Boys Keep Swinging

by Jake Shears

  “The gas mask was a nice touch.”

  “I almost fell off the platform a couple times. I couldn’t see very well.”

  “Well, I hope it was worth it.”

  “I think my dick looked really small,” I said, letting my mouth get ahead of me. “The thong was way too big and even with a couple of cock rings, I wasn’t filling it out.”

  She looked amused, a tiny hint of a smile, and turned to greet someone else. God, I was such an idiot. And that was that: an entry-level lesson in the art of Nightclub Small Talk: Get in and get the fuck out before you say something really stupid.

  The rest of the night was all tracers, drunk laughter, drinks spilling, and lips smacking. My girlfriend Jess and I walked home from the club. She wore the bikini and wig, her heels hanging on two fingers. We held each other up, limped through Chinatown, and basked in our party mission accomplished. My bed could have been made from peat moss: We wouldn’t have known the difference. Mixing our limbs up in the sheets we slept, knowing that no matter how much water we drank, it was going to be a rough morning.

  I NEVER CONSCIOUSLY INTENDED TO start writing real songs. I tell myself that it was an exuberant accident. But in truth, it’s something I had dreamed of most of my life. But how could it ever become real? I could barely play an instrument, yet I sang all the time. I’d sing songs when I walked to the subway, when I made food. I’d make up melodies as I put myself to bed.

  The dancing I was doing at parties and bars was getting a little rote. I would work on making my outfits more elaborate and outrageous, but would still feel a kind of dissatisfaction when I stepped off a platform, wondering what the endgame was.

  Scott Hoffman and I had been hanging out the entire time I lived in New York. We had met through my college friend Lucy originally when I was visiting her one Christmas in Lexington, Kentucky. He was one of her longtime friends; they’d met in high school.

  Scott and I had crossed paths again, when he was taking a road trip across the US and stayed with me for a few days in Seattle. The two of us had books, horror movies, and video games in common. We could talk for hours on end about the minutiae of David Lynch.

  When I got to New York, Scott and I would meet occasionally for drinks or I’d go see his band performing up at Columbia, where he went to school. Sometimes he and some of his friends would come see me dance. He told me he’d been learning Logic one night when we were out, a music program. He said the two of us should make something together. “I want it to sound like Depeche Mode.”

  Scott’s apartment in Park Slope was college-straight-boy undecorated, with a whiff of mildew. We popped open some beers and went into the makeshift studio. There was nothing on the walls, just a desk and some notebooks stacked around. He showed me Logic on the computer screen, an all-gray palette of boxes and horizontal lines. I had no idea what I was looking at.

  “It’s basically a sequencer. Like take this keyboard, for instance.” He had a Roland Juno-60 from 1982. “This doesn’t have any MIDI capabilities because it’s so old, but we can lay down some notes and map them out on the screen, push them around if we play them wrong. Listen. . . .” He played me a fuzzy lead line.

  We built our first beat, assembling the sounds and assigning each one to a different key on a MIDI keyboard. Scott would hit the record button and I would do my best to play while a metronome beeped in the background. Scott could go back in and quantize what I’d played out of time, move the misfired beats onto a grid. We cracked ourselves up making Satan voices into the microphone or pitching our voices down to make ourselves sound like giants. We twisted knobs on the Juno for hours, losing time and listening to sounds modulate. Finally Scott said, “Let’s just put a song together.”

  The first thing we wrote was called “Talking to Databases.” I couldn’t think of any lyrics off the top of my head, so I just read out of a computer manual in a staccato, sinister voice. We had a chord progression that lifted up the dark feel, and I came up with a melody for the chorus.

  “Hey, I sound like Cher!” I said, referring not to robo-Cher but to actual Cher. We laughed and hooted at each turn, and at the end of the night we had a little song, perhaps a stupid one, but it was still a marvel to listen to something we had created.

  During the weeks after, I returned a few more times in the evening. We would lay down a beat first and come up with a simple bass line with what we thought to be an interesting synth sound. The lyrics came quickly. We wrote one called “Step Aside for the Man.” By no means did we strive for perfection:

  ’Cause I’m a real nice guy and I’m free as hell

  To be a cornpone faggot dressing really, really well.

