“Lesson the fourth: never look at a subway map in front of other people. It’s like getting up and screaming, ‘Take advantage of me! I don’t live in New York!’” Ethan whispered.
“But we don’t live in New York!” Alek whispered back.
“No one has to know that. You know what the biggest compliment in the world is? When someone asks you for directions. It means that you really look like you know where you’re going.” Ethan leaned in. “We stay on the C train for four stops, then we get off and we walk through Central Park to SummerStage. Until then, kick back, relax, and look cool.” Alek did his best to follow Ethan’s instructions.
When they climbed out of the subway stop a few minutes later, Alek found himself in front of the entrance to Central Park.
“You see that building?” Ethan asked, pointing to a palatial structure across the street. “That’s the Dakota. It’s, like, the fanciest building in New York.”
“Dakota like Dakota Fanning?”
“No, fool. Dakota like the states, because when it was built, like, a hundred years ago, going this far uptown was considered undiscovered country, like going to North Dakota,” Ethan said. “At least, that’s what people say.”
“How do you know so much about the city?”
“You hang out enough, you pick things up.” Ethan waited for a gap in traffic, and before the red Don’t Walk turned to the white Walk, he bounded across the avenue. Alek considered saying that his parents had always taught him to wait for the Walk, but decided against it and followed Ethan, close in tow, into the impossible forest universe that was Central Park.
“We’re a little early, so we’re gonna take the scenic route,” Ethan informed him.
Walking through the park, Alek and Ethan passed people feeding goats and sheep at a petting zoo, paddling little boats over the lakes, jogging along the park’s circumference, reading plaques under statues of literary figures, and picnicking on the grass.
“The park rocks because it’s the best of both worlds: city and country at the same time.”
Alek nodded his consent. He couldn’t believe that just a few minutes ago he’d been underground, wading through a sea of commuters on a subway. All he could make out of urban Manhattan now was the tops of skyscrapers peeking above the trees. In this section of the park, there weren’t even any roads for cars—just walkways for bikers and runners and skaters.
“I can’t wait to tell Becky about all the Rollerbladers in Central Park!” Alek said, adding a silent if I ever speak to her again.
“Becky who?”
“Becky Boyce—we always sit together at lunch.”
“No idea who you’re talking about, man,” Ethan said, admiring a large collection of boulders, each the size of a small house, that looked like they’d been there since the prehistoric age.
Alek stopped walking. “Ethan, when did you become aware I existed?”
“That day that Jack almost kicked your ass.”
“Never before then?”
“We go to school with twelve hundred other kids. It’s not like you know who everybody is either,” Ethan said. “How about you? What’s your first memory of me?”
Alek had known Ethan existed from his first days of school. It was hard to miss him, walking through the school like he owned it.
“Well, you know, you have a certain notoriety…”
“I do?” Ethan asked with the perfect balance of humility and pride.
“Well, you were responsible for the single most chaotic event in recent school history.”
Ethan laughed again. “One little food fight and suddenly that’s all people know.”
By the time they arrived at the outdoor stage, a large crowd had already gathered. Alek could feel the anticipation in the air before the first fork of lightning erupted from a storm cloud. He unsuccessfully tried to locate the ticket booth.
“You know I’ve only got five bucks left,” Alek told Ethan.
“You gotta chill out, dude.”
“So what, we’re going to sneak into the concert without tickets? And you’re going to convince me that’s okay, too?”
“Who needs to sneak? It’s free.”
“What?”
“All of these awesome things are totally free in the summer—swing dancing at Lincoln Center, movies in Bryant Park, yoga along Riverside Park. Lots of people leave New York in the summer ’cause it’s so humid and nasty, but it’s my favorite time to be in the city.”
Alek assumed that the audience would consist of young people, like himself and Ethan, but he was surprised to discover that the audience was as diverse as the subway crowd. He wondered how all these grownups were free to attend a concert in the middle of a Tuesday. Didn’t they have jobs? Standing right next to him was a middle-aged couple holding a grocery bag. They were old enough to be his parents, waiting for the show to start with as much excitement as anyone else. The only major difference Alek could make out between the subway and the concert crowds was that here in the park, he could see men holding hands with each other.
