wall, it was too late. Maryanne had heard everything. She’d made me play the message back repeatedly while ignoring my protestations that this was the rambling of a drunken Tgirl I’d made the mistake of giving a business card to, a business card that I’d made the mistake of putting my home phone number on.
“You seem to make a lot of…” the finger quotes. “mistakes, don’t you, Shawn?”
Now here she was, throwing this in as prosecution exhibit B. “It’s obvious you may have tendencies, Shawn. Now I have a proposal,” Maryanne drawled. “One I think you might like.”
“We hit up Jack In the Box for a late night snack?” I asked, only half-joking.
She smacked my arm. “You should get out there and get gay.”
“What?” I asked.
“You should experiment,” Maryanne implored. “I think you have a lot of unresolved sexuality issues waging war inside of you, Shawn. I don’t want to become totally involved with a man who in two years will say to me ‘Oh, by the way, I’m really gay.’ I couldn’t handle that.”
I was aware that this was precisely what had happened to Maryanne’s parents. When she was fourteen her father had left the family to shack up with a twenty year old male dancer he’d “just happened” to meet at “a club he’d wandered into after work.”
I knew better than to even hint that Maryanne might have Father Issues, and instead offered a shrug. “If that’s what you want…” I said hesitantly.
“It’s what you want!” she stated. “If you experiment with the homosexual underbelly of Los Angeles and take it up the ass, suck dick, and after all that rigmarole you decide you’re not really gay, then you belong to me. Capiche?”
A sane man would’ve hopped out of the bed and run screaming from the apartment. But unfortunately, not only am I not that sane, but it was my apartment and I was horny and wanted to get at least one last good pounding in with Maryanne before she sent me off to embark on this venture.
So we knocked a noisy one off, complete with cries out to the Almighty and pleas for varying speeds and force. (A “farewell for now fuck” Maryanne termed it), and agreed that the next weekend she’d escort me to a gay bar in West Hollywood. “For moral support,” she nodded as she laid a supportive hand on my shoulder.
Hence, the next weekend we went out to a bar with fake tiki torches crossed above the entrance. Both blazed a neon glow. A sign colored in fat pink lettering read: TUTU’S ALIBI.
Inside it was just like any other friendly neighborhood watering hole; a pool table, bottles lining glass shelves next to a mirrored wall behind the bar, and neon beer signs everywhere. But there were a few notable differences: artwork of naked men with penises that looked as though they could unclog a clogged toilet hung (no pun intended) rampantly along the walls. Also, whereas most bars feature whatever sport might happen to be in season, the televisions in this bar presented various bodybuilding contests where chemically enhanced men slathered in oil flexed and posed. With a little luck and enough tenacity maybe one of them would one day become governor of California.
The coolest oddity that set this bar apart from the ones I was used to frequenting was the shimmering neon rainbow over the condom machine in the corner. The rainbow was a nice touch, but it was the blatant location of the condom machine that impressed me the most. Everyone knows that people come to bars not only for the pleasures of drink but the tempting aspect of potential sex. However, most straight bars cloak this nasty possibility underneath a barrage of pool tables, televised trivia games, and, may the Lords deliver us, karaoke. If even present, condom machines are relegated to the restrooms, hidden away like bastard stepchildren. It was cool to see that this bar, a gay bar, advertised the fact that one of the major reasons its patrons had walked through its doors was in the hopes of getting “lucky.”
The hopeful lucky ones were clad in outfits that ran the gamut from wife beaters and floppy pants to leather jackets and blue jeans to red sequined outfits. It was like a concert had come to town that featured hip-hop, country, and a David Bowie cover band.
I myself was clad rather conservatively: leather pants and a button-down blue mesh shirt that was semi see-through. The pants were in direct honor of past immortalized adventures in L.A. I’d bought them to replace another pair that had been stolen back in my “living and drinking in L.A.” days. I’d picked this particular pair up cheap, thirty bucks at the local Salvation Army, and though I didn’t wear them that often, I thought going to a gay bar was a worthy occasion to strap them on.
