The Yelp

by Chase Compton

  A few weeks later, we spent the day in Coney Island being wildly in love. We took in the aquarium and the boardwalk and ate ice cream cones, as one does when in Coney Island. My man was back, and I had never known such peace and happiness. Later that night as we walked home from the ferry, we made a promise to each other. We said that the first time it snowed, no matter what we were doing or where we were in life, we would return to the library and meet. It was a promise, and I kissed Him and looked into his eyes to seal the deal.

  Two gigantic statues of crouching lions adorn the front steps of the library. These iconic lions of the New York Public Library are named Fortitude (on the north side) and Patience (on the south—our side). I reflected deeply on what this could possibly mean. Even after he had left me for the last time, I knew that I would return to Patience on the first snow. I also knew that he would not be there. But, a promise was a promise, and I knew I had to go—if only to prove to myself that I could. As the snow came down in sheets, I made my way from Times Square and sat beneath the big marble guardian.

  I sat on the bench in the snow and froze my ass off. I thought about Patience and what it meant. Did it mean to be patient for Him and to let Him run his course until he was ready to finally be in love? Or did it mean to be patient with myself, and let time heal the wounds that he had knowingly inflicted upon my heart? Either way, time crawled by, and I found myself feeling terribly impatient. I looked up at the lion, which was wearing a Christmas wreath around his thick neck, and wondered how long I had to be patient until all of the pain would go away. Even though he had broken me completely, I had secretly wished that he would be there, standing in the snow with that typical look on his face and his adorable pea coat.

  On the north side of the library sat the lion named Fortitude, which I went and sat under as well. Fortitude was the one I should have been sitting under all along. Strength, courage, and grace were the things that were going to save me. I knew that I had done everything I could to save my once ardent heart from being completely snubbed out.

  Melvin’s Juice Box

  Category: Juice Bars & Smoothies

  Neighborhood: Greenwich Village

  There is absolutely nothing funny about crushing depression, until the moment comes when absolutely everything is funny about crushing depression.

  In a desperate attempt to pull myself out from the bell jar, I went to try and reclaim the happy person I had been in the not-so-distant past. Happiness, I figured, was a palpable object that I had simply left behind like a pair of gloves or a scarf, and it would be waiting there at Melvin’s right where I had left it, or perhaps in the lost and found. I went to Melvin’s to try and find that happy person I was in the summer—the sun-kissed skin I wore like a trophy and the delicious green juice that I used to drink with Him that tasted like a love potion. I always found Melvin’s to be my happy place; what with the constant stream of reggae and vibrant colors everywhere you looked, it was hard to be sad when immersed in such brilliance.

  Melvin’s was like Xanax for the soul. It calmed me, and made me happy, and I felt that the people who went there or even worked there were “my kind of people.” Melvin was usually there during the morning hours, and every time I walked in, he would greet me with a smile and a fist-bump and ask how I was doing. It was a rarity in this neighborhood and in this age to find such natural and honest hospitality. So I went there and hoped to be reunited with my heart, which used to be at peace in this very room where I was now looking for something I had lost.

  I could feel the snow drifts outside as if they were glaring at me through the windows. It was as if they could just knock on the door to say, “Don’t be fooled by the reggae and the fruit and the colors—we’re still here.” Inside, Melvin’s was warm and welcoming as usual, but as I should’ve expected, my joy was nowhere to be found. I looked under the tables for it, hoping that it would be in an unmarked package—“If you see something, say something.” It just wasn’t there. Maybe, like an unattended child, it had been scooped up by a concerned patron who was quick to call 311 and report this tragedy. Who would leave their heart so callously unattended?

  The minute the green elixir “The Body Good” touched my lips, I could feel it all coming back to me. It’s always been said that the sense of smell holds the strongest connection to memories, but I knew this was not true for me. This fat ass has always been brought home by taste. Just by tasting the bright zing of ginger with the deep earthiness of kale, I could remember every single day of the summer like it was playing before me in IMAX. When I closed my eyes, the snow drifts ceased their knocking at the door, and suddenly I felt like I was wearing one of those white tank tops that I had worn day in and day out. I could remember what it was like waking up in the morning and walking out into the blaring heat completely unfazed, because I knew that the world was my oyster and I had no need of hiding indoors from the winter’s cruel hands. That, and of course, Him.

  When I was a little boy, my grandma Edna used to sing to me. It was one of the few memories I still had of her. That, and the color of the robes that she used to wear. She was always wearing a very distinct shade of baby blue, almost the kind of blue you see depicted in pictures of the Virgin Mary. She would hug me close and sing to me her favorite song, “You Are My Sunshine.”

  You are my sunshine, my only sunshine

  You make me happy when skies are gray

  You’ll never know, dear, how much I love you

  Please don’t take my sunshine away.

