I could easily spend every dime I have in this store, but I stay focused and head to the import section. UK 45s have this tiny hole in the middle, like an LP, instead of a big hole like U.S. singles. Thankfully I have an adapter, a yellow piece of plastic with RHINO RECORDS stamped on it to use with the rest of my singles, so I can stack the U.S. and UK ones together on my turntable’s spindle.
The import section is decked out with a million flags from a million different countries, even though 90 percent of the records are from the UK. The British flag is red, white, and blue. I don’t get why the colonists hated England enough to declare war on them but stole their flag colors anyhow.
I think about James and his British mother. About how there’s so much tension between them all the time.
It’s funny how sometimes you can speak the same language, yet you still need a piece of round plastic to bridge the gap.
I met Becky and James at a fire drill two weeks into my freshman year. When the bell went off, I followed the other students into the hallway and then through the door as they trudged out to the street on a dreary day.
Everyone knew everyone else. Except for me.
It took a minute to notice James fitting himself into a doorway, marking up a paperback with a highlighter he kept bringing thoughtfully to his lips.
But then I couldn’t stop noticing him, couldn’t look away from his bright white shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, or his gray striped suspenders. Couldn’t stop smiling at the girl who was twirling around in front of him, singing Blondie’s “Call Me” woefully out of tune.
I watched them, thinking they looked interesting. They looked unique. They looked like people who were living the kind of life I wanted.
Before that, I used to go to St. Sebastian’s Academy for Young Men, but then my parents decided to blame St. Sebastian’s for my brother being gay. So after they kicked Connor out of the house, they sent me to a mixed-gender public school.
You aren’t worried he’s going to get some girl knocked up? Connor asked my mother at one of our rare family meetings.
I think we’ll take our chances, my mother responded, looking wistful, as if my becoming a father at twelve had been an actual possibility. As if the law of averages guaranteed my parents one straight son.
I’m not going and that’s that. My father’s voice cuts through the walls. Pulling off paint. Dissolving Sheetrock.
But it’s Connor’s birthday, my mother pleads.
I don’t care if it’s the Second Coming, my father says. I’m not going to sit in some filthy diner in the godforsaken Village and shove some infected fork in my mouth.
This is the music of our house. This is how things are, now.
Connor and I sit next to each other at a table in Veselka. I try not to stare as he gobbles down meatballs and potato pancakes like he hasn’t eaten in a year.
My mother sits on the opposite side of the table from us—if this were a book, my English teacher would label this seating arrangement symbolic—and pushes pierogis around her plate.
Your father is sorry he couldn’t make it, Mom says, handing Connor a birthday check. He had to work.
My brother opens his mouth to call Mom out on her obvious lie, but I shake my head, begging him to shut up for once.
And for once, he actually does.
After she pays the bill, Mom hands Connor a slip of paper. Mrs. Jaffe’s daughter, Caroline, is moving back to the city, she says, not looking my brother in the eye. You should give her a call.
Connor tilts his head and raises an eyebrow. Waits to see where Mom is going with this.
Well, you were so close when you were kids, she continues, obviously feeling masochistic. And Caroline’s such a nice girl.
Connor reaches out to take the paper, looking like a snake ready to gobble up a rat.
In a breathy voice, the deliberately bad Marilyn Monroe impersonation he drags out at parties to make the boys laugh, he says, I don’t know, Mom, do you think she’ll still let me borrow her high heels?
Then, without another word, he slides out of the booth, tosses the paper behind him, and leaves.
I don’t know why your brother has to be so angry all the time, Mom says as we’re taking the subway home.
I sometimes forget how good she is at denial. How good she is at forgetting that her inability to stand up to our father had so much to do with Connor moving seven times in four years, crashing on friends’ couches and floors. How good she is at pretending she had nothing to do with him working a job for not much more than minimum wage because Dad pulled his college funding.
This time it’s myself I have to remind to shut up. But it’s hard.
Things that fill our house:
• My grandmother’s old flowered sofas
• A scratching post from our cat, Henry, who died when I was in seventh grade
• Conversations about the weather and the Yankees
• My mother’s collection of salt-and-pepper shakers from all fifty states
• My father’s anger
• My brother’s absence
It isn’t that I’m unhappy, Becks, I say. Not really. It’s just that…
Ennui, James interjects, not looking up from the copy of the New York Times he’s smuggled into our apartment. He has the Arts section spread out across my bedroom floor and is trying to read and solve the crossword at the same time.
Damn, he says, we missed our chance.
What? I ask, happy to have the conversation shifted away from me.
To see the worst play to ever appear on Broadway, James replies. That could have made for a good time.
Yeah, well, better not let my dad see that paper, I warn. You know my father only reads the Post.
James smirks. He isn’t a fan of my father, and I think my dad is scared shitless of him, because James is a walking billboard for everything Dad hates. James looks up at me and says, Seriously, you just need something to be excited about.