Alek tried to remember if he’d ever seen two guys holding hands before. Girls did it all the time at school, of course, but not boys. And he’d certainly seen gay characters on TV and in movies. But as live viewings went, he concluded this was his first time. And like everything else in New York City, there was so much else going on that the sight of men holding hands didn’t even warrant a second look from anyone else.
The crowd erupted into applause the moment they saw Rufus. He didn’t wait for the noise to die down. He jumped right into his first song, crooning the words “Who are you, New York?” to his adoring fans.
“Have you ever seen Rufus perform before?” Ethan asked Alek. Alek shook his head no, too embarrassed to admit that this was the first bona fide concert that he had ever attended. “He’s this amazing indie singer/songwriter/composer. He even wrote an opera!” Ethan gushed.
Rufus was wearing a striped white-and-purple shirt, open to the third button, with a white cravat tucked inside. A flower was pinned to the lapel of his linen jacket, and tight pants hugged his legs as he strutted onstage, strumming his guitar and caressing the words with his voice. Even though Alek knew he was just one of the hundreds, maybe thousands of people in the audience, he felt like Rufus was singing just to him.
Alek couldn’t tell if it was the radiant sun, or all of the cool people, or getting to hang out with Ethan, but at some point he gave up trying to figure out why he was having such a great time and just surrendered to the perfect afternoon.
Ethan was clearly a die-hard Rufus fan: he knew every word to every song and danced along to most of them. Sometimes, Ethan would just bop along by himself. For the fast songs, he’d join groups of people dancing, drifting his way into the crowd. But he’d never be gone so long that Alek felt self-conscious about being alone. Ethan only remained still during Rufus’s final encore, “Do I Disappoint You.” By the crowd’s reaction, Alek could tell this was one of his signature songs. Even people who couldn’t sing along to anything else knew the words to this one, and Alek joined in for the last refrain, singing “Do I disappoint you?” along with everyone else.
The words clearly had a deeper meaning to Ethan, who looked off into the distance while the song played. Occasionally, Ethan’s lips would mouth along some of the lyrics, but he never actually made any sound. Alek wanted to ask about the song’s significance, but Ethan looked so solemn that Alek decided against it.
Two encores later, Rufus was forced to say, “I love you all, I do, but if I don’t leave now you’ll never let me.” He took one final bow to thunderous applause and ran off the stage. Even still, Alek heard people screaming, “I love you, Rufus!” and “Come back!” He even heard someone in the audience ask Rufus to marry him, but nothing was going to make everyone’s favorite rock star come back on the stage.
When the concert ended, the audience started dispersing, packing up their picnics and blankets and portable plastic lawn chairs. Two
guys making out remained seated on the ground, oblivious to their surroundings. If Alek had never seen two men holding hands before, he’d certainly never seen them kiss.
“Rufus is a homo, so his music is really popular with faggots,” Ethan whispered to Alek conspiratorially.
Alek couldn’t believe what he heard. He looked at Ethan, waiting for him to apologize or make a joke, but he didn’t say anything. Alek realized that even though he felt like he’d known Ethan for years, he probably didn’t know him at all. The person he thought he knew would never use that kind of hateful language.
“You ready to go to the museum?” Ethan continued nonchalantly.
Alek nodded yes.
“Everything okay, dude?”
“Sure,” Alek grunted.
Alek and Ethan walked through the park, passed a statue of Samuel Morse, and exited on the opposite side.
“We’ll walk up Fifth Avenue to get to the museum,” Ethan informed Alek. “It’s only ten blocks away. You know how long that’ll take us?”
Alek shook his head.
“Ten minutes exactly—each street takes around one minute to walk, and each avenue around four. Sometimes it gets trickier to figure out, like on the East Side where the Avenues get shorter, but that’s the basic rule for figuring out pedestrian commute time in the city.”
Alek could tell that Ethan was proud of his equation. And even though Alek was impressed by it, he wasn’t going to give Ethan the satisfaction of saying so.