  In my big black boots and my denim Daisy Dukes

  I got my bleached-blond hair and my leather underwear.

  You know I’m fine, ’cause I work it all the time.

  The words just came off the top of my head, and I wasn’t really paying any attention to whether they were good or not. Mostly we just thought they were funny. I was getting a kick out of poking fun at myself and the city around us.

  There were a couple more tunes. One was called “Backwoods Discotheque.” Another called “How Many Times.” But summer was approaching and major transitions were happening all around. I was about to graduate school and leave on another backpacking trip to Europe. I didn’t think about making music again with Scott for months.

  My relationship with Steve Kramer was painful at moments. He enjoyed my company and liked having me around, but I wanted to get swept away, my emotions taken care of and looked after. His apartment had been a wonderful respite from the dank basement dwelling I had been living in, but the reality was that he was still having to look out for himself. He was in what he called a “deep thaw,” coming out of a period in his early thirties of significant partying. He would look at me in the backs of cabs and say, “You know I adore you.” But I knew well enough by then that adoration wasn’t love.

  My demands put him off. I insisted on time spent together, more sex with energy he didn’t have after working in the bar all week. I knew when he told me it was fine if I wanted to fool around with other guys that his absence of jealousy was a sign of his lack of attachment.

  I graduated college at the end of May at Radio City Music Hall, and my parents came to attend the ceremony. My father wasn’t too keen on being in New York, but my mom was taken with its glamour. I could tell they were both proud that I had lived there for two and a half years and had somehow stayed on my feet. While they were in town I took my mom to the East Village bars one night, to all my favorite haunts, including the Cock and IC Guys. I refrained from telling her that I had been dancing at these establishments, but she was just thrilled to be out with me and basked in the lovely attention she got from my gay friends. She rolled her eyes and shook her head at some of the raunchier dancers. Surprisingly, she had a sense of humor about it. I think I inherited my mom’s lovely capacity for handling just about anything.

  I’d always had a safety net. It was called “Mom and Dad.” If anything bad happened, if I were to run out of food, get stranded, abducted, whatever, I knew my parents would get me out of it. Their love was a luxury that afforded me more than perhaps I deserved.

  By the time I had finished high school, my parents had mostly accepted my gayness. But it wasn’t until I graduated college that I began to feel my dad’s full support. I was the first person in our family to finish school; I think he realized that, gay or not, I had my shit together. The trust and the freedom, the low-friction ride they provided might have been a by-product of their pity. Perhaps by me turning out homo, they thought I’d been handed a shit deal, or perhaps The Joy of a Gifted Child didn’t include a chapter on the ways my gifts could be a joy. They must have been amazed that I hadn’t blown it, given the prior difficulties with my siblings. Yes, I did drugs, had sex with men, and stayed out late. But I still showed up when I was supposed to, turned my papers in on time, stayed busy with my passions. I’d mostly
steered clear of being a mess.

  The night I graduated, I had dinner with my parents, then decided to go out to the Roxy. I sat at the bar sipping a cocktail and letting myself feel proud for a moment. I’d majored in creative writing, and college was finished. There had been no stunts pulled, no crappy grades. (If you didn’t count the last F I’d received in a writing workshop for forgetting to turn in a novella I’d written. The college let me walk in the ceremony, but to this day, I’ve never actually seen a diploma. Whoops.) Unease, though, traced itself around the good feelings. As I looked out at the packed dance floor, here in this city I loved, I thought, What now? I had virtually no idea how the hell I was going to make a living. Dancing certainly wasn’t going to pay all the bills. The thought of getting some office job made my skin crawl. I knew nightlife or bartending could be an okay Band-Aid, but that wasn’t where I wanted to end up in the long run.

  I glanced up to my left, and there was a man with silver hair wearing a black T-shirt who was looking at me and smirking. He was a fox. His gaze was straightforward and at the same time a little bashful. We approached each other. His name was Anderson.