I lower my eyes while Becky asks him, Are you sure you don’t know anyone you can fix Michael up with?
I don’t know why Becky thinks that’s the answer; for some reason, people in relationships always think that relationships can solve everything.
No, kitten, James says with a sideways glance at me. I’m pretty certain that Michael wouldn’t be interested in anyone I know.
Well, I guess you could always get a job, she says to me as she gets up to flip the Ramones cassette she’s playing to get under James’s skin.
Or a dog.
Or a hobby.
Or.
I stare at my guitar.
My guitar stares back.
When Connor was still living here, I played all the time. Filling the nights, drowning out the sounds of my parents’ fights, beating down the silence of the house while we all waited to see if my brother was going to come home from wherever it was he’d gone. I played until my fingers bled, until calluses formed, until I was better than I ever thought I could be.
Then Connor got kicked out, and I stopped playing for a while because I didn’t want to join a band, and I wasn’t sure of my voice, and my father kept telling me to shut the hell up because without all the noise Connor made, the neighbors could hear, and who did I think I was anyhow? John Lennon? Because he was damned if I was going to turn into one of those lipsticked, eye-shadowed, black-wearing weirdos who hung around on St. Mark’s looking like they were dead.
My father sells insurance and hates every minute of it.
My father is angry that it’s only money from my mother’s parents that allowed us to move from Queens to Manhattan.
My father hates that Little Italy is being taken over by Chinatown, but he won’t spend any time there because he doesn’t want to ride the subway downtown with “all the crazy tourists.”
My father
has gotten meaner as I’ve gotten older. Or maybe I’m more aware of it now.
My father plays poker on the first Thursday of every month. He treks to Queens, picking up a six-pack or a bottle of whiskey on the way and doesn’t come back until late.
Sometimes he wins money and brings my mother a cake from the Greek bakery she likes. Sometimes he loses money and wakes me by slamming the pantry door too loudly, or drunkenly ranting under his breath about the “damned foreigners” on the 7 train.
But while he’s gone, the apartment is quiet, peaceful, relaxed. Mom and I can use the phone without worrying that we’ll say the wrong thing. Instead of the TV, Mom will put on music and read or bake or simply hang out.
I leave my bedroom door open on these nights, not worried about being told that I’m a disgrace.
Friday afternoon there’s enough snow to close businesses and schools. Seven inches and still falling. My parents wander through the house, unsure of how to interact in daylight when they’re both stuck at home.
I’m going out, James says on the other end of the phone.
Out where?
Into the world. Come with me.
I hang up. Pick up the receiver again. Wait for the tone. Dial. Let it ring twice. Hang up.
Miracle; it rings back. I pick up.
You’re going to owe me, Connor says instead of hello.
Put it on my tab, I answer, making sure he can hear the sarcasm in my voice.
I throw some gel in my hair, grab my coat, and tell my parents that Connor is working and I have to walk his dog. Which I would do, I think, if he had a dog, because I don’t trust my brother to stay home often enough to keep another creature alive.
Maybe I’ll crash there so I don’t have to deal with the snow, I say.
Mom smiles, happy that Connor and I are close enough that I’d head out in a storm to walk his dog. It’s odd, my mother’s smile. It isn’t the smile of a mother who allowed her son to be kicked out of the house. It’s the smile of a mother content with things that don’t really exist. She lives in a strange kind of world where Connor is straight and an executive at a bank or a successful filmmaker or a hotshot journalist, anything instead of what he is, a gay shop clerk with more friends than she’ll ever have, and a taste for free will.
On the other hand, my father’s emotions are written all over his face. The grimace he wears now is the one he always has when I mention Connor. The one he filled the house with, along with his rage, the night Connor graduated from high school and came out to my parents, St. Sebastian’s, and all of the Upper West Side as he accepted his diploma, high as a kite, and announced his unfortunately short-lived love for Tony Ramos.
Even now, I can’t meet my father’s eyes. While he won’t go as far as forbidding me from seeing Connor, he makes his feelings clear. I’m not sure if he’s more worried that I’m lying about going to my brother’s or telling the truth, and he’s too afraid of my answer to ask directly. Afraid I might confess to being “that way” too.
In truth, Connor wouldn’t need me to walk his dog, he’d probably have friends lining up to do it.
Connor has a knack for collecting people. He meets them at clubs, and in stores, at parties and shows. He strikes up conversations with bartenders and librarians, taxi drivers and street performers. Connor lives his life out loud, but until that night at graduation, I hadn’t really noticed how loud, and even though it’s been four years, the reverb is deafening.
You have to take control of your life and run with it, Connor tells me. Don’t let anyone hold you back. There’s a world waiting for you. It’s big and flashy and exciting, and you need to put yourself out there and grab it. Or let it grab you, you know, whatever you’re into.
And while he talks, I can picture it. This community, this family he’s replaced us with. These people who can dance all night fueled by rhythm and freedom, drugs and each other. These people who have grabbed their lives away from everyone who has told them they’re wrong and they can’t and they’re damaged. These people who have made themselves into who they want to be, even if it’s just for one night.
These people who are not me. Not yet, anyhow.
I don’t know if I’m jealous of Connor or of the people he hangs out with. I only know that my brother has moved on to someplace I’m not.
I miss him.
I make my way to James’s apartment. He’s two years older than me, went to at least three schools I know of, and none could keep him interested enough to show up for anything more than tests. Tests that he passed with honors, but still. Even those weren’t enough to make the schools happy. There were meetings with his parents, and meetings with expensive private tutors, and meetings with the psychologists who accused him of acting out. All those meetings never changed anything; James was still James. In the end, each of the schools decided that he might be better suited “elsewhere.”
He got his GED, and now his parents, who moved to a sprawling mansion on the water in Connecticut, think he’s attending NYU. They deposit his “tuition” into a bank account in the city, out of which he draws a seemingly always-available allowance.
James has made a name for himself in the underground world of performance art and lives in a Hell’s Kitchen rent-stabilized share: four guys in three rooms and a snake named Boris in the tub.
Snakes aren’t my thing, James told me when he moved in, but at least we’ll never have to worry about rats.
The buzzer to James’s building is busted, so when I get there, I call up from the pay phone outside the bodega across the street. A cat weaves its way through the fruit display, one bitten ear twitching against the snow, tail dusting a frozen pyramid of apples.
James picks up the phone, and I have to scream over the sound of trumpets and bongos leaking, along with a stream of pot smoke, out of a car window at the stoplight next to the phone booth.
Let me in.
What?
Let me in.
Michael?
The car pulls away.
Let me in.
Oh, why didn’t you say that?
I shrug, even though James can’t see me.
I wait for James in the vestibule.
This is poetic snow, he says, running down the stairs, wrapping an impossibly long scarf around his neck, It hasn’t had time to become tabloid slush.
Connor gave me a fake ID last year for my birthday. I only wanted it so I could get into this club, The Echo. Regardless of what the ID says, I won’t be legal to drink for three years, but that’s beside the point anyhow, because I wanted to go there to dance, not to get drunk. Even before then, the bouncer, Freddy, had to know I was underage, but New York is sticky hot in summer, and really, what did he care if one more I’m-queer-but-nobody-really-knows-it kid added his sweat to the already wet brick walls of the basement club?
Now, I don’t need to wait in line to get in, and they don’t ask to see my ID. I love The Echo. If I wanted to, I could be anyone in there. A playboy. A hard-ass. A romantic. I could be a drag queen if I learned to walk in heels.
I could even be myself, if I ever figure out who that is.
Danni is DJing tonight, which means the music is so loud the words are getting sucked into the bass. It’s too loud to talk, too loud to hear, too loud to think.
Just the way I like it.
I stare into the spinning blue lights and then blink so that blue spots cover the dark walls, the dark boys, the black jeans, the clear glass, the stretched white shirts.
I’m struck with a sudden and deep hunger. I want it. I want it all.
Relax, the speaker screams. Don’t do it.
Easy for Frankie to say.
Over the course of the evening, I:
• Dance with a hundred cute shirtless boys
• Sing along to a hundred different songs
• Dream a hundred
different dreams
But at the end of the night, I’m still alone.
James doesn’t dance. Instead, he leans against the wall, smoking the long, thin cigarettes he encases in an etched silver holder, his extensive bangs obscuring his face.
Becky says that James observes people like a scientist. I think he’s more like an alien, sent to report back to his home planet on the deteriorating state of humanity.
Becky and I have spent an absurd amount of time debating this.
But there’s no debate about how tonight will play out. It’s always the same.
At some point, almost everyone will try to get James to dance. They’ll stand, hand against the wall next to his head, leaning in to make their case. Trying to be charming enough. Sexy enough. Eccentric enough.
James will smile and run his fingers through his hair. For a moment, he’ll give them 100 percent of his attention and 90 percent of his piercing gaze, and they’ll each feel as if they’re the center of his world.
But he won’t leave the space he’s staked out against the wall.
Not until the last song, anyhow.
Then, Danni will give in to James’s standing request and play Roxy Music’s “More Than This.” James will make his way to me, and we’ll dance, him swaying like he’s possessed, and mouthing the words as Bryan Ferry sings about being carefree for a while.
Everyone will watch. And it’s easy to believe, in that moment, there is nothing that matters to him more than that.
Time moves faster as you get older. That’s what my dad complains about, anyhow.
I once tried to explain to him how time stretches and retracts on the dance floor. How you can lose yourself in the overlapping beats as one song bleeds into another, and you can almost ride the lights as they swirl and spin, and the smoke of the dry ice mixes with the heady scent of cloves and who knows what else until you’re someplace different altogether.
All I got from my father in response was an eye twitch that too closely resembled the one I remember from when Connor still lived at home. I stopped trying to explain it.
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