by Tim Anderson
“…chronic, even life-threatening liver disease.” Now he’s thinking to himself: “Liver”—is that even a word? Indeed, he pronounced it with a terribly hard “v” sound, as if he were moving his lips for the first time after waking from a coma. He slaps himself.
“The majority of people infected with hepatitis B are young adults, and there is no cure.” Seeing that he’s made it through a sentence without any weird pauses or exaggerated mispronunciations, Tracy backs away and returns to her office at the end of the hall.
“A safe and effective vaccine can prevent hepatitis B. Health officials…recommend that…all students get vaccinated.” He wipes his forehead again and starts staring at the sweat beads accumulating on his forearm and rolling into his elbow pit. So weird, you don’t usually think of your forearms sweating. But they do, he’s finding out. And he’s apparently determined to think about for a minute. A long silence follows, during which Tracy, who has just sat down in her office, stands back up.
“For more information,” he finally says, cutting through the dead air, “call this number and ask for someone.” He ad libbed that last part as he put the wet notecard back in the recipe box all the PSAs are kept in.
“OK, fraggles,” he said, losing all sense of college radio decorum, “up next…is the most…beautiful…song…you’ve…ever heard.” At this, by the grace of God, he stops talking and presses the correct button on turntable #1, which is cued up to play some art-faggy nonsense by the Cocteau Twins called “Feet-Like Fins.”
He switches off his microphone as the ethereal guitars on the track begin filling the room, a small gesture of aptitude we didn’t expect from him at this point.
The song plays, and he just sits in his chair. He stares ahead at the two CD players in front of him, probably wondering what on earth those two things are. Are they the same thing? Should he be doing something with them? Are they from the future? Why does his hand look so weird, and why is the area between his thumb and forefinger so wet?
The song slowly builds to the dramatic crescendo that he’s been waiting for. There go the cymbals heralding the opening of the heavens into an aural orgy of cosmic coitus. Then there is the sound of a needle scratching against the record, followed by the silence of the grave. Have we all just died?
No, he realizes, the record sleeve that was leaning against the wall behind the turntable fell forward onto the playing record, sending the needle across the vinyl and then off it entirely.
Ever slow on the uptake, it takes a few moments for our DJ to realize what’s happened. He gingerly lifts the sleeve off the turntable and leans it back against the wall, then turns to his microphone to address his public and offer an apology for this appalling act of gravity. Whoops, he’s forgotten to put on the headphones.
“Whoa…hello…think we…had…a…accident,” he struggles to say. Oh, and look, there’s Tracy at the door.
“Tim!” she says. He turns to her with his dead glassy eyes. “You’re not coming through. It’s dead air.”
He turns back to his microphone and instinctively knows what she’s saying because, though he didn’t understand a word of what was coming out of her mouth, she was pointing at her ear, shaking her head, and giving the universal facial expression that means “I can’t hear a fucking word you’re saying.”
He turns his microphone back on and, realizing his headphones have slipped off his increasingly soggy head and are now dangling from his wet neck, slips them back over his ears and breathes into the mic. He hears himself. We are back on the air.
“Oooooookay, sorry, everyone. Technical diffi…[deep breath] culties. Here’s another…” Another song, presumably. Surely not another technical difficulty. He shuts off his microphone and presses the start button on turntable #2, which is cued up to play, appropriately enough, “Really Stupid” by The Primitives. If only he’d cued it up correctly. He hadn’t placed the needle precisely at the very beginning of the track, so when the song starts playing, the guitars go “whiiiiiiirrrrRRRRRRRRRRRRAH” as the record spins to its requisite 45rpm speed. So he DID mean another technical difficulty. Well done, sir.
Tracy looks at him as he searches through his army bag of books, random pieces of paper, and trash. He pulls out a king-sized Snickers bar, rips it open, and slides its massive shaft into his open mouth, taking at least half of it in in one go. I feel like I’m watching something I shouldn’t be. Tracy clearly does, too.
“Tim, are you OK?” she says as he takes his massive bite of Snickers and starts chomping. “Do you need something? Want me to take over for you while you…eat?”
He shakes his head. “No…sorry…I…fine…inaminute.”
“Do you have anything else cued up?”
He nods. But he doesn’t have anything else cued up. Or at least, he has no memory of cueing anything up. But he definitely knows what he wants to play next. He just has to locate it, somewhere in the room among the stacks of CDs and records he’d brought in from the station library.
He’ll cue something up right after he finishes off the strawberry Pop-Tart he’s currently fishing out of his bag. But wait, “Really Stupid” is getting ready to finish its short two-minute thirty-one-second running time. There’s no song on deck. Iceberg straight ahead.
Next technical difficulty in 5, 4, 3, 2…
CHAPTER 9
I think it was in the summer of 1993, when I was bent double on the side of I-40 hurling my guts out onto the side of the road at four in the morning while also blubbering like a little baby, that I realized I was losing my sense of humor about myself.
I wasn’t puking up alcohol. I’d gone to a July 4 party the previous evening, sure, but I’d only had one beer, and I’d ended up back at my shitty basement apartment at University Gardens in Chapel Hill at a pretty early hour.
No, I was throwing up the way you do when you’ve had one beer, smoked a bunch of weed, stayed up all night punching the wall, battling a cave cricket invader, and silently screaming until you look like you’ve been clubbed by a lumberjack, and also you hate yourself. And because this loathing can be best expressed either (1) through interpretive dance or (2) by vomiting up bile, you choose the second option because your cat is sleeping on your leotard.
I was supposed to hang out with the family in Raleigh that day, and so decided to go ahead and get on the road early that morning since I obviously wasn’t going to be getting any sleep. I’d already almost puked a few times by the time I left my apartment. This was not unusual. Over the past year I’d developed a new malady: Every so often, I was seized with the nervous urge to throw up. Not a figurative urge to throw up, but the actual urge to shoot whatever’s in my stomach onto the wall. It was awkward at parties. Because sometimes it would just happen out of the blue, and, though I eventually was able to control the churning of my stomach and keep the vomit from leaping past my throat, I could never hide the moronic facial expression you get when you are about to hurl. I’d pretend I was going to sneeze and had to cover my mouth, or I’d pretend that I was silently coughing. I got by. And I was nothing if not a perfect gentleman when I vomited. If I was at someone’s house, I excused myself and went to the restroom. If the restroom was occupied, I ran outside and puked in the bushes.
So I’d gotten into my car, blasted some Blondie, and steered my jittery, clammy self onto the interstate for the quick ride to Raleigh. But sometimes vomit, like a deep dark secret or a tumor, just needs to come out. I had just passed Exit 274 when I realized that I was about to hurl whether I liked it or not. My guts twisted and churned and sent gallons of vomit up into my head, but I wasn’t going to just puke onto my steering wheel, no. I wasn’t some commoner. I would pull off the side of the road first. So, as snotty vomit trickled out of my nostrils, I veered off the interstate, stopped the car, stepped out, bent over, and spewed a hurricane of wretched liquid onto the shoulder.
It was when I was wiping some of this delightful mixture from my eyelashes and eyebrows and out of my ears that I real
ized a police officer had pulled up behind me. I could see the reflection of his lights in the surrounding trees and in the pale, diseased-looking puddle of filth I’d just left on the gravel.
It’s at times like these that you might pause briefly to reflect upon the remarkable journey you’ve taken to get to the position you are in right now.
I’d left Guilford College after one year, deciding that, instead of needing a tiny school with a minuscule gay population, I needed the opposite of this: a giant school with a slightly less minuscule gay population. Much better odds. (Or worse, one or the other.) So I applied to UNC–Chapel Hill as a sophomore transfer student and was accepted. That summer I reconnected with Jennifer, the then parabola-haired friend from high school I’d met at the legendary PJ party four years before. She was quitting UNC-Wilmington to work and save money, and we decided we should move to Chapel Hill together. I definitely didn’t want to subject myself to another roommate lottery, and she knew how to handle my low blood sugar attacks, so it was a perfect arrangement. There was just one minor thing she didn’t know that I thought perhaps I should tell her. But as we all know by now, Libran gays don’t come out of the closet—they are pulled.
I was back at home living with Mom and Dad for the summer, and Jennifer had come by one night so we could catch up. During the briefest of lulls in our conversation, completely out of the blue, she made a confession.
“I’m gay,” she said, looking deep into my eyes the way only a lesbian can.
“I am, too.” I smiled, excited because, wow, what a coincidence.
“Really?” she said. “You are, really?”
“Yep.” I nodded. “As a chaise lounge.”
“Oh, I’m so glad you told me,” she said, taking me by the hand in the way that lesbians usually didn’t. “Oh, and by the way, I’m not gay.”
“Wait, what?”
“Yeah, I’m not actually gay. I mean, well, I was once, at a party in Wilmington, briefly. But it didn’t stick.”
“Wait, so you were just…baiting me?”
“Oh, Tim, how else was I going to get you to tell me? You’re a total Libra.”
She had a good point. And I like a crafty bitch. So that was that. We decided that night that we would move to Chapel Hill and she would help me be gay. Because a boy can’t be expected to do that on his own.
“So…,” she continued, “shall we go to Legends?”
Why yes, we should. Legends, in downtown Raleigh, was one of the city’s only gay bars. I’d never been there—indeed, I had never been to an actual gay bar, only to rave parties where dudes occasionally played slap-and-tickle on the dance floor while I sat on the sidelines, stubbornly and stupidly afraid to let my freaky gay flag fly—and was eager to see what it was like. Would there be a merry-go-round? A kissing booth? A lifeguard parade? Of course not. It was a Monday night.
So we got in Jennifer’s Chrysler and headed downtown, with me giving her street-by-street directions on how to get there because I of course had them memorized.
“Turn right on here and then go straight.”
“No,” Jennifer scolded. “Go forward.”
Yes, go forward. Go straight and you end up at Applebee’s, probably.
We parked and sauntered past the pornography store and into the cozy embrace of baby’s first gay bar. The place was empty except for a young twenty-something in a suit, sitting and chatting with a similarly dressed elderly man.
The bartender, a fit gentleman in a tight T-shirt and cheeks hollowed out by Michelangelo himself, smiled at us young whippersnappers, looked at our IDs, and said, “So, a round of Shirley Temples, kids?”
We agreed with his suggestion and decamped to a tall bar table in the corner of the room, where we could talk while enjoying a great view of one of the television screens suspended from the ceiling that was currently playing a video of an erotic massage being given to one hot hairless stud by another hot hairless stud. Though I’d seen my share of hot gay pornographic pictures in my time as a shoplifter of them, I’d never seen an actual porno. This one seemed like a pretty good place to start. Sadly, because of obscenity laws, this film was censored all to hell. We got plenty of close-ups of tight buns in Speedos, oiled-up torsos being worked over by big, strong hands, and snarls of affection/appreciation by both parties, but there was no big reveal of what the people really wanted to see: the junk.
“Tim? Hello!”
“Oh, I’m sorry, what?” I was a million miles away, over there, where the junk was hiding.
“I said do you know of any gay bars in Chapel Hill?”
“Hmm. No, I’ve heard there are gay people dropping from the trees and such. But I don’t know if there’s a bar.” Now can I just get back to watching the teevee?
Jennifer excused herself to go to the restroom. I looked over to the bar and saw that the young man was gone. His erstwhile elderly companion was looking my way and intermittently staring up at the television above the bar that was playing the same film. I looked back at the dirty video, then in the direction of the restrooms for any sign of Jennifer.
I turned my head back, and there he was standing next to my table. He looked at me and up at the screen, then back to me.
“He’s pretty good, huh?” he said.
“Yeah, definitely,” I said, assuming he meant the masseur, whose skills were undeniable.
“Yeah,” he replied, looking back up at the screen. Then he mumbled something I couldn’t make out.
“Yeah,” I said, because what else was I going to say?
“Hey,” Jennifer said as she sat back down. “Who’s your friend?”
“Oh, um, I don’t know, actually.”
“Hi,” she said, reaching out her hand to the man. “I’m Jennifer, and this is my boyfriend Tim.”
He took her hand weakly and nodded, then slunk away. For a tiny, terrible moment, my heart broke for him. Because old men on the make need love, too, God knows. But did they have to get it from me?
I realized something else that night, besides the possibility that I would end up at age eighty out at a bar on a Monday, looking for love in all the wrong places when I should be at home playing canasta with my husband: Having a wingwoman to help me navigate these tricky gay waters was an absolute necessity. If I hadn’t had Jennifer there to bail me out, I would have probably ended up eloping with this old man to Vegas simply because I didn’t want to hurt his feelings and because no one else had asked.
And if Jennifer could help me avoid unwanted suitors like that poor man, perhaps she could also assist me in securing some hot rod or other to get me laid?
I spent the summer trying to walk homosexually upright now that I was partially out of the closet. I spent a lot of time at the Fallout Shelter in Raleigh, which held an Indie/Industrial/Goth Night on Mondays that brought in a mixed crowd of young miscreants eager to get their rocks off to a bunch of erotic, hollow-cheeked clatter. I went there religiously with Jennifer, Mandy, and her boyfriend, Allen, all summer.
Every Monday a parade of pierced, suspender-clad eyeliner junkies descended upon West Street downtown to see, be seen, show off their tattoos, and have a pose-athon. The vast majority of us weren’t old enough to drink, so to fill up the empty spaces that most folks usually fill with alcohol, we danced, watched each other dance, smoked, watched each other smoke, talked about how dumb everyone was, and snuck hits of weed.
When not engaging in important social jibber-jabber, I spent most of my time leaning against the wall by the dance floor looking around for eligible undead bachelors who might be convinced to take me back to their vampire lairs and show me their hard, throbbing coffins. Maybe that one with the Morrissey coif dancing nearby with his shirt off and his sinewy muscles undulating ecstatically under the black lights?
I watched him for a while, and by the end of “Beers, Steers, and Queers” I was having to wipe saliva from the corners of my lips. This boy was making love to that dance floor like a pro. And there he stood—or, rather, partiall
y stood, since he was bent in half touching his toes, sweat glistening off his back and shoulders, sequinning all over his Chinese tattoos—daring me not to walk right up to him when he stood back up as the next song blasted out of the speakers and shout into his ear,
“Hi, um, you’re a really good dancer!”
“Oh, thanks!” he shouted back, smiling. I had my hand on his soaking wet shoulder.
“Uh,” I continued, still shouting into his ear, “do you date guys?”
He shook his head and shouted back, “NO. I’M REALLY FLATTERED, BUT…NO.”
I nodded and said, “THAT’S COOL.” Disappointing, but hey, at least he didn’t deck me. And I was proud that I’d had the nerve to seek him out and get quick confirmation that there was no way in hell I’d be getting to see his mausoleum.
I looked over and saw Allen chatting to a cute boy on the other side of the dance floor so, wasting no time, I slunk over to where they were intermittently dancing, slapped Allen on the back, and did the “what’s up” head nod, flashing the cute boy the quickest and most tantalizing of glances.
“Temple of Love” by The Sisters of Mercy began pumping out of the speakers, and it sent us three into a frenzy of hopping about in a dance-like flailing of limbs. I took the opportunity of this very long song to check out Allen’s friend. He was pale as the dickens, with sleepy eyes and a lopsided smile, and I was already in love with his hilarious, jerky dancing.
“Who’s your friend?” I screamed into Allen’s ear after the song finished and “Personal Jesus” erupted from the speakers.
“WHY, DO YOU THINK HE’S CUTE?”
“SURE,” I said. “HELP ME OUT?”
I continued dancing to Depeche Mode as Allen consulted with his adorable friend. They had a little back and forth for a minute, and then Allen leaned over to me.
“He says you’re cute, but he doesn’t want to get involved with a newbie.”
“A WHAT?”
“SOMEONE WHO’S NEVER DATED A GUY BEFORE.”