It wasn’t like I’d never been in a gay bar before. I’d visited one at the tender age of twenty-something, when my friend from Santa Monica College, Jason, and I had gone to Rage, a gay club in West Hollywood. We were classmates in an Introduction to Groundbreaking Works of Literature class, and were reading John Rechy’s City of Night. Given the novel’s groundbreaking dealings with male prostitution, we figured we should shatter some of our own ground and head for a gay bar for the first time in our lives. I’d been astounded at the sights I saw that night: a burly African American guy wearing a Malcom X t-shirt making out with a burly white guy wearing a Harley Davidson biker jacket. There’d been a flaming queen with long orange hair standing atop the bar screaming, “I am guilty, mother! I am!” Nobody seemed to know what he was guilty of, but at the same time, nobody seemed to care. It had been an eye opening experience to say the least, which ended with me getting thoroughly overserved and throwing up in the parking lot.
The only other time I’d been in a gay bar was an incident in Washington D.C., a time I’d made a fool of myself and once again declared myself the World Writing Federation Champion. This craziness had been broadcast on YouTube under WWF Champion Intro before I deleted the hell out of it (although there are so many viral copies floating around it may still be online).
So here it was, my third time at an establishment of this nature, and I was feeling distinctly uncomfortable as I sat at the bar with Maryanne. She constantly pointed out guys to me with comments such as, “I bet he’d be hot in the sack” and “He looks like he could wrap his mouth around a fire hydrant,” while all the while feeding me a steady stream of drinks.
After four rounds in the span of twenty minutes, I suggested to Maryanne perhaps she shouldn’t order me another drink just yet.
“Wow,” she exclaimed. “Never thought I’d hear you say that.”
Neither had I. But then, I never expected to be sitting in a gay bar beside a woman I was in love with while she urged me to get drunk and sleep with another man.
What one may do in the n
ame of love.
A minute later Maryanne was jostling me and exclaiming in an excited whisper that a guy at the end of the bar looked to be just my type. I looked and saw a man sporting jeans that looked to be pasted on, a light red Mohawk and eyes that were swimming over the bar as if searching for prey. “I’ll bet he could fuck you into another stratosphere,” Maryanne whispered seductively into my ear.
I felt like I was already in another stratosphere. Did I really belong here? What did this woman want from me? I had little doubt at this point that given the chance she’d see fit to have me bound, legs straddled high, while a gang of hoodlum-looking types moved in on me with economy-sized jars of Vaseline in their hands.
As open minded as I consider myself to be, this vision unnerved me so much that I quickly excused myself to the bathroom in order to escape all these disconcertingly attractive men who I’d suddenly decided were circling me like sharks.
Unfortunately, not only did the bathroom not have a door, but it featured nothing more than an open stall (occupied) along with two commodes on the wall, which were separated by yet another condom machine.
How many condoms are sold here on any given night, I wondered, as I stepped up to the receptacle closest to the doorless doorway. Just as I started to get a good flow going, in walked another gentleman. To my unease, it was the very same man Maryanne had promised could fuck me into another stratosphere just a minute ago. He stepped up to the urinal on my left and unzipped with an exhalation that suggested he was just sitting down to a good meal. His head tilted back as his exhalation ramped up to a moan. His urination possessed such volume I was tempted to look and see if he had a fire hose down there, but given the present location and potential implications, I thought it better to mind my own business.
He, however, had no such qualms. I could feel his eyes locked on my penis. It made me nervous, nervous enough that as I stood there, dick in hand, I found I’d lost the power to piss. This usually happens to me in packed bathrooms at concerts, when you are terribly aware that there’s thirty guys waiting for you to finish so that they can take a whiz. With the variables packed into this current situation, there was a better chance of me levitating than being able to wring a drop of piss out of myself. This only compounded the problem, being that the longer I waited and prayed for urination, the more it seemed like I’d come into this bathroom explicitly for sex. Congressmen did it, why not writers?