  “Oh, wait.” I suddenly realized that I recognized him. “I used to watch you when I was in high school. You were on Channel One News.” It had been a show that was broadcast daily into public schools. Each episode was about twenty minutes and kept students abreast of current events. In my ninth- and tenth-grade years, we watched it every day in class. “I used to see you dodging bullets in Bosnia.” His adventures had always stuck with me. “That shit looked dangerous.”

  “Ah . . .” He waved it off. “Wasn’t bad. I liked it.”

  I asked him if he was still doing it, and he told me that at the moment he was hosting a reality game show called The Mole. But was still doing some news anchoring. “It’s very early in the morning,” he said.

  “Does that mean you’re leaving here in thirty minutes to go sit behind a desk?”

  “I have tomorrow off—thank God. I just wanted to come out tonight and have some fun.”

  We looked around at the club and nodded our heads, silent for a moment. It occurred to us at the same time that we were both out alone. He took my hand and we went to the dance floor. I made faces at most of the circuit music, I was never a big fan, but I was just happy to be out, dancing with a handsome man. We got some more drinks and found a couch on a secluded side of the dance floor. I leaned over and we shared a sweet kiss. The bass vibrating through us only seemed to amplify the connection.

  Anderson and I went back to his little first-floor apartment in the West Village and stayed up the rest of the night talking and thumbing through his book collection, laughing and making out. I was impressed with all his first editions and with the pictures of him all over the world, waist-deep in water, dusty in deserts.

  After a few hours’ sleep we got up and decided to go to the Ziegfeld to see Moulin Rouge!, which had just opened the day before. While we watched the movie, I laid my head on his shoulder, exhausted. But afterward, we still had enough energy to take my parents out to dinner at some Moroccan restaurant on Houston.

  Anderson was sweet with my family, talking to my father, who could be formidable, with ease. I’m sure my mom was wondering where Steve was, but he hadn’t seemed too interested in me lately. I told her he was out of town visiting his family in Pennsylvania.

  Anderson and I met again two nights later. We had dinner and spent the night together. I told him I was going to be traveling Europe again, and it turned out he would be in Italy shooting his TV show. We decided that we would meet up, and though I wouldn’t have a cell phone, we would stay in touch by email. On my way out the door he said, “Wait a minute,” and handed me a picture of him standing by himself in front of a sunset. “Maybe you can take this with you,” he said.

  Before leaving on the trip, I was back with Steve for my last night in New York. I spent the time after graduation packing my stuff from the Bleecker Street apartment and putting it in storage. My roommates Tim and Matt seemed sad to see me leave the nest, but I knew there was another go-go boy lined up directly behind me to take my room. I took care of all my final business and brought my backpack to Queens to spend one last night with Steve. We were contemplating what to get for dinner when he picked up my huge gay Spartacus guide to Europe and thumbed through it.

  “Who’s this?” Steve said. He held the photograph of Anderson up. I hadn’t even thought about him finding it, having forgotten I’d slipped it in the book.

  “His name’s Anderson.”

  “Is he your cousin or something?”

  I paused for a moment, knowing I could lie. But then didn’t see the point. “No, we met the night I graduated. We’ve gone on a couple dates.”

  Steve’s face fell. He stood up from the sofa, pale, and retreated to the kitchen to pour himself a glass of water. I sat wringing my hands, confused as to whether I’d really fucked up.

  “So you have another boyfriend.” He came back into the living room.

  “No, we just met.”

  “Nice,” he said, bitter. “Nice one.”

  We went outside for a walk. Steve stared at the ground, knowing he’d just lost a relationship, albeit one he hadn’t necessarily claimed to want in the first place. I’d thought we could be boyfriends, in my naive way. But he wouldn’t give me the attention I needed. What I didn’t quite understand yet was that no single person would be ever be able to give me the level of attention I needed.