They walked up Fifth Avenue, with Central Park on their left and tall residential buildings stretching into the sky on their right.
“The Met starts what’s known as Musuem Mile.” Ethan walked briskly with his hands in his pockets. “It starts at 82nd Street and goes all the way up to 105th. You want me to show you on the map?”
If it had been earlier in the day, before Ethan had used the F-word, Alek would’ve said yes immediately. “I thought we weren’t supposed to look at maps in Manhattan,” Alek shot back instead.
“Nobody’s looking at us, so it wouldn’t violate lesson the fourth.”
When Alek caught sight of the majestic building, he walked ahead of Ethan, past the used-book and hot-dog vendors, up the stairs so wide they could’ve been the footprint to a separate building altogether. Having been to the Metropolitan Museum of Art before and having a sense of where it was, Alek was relieved he didn’t need Ethan to guide him.
“Wait up, man,” Ethan called after him.
“I just want to get this over with as soon as possible.”
“What’s the rush?” Ethan asked, taken aback.
Alek continued charging forward, not bothering to answer. When he entered the museum lobby he got in line, Ethan right behind him.
“That’ll be twenty-four dollars for the both of you,” the young man inside the glass booth said.
Alek looked up and saw the large sign clearly displaying the admission cost: $25 for adults, $17 for seniors, and $12 for students. He should’ve known Ethan’s claim that this trip could be done in ten dollars was a lie.
“But you gotta let us in as long as we give you something, right?” Ethan asked knowingly.
“Excuse me?”
“I mean, if we decide just to pay this,” Ethan said as he slid two dimes over the counter, “you still have to admit us, right?”
The counter person’s tone quickly changed from polite to annoyed as he puffed up. “I mean, I guess so,” he sputtered. “But the suggested donation for two students really is twenty-four dollars.”
“Luckily, I don’t really need other people’s suggestions. I’ve got enough of my own. You wanna give us those pins?”
“Actually, we use stickers now.”
“Well, cough up two stickers then.” Ethan appeared oblivious to the line he was holding up behind him.
The counter person begrudgingly slid two little yellow stickers with the Metropolitan M boldly emblazed in the middle. Alek imitated Ethan by slapping it on his shirt pocket.
They walked past the guard, who saw their stickers and nodded for them to enter. In spite of how offended Alek still was by the word, he couldn’t help complimenting Ethan.
“I can’t believe you pulled that off.”
“Me either,” Ethan admitted. “I’d heard that you could get away with it, but I never actually had the balls to give it a go. I didn’t think that punk-ass ticket guy was gonna let us. Did you see the look on his face?”
“Totally. So why’d he let us in?”
“The admission here is just a suggested donation, which is different from a ticket price. A suggested donation is ‘we really hope you pay this much, but if you don’t we can’t actually stop you from coming in.’”
“You know everything!” Alek cried.
“My dad teaches sociology at NYU. My mom split when I was six, and ever since then he’d bring me in whenever he had night classes because he didn’t want to pay for a sitter. Then I started coming in by myself when I was eleven. I used to sit in the back of his class bored as hell, so when I got old enough he let me out to explore. I know this city better than most people who grew up here. It’s my playground.”
Alek followed Ethan into the Rodin exhibit. The black bronze statues were laid out in a large open room, making it feel like they were in a garden. The first one they saw was an enormous framed doorway portal, made of writhing figures that looked like they were trying to explode out of the structure. “This one is called The Gates of Hell,” Ethan said, reading the placard next to it. “That’s what I feel like every time I walk into school,” he joked. Alek was about to agree, but then he remembered that he was mad at Ethan. He mumbled noncommittally and walked away instead.
Alek let himself get lost in the bronze figures. He found that the sculptures changed depending on the angle from which he was looking at them. Other times, the essence of the piece was the same even when the perspective was not, like The Shade, whose tortured neck and head succeeded in evoking anguish in Alek regardless of where he stood. To appreciate other sculptures, like The Athlete, Alek had to get in close so he could see the detail in the figure’s perfectly proportioned body.
Alek finished making his way through the exhibit over an hour and a half after he started. He was worried that Ethan was going to want