  I’ve lived in New York for nearly fourteen years now, and this happens every single year. It’s the winter. It destroys me, and I don’t know how to fight it. Doubled with heartbreak, this winter seemed that it would be one that I could never bounce back from. He had left with my heart, winter had left with my mind, and my body was left numb and pointless like one of those gross crab carcasses you see washed up on the beach in the summer. I had tried with all of my might to regain the whimsy that the summer had left in my dormant heart, but it was slipping through my fingers like so many grains of sand. All I could taste was the good times and the happiness and the light. But something still pulled at me like a nagging cough that just wouldn’t go away.

  I looked down at my wrist at the tattoo that I got hundreds of years ago. It read “Edna” in a cursive script. Ink is important to me for a few reasons, but more than decoration (and just because I think it’s sexy), it’s a reminder. I remembered my grandma, who had passed away many years ago but still lived inside of me. Her legacy and her song would forever be with me and inside of me. My sunshine had been taken away, but it would always be there, lingering deep down inside. Perhaps it was just dormant, and hibernating, as all things tend to do in the winter.

  I slugged back my juice and walked out into the cold, praying that summer, and my heart, would return.

  Eva’s

  Category: Mediterranean

  Neighborhood: Greenwich Village

  It was time for damage control.

  The winter had completely ravaged my body and spirit, and I was poised to sit and wither away in a mire of cheap take-out and Netflix binges. It was the perfect storm of a heartbreak that took me and threatened to pull me asunder. I’d been here in this familiar place before, and I knew by heart the steps to recovery. However, this time I knew that I needed to go about things differently if I didn’t want to wind up in the same shipwreck of a life I had come from.

  I knew it was time to fix myself. Perhaps it hadn’t been Him all along that was sabotaging my hopes and dreams—it frightened me to think that there was a distinct possibility that it had been me and all of my shortcomings. I am, by nature, not a very “hot” guy. Being a gay man in New York City, “hot” is the most important commodity that exists. Maybe my lack of “hotness” was what was constantly putting me at a disadvantage with dating. I’m skinny, I have toothpick arms, and it’s a constant battle with the mirror. Through gay evolution, I’ve formed a defense mechanism against my tragic biol
ogy, which has helped me to think that there is a slight possibility that I will not die alone. If I couldn’t be one of the muscled, vapid, sex-and-gym-obsessed himbo’s that he constantly berated me for not being, then I would just have to settle for my brain. And sometimes my heart. Those were my strong points, and even though he constantly made me feel that that wasn’t enough, I knew that there had to be someone out there who thought that it was.

  The real kicker was that I (as in my rational and personal self, not my feeble chicken-body) was already good. I knew my heart and my mind backwards and forwards, and I knew what I stood for and what I could not stand. Maybe it really was my disgusting girly-boy body that was ruining my life. It just had to be—everything else was in its place. Virtue? Check. Honesty? Check. Loyalty? Check. Kindness? Check. Tenderness? Check. Pectorals … pectorals? And the silence is deafening.

  This world is a sick and shallow place, and if I wanted to survive, I knew that I had to either sink or swim. I chose to swim. First step was to dip my pinky toe in the shallow end (pun intended) and start to treat my body like I treated my heart—with extra care and tenderness. I went to Eva’s Health Food Store and felt like Columbus discovering uncharted territory for the very first time. All around me swarmed muscular gym rats shoveling protein-laden trays of heaping food into their faces. Little old me, I felt like I didn’t belong. As per usual.

  I couldn’t be daunted by this, though. I had to change or I would forever be stuck as just another useless waif in a sea of torsos and rock-hard asses. Anyone could love me for being a good person, and that was all fine and dandy. But at the end of the day, I knew the only real way to find and keep a man was to fix myself up to not look like I had a heart or a brain. I’d wallowed in my condition long enough to know that kale, brown rice, vegetables, and a shit-ton of protein was going to save my life.

  When I went to Eva’s and spoke to the guy at the counter about getting some protein powder to help me gain weight, I felt like he thought he was being punked. Every journey starts with a single step, so I bought a gigantic barrel of protein and lugged it to the counter. The tub of powder itself was nearly as large around as I was, and I felt like a cartoon as I schlubbed it with me. I had to keep telling myself over and over again that this was all going to be worth it someday. Someday, I would be looked at as more than just another nice guy. Someday, all this quinoa and chicken breast would erase the memory of how good the cheeseburger at the Spotted Pig tastes. I took home an order of grilled chicken with steamed vegetables and brown rice and pretended that I was eating a pulled-pork sandwich.

  I wished that someone could love me for who I was, but immediately thought better of myself and realized that it’s a crock of shit. No one would ever love me if I stayed the same because I could never love myself. All I ever wanted was to be wanted, and I was ready to attain that at any cost. I would live at Eva’s. I would guzzle the chalky powdered protein until I no longer looked like a deformed and sickly bird. I had learned my lesson, and it had taken the cost of my self-respect and my heart to attain it.

  This is the movie-montage portion of the journey where you see me running on the treadmill and pumping iron. Then you see me at the salon dying my hair. Then you see me gnawing at a raw head of kale like a tortoise and pounding protein shakes. I knew it wouldn’t be easy, but it seemed I didn’t have another choice. My heart had led me in the completely wrong direction. It was time to start thinking with my head.

  124 Old Rabbit Club

  Category: Bars

  Neighborhood: Greenwich Village

  The Rabbit Club is the bar of my dreams.

  It’s the kind of place that I always dreamed existed before I ever moved to New York City. In an early premonition of my life, I pictured the dark, subterranean room filled with nothing but candlelight and a subtle red glow coming from an undetermined location. I knew I would someday find this bar, which served only beer and always seemed to be playing music that was completely in sync with whatever foul or joyous mood I was in. It is the greatest validation in life when you find the places that you just know you were meant to exist in. The same could be said of the people you choose to love. When it’s right, at least.

  I suppose I fit the bill when I poured myself into the hidden door that was just below street level on crowded Macdougal Street. Up above were the masses tripping over each other and their own paltry problems; they all had no idea what was going on below. As I opened the door, I was greeted by a nearly empty bar and the soft muffle of vintage garage punk music wafting through the dank air. It was perfect. I couldn’t imagine a place on earth that I would rather sit and drink beers with myself and my crushing disdain.

  I had always feared it would come to this. I somewhat expected that the day would come where I would be sitting at a bar by myself pounding beer and listening to Patsy Cline crooning “Crazy.” It was another bad day in a long line of bad days, and it had finally won me over to the dark side. I came to the Rabbit Club chasing a ghost, as I tended to do those days, and hoped that if I drank an entire large bottle of Rodenbach Grand Cru by myself, the specter of Him would materialize. I knew this was out of the question, because he was 3,000 miles away in Napa Valley spending the holidays with his family.

  Weeks earlier, we had sat in the exact spot at the bar and shared a Rodenbach between us. The bartender with a heart of gold had kept feeding us beers and telling us how she could feel how palpably in love we were. He was holding onto my arm with one of his hands and clutching the glass of sour beer in the other. We swayed with the country music like we were wearing it as a costume, and the twang warmed us into a state of beer-glazed bliss. We laughed, told stories, laughed some more, and kissed as we fell into a buzz that I never wanted to go away. I was completely lost in Him, and his words and ideas wrapped around me like a blanket and soothed me into hysteric happiness.

  It was another one of those places that I would never look at the same way again. Like the Temperance Fountain in Tompkins Square and Café Mogador on St. Mark’s and so many other places I had come to claim as my favorite place on Earth, now the Rabbit Club belonged to Him, too. I would learn my lesson the next time I fell in love—keep some things to yourself. If I ever had a new favorite place to drink beer, I would go to it only by myself so that it could never be haunted by the utter sadness of losing one’s heart. I just hadn’t expected that if I showed Him my world and the things that I loved, he could potentially leave with it all. There I was again, ghostbusting and trying to uplift my spirits with nostalgia that didn’t want to be remembered in the first place.

  The thing that he never knew about me was that I desperately wanted to be Him. I wanted to be the one who didn’t care, didn’t want a future, or didn’t want to be loyal. I wished that I could turn my heart on and off like a light switch, one minute having beers with me and kissing my neck and the next minute ready to walk out the door and onto the next. In a selfish fantasy, I began to wish that I, too, could haunt his favorite places in New York City. The only problem with that was he didn’t have any places—they had all been mine. He was new and scared. Maybe that’s the real reason he left me: to carve out his own places without an old “regular” like me getting in his way.

  I feared that I would never make it to his “Rabbit Club” or his “Temperance Fountain.” I’d never be important enough for Him to let me see the things in his life that brought him joy. Hell—he didn’t even want to be associated with me on any social media sites: I wanted a partner and lover, and he wouldn’t even friend me. Someday I’ll laugh about this. I guess I just wanted too much. Being with Him was like drinking an entire bottle of the Grand Cru—one can’t handle it all on their own without getting sick.

  As I sat there and finished the gigantic beer by myself, I wondered what he was thinking all the way across the continent. I hoped he was in a happy place, like the Rabbit Club used to be my happy place. I hope our worlds weren’t forever stained with our own ignorance and our own selfish folly. I went home—acr
oss the street—and threw up all of the expensive sour beer that I drank in a violent cacophony of tear-streaked gagging.

  Tompkins Square Park

  Category: Parks

  Neighborhoods: East Village, Alphabet City

  Dear (Him),

  The Temperance Fountain in Tompkins Square Park was built in 1888 by Henry D. Cogswell. He was a wealthy businessman and dentist from San Francisco. After living in New York for thirteen years, you would think I would have known more about this famous monument. Hell, there was even that one night I slept by it. It’s one of those things for me—a place that I can’t explain but am drawn to and almost magnetized by. Summer, winter, spring, and fall all find me there sitting in Tompkins Square and just staring at the thing. I can only imagine how many times I have sat there, sometimes with you, and meditated on the inscriptions on its sides: Temperance, Hope, Faith, and Charity.

  I tossed the words around until they became divine, or perhaps a sign from the universe telling me that everything was going to be okay. I especially was drawn to the word “temperance.” What did it mean? How was a bawdy peacock of a man like myself to learn the virtue of self-restraint? What would I learn if I learned to regulate myself and my locomotive heart?