  Barcelona was my first stop. I started there to attend an electronic music festival called Sónar that Gary Pini at Paper told me about. I arrived as planned the day before and spent the rest of the weekend there. The daytime part of Sónar was held at the contemporary art museum; the nighttime portion was at the soccer stadium. Every day I sat out in the sun by myself and listened to different DJs I’d never heard, playing sets of glitchy, sometimes challenging electronic music. At night, bands and more commercial DJs would play. Sonic Youth did an experimental set back-to-back with Richie Hawtin, that sort of thing. I took notes, took pictures of revelers. The crowd was studied and there for the music, eager to get turned on to new things. There were other shows going on around town, most notably Fischerspooner, who played a set at a club called Lolita.

  By now, I had been to multiple shows of theirs in New York. Their performances had evolved a bit, with more distinct costumes and additional dancers. It was a bigger production, an electronic flapper fever dream. Before their set started, I was by myself and looking around for some ecstasy. After I asked around to no avail, people must have gotten their hands on some, because it seemed like everywhere I turned, someone was popping a pill into my mouth. By the time the band was finished my eyes must have looked like they were swallowing my face, I was so high. A cute young man from Venezuela took me by the hand and led me into the square to have a beer. I swear to God I was fluent in Spanish that morning.

  When the sun started to rise, the guy took me on a train to a village in the mountains. It seemed like the middle of nowhere. A light rain started to patter around the greenery as we entered his modest flat, fooled around, and fell asleep for a couple hours. And so my summer journey proceeded in this manner.

  But with the time alone, I was haunted by my sick heart. I had to face the reality that Steve and I were over. I had acted fairly casual about our breakup, but I realized once I was on this trip that I was grieving him. There were many long walks alone, or train rides with no one to talk to that allowed too much space in my head. I seethed with jealousy when I thought about Steve back at home sleeping with other guys. In tiny rooms with single windows and stiff beds, I wrote letters that would remain unsent. Though I knew my heart would be stitched up and healed, there would always be a little scar with his name on it. In retrospect, Steve had been pretty good to me. I had been the one to be a demanding, sullen little fucker.

  There was plenty of quiet time, but there was also a plethora of distractions. It was like my first sum
mer in Europe, but the sequel was on steroids. I was a wandering drifter, in search of amiable people and moments worth remembering. Some towns didn’t strike my fancy, but there were boys everywhere.

  I snuck a guy and his dog into my room in Montpellier, France. I shacked up with a Danish couple I met at a party in Amsterdam. Sometimes a tryst would turn into an adventure. One evening, I picked up a man from a restaurant in Marseilles—which I was very thankful for, because I had found little worms in my bed in my disgusting hostel. When he dropped me off at first light the next morning, a group of boys stole my camera, while asking me some question I didn’t understand. I chased them down the streets hollering; we ran for blocks in the early-morning light. When I threw all my cash at them, one of the guys gave me my camera back. I returned to the filthy hostel, grabbed my backpack, and headed to the train station to get the fuck out of there.

  I was always pleasantly tired and slept whenever and wherever I could, whether it was under a tree in a park or on some kind stranger’s couch. Sometimes I paid for places to stay; often I didn’t, preferring to meet people and share food and stories. I prowled the discos and had drinks on the barstools whether the place was alive or dead.

  By the time I got to Italy, I was relieved to see Anderson’s familiar face. He was shooting the show in Lucca, a tiny walled-in village about an hour from Rome. I was taken to his hotel room before he got off work. When he walked in I had my contacts out and a mud mask on. We talked and slept for a few hours before he had to return to taping his show, tired but happy to see me. “I’ve been around these people so long who are so obsessed with this game, I don’t really know how to act,” he said. But we were content just being ourselves. The next morning we read the news together, and I headed to Florence, then Rome, where I would meet up with him in a few days.

  It was the first LGBTQ pride week in Rome, and it seemed like everyone was in the streets. The days were a sweet blur of boys and food. I connected with some friends from New York, and spent a day swimming at a literal castle. I watched in horror as some new Italian friends I’d met dined on raw horsemeat in their kitchen. I spotted one of my favorite Bel Ami porn stars with an older American businessman who had hired him for the week. After a couple dinners together, the older guy tried to get me to come have a three-way with him and the model. I was tempted but didn’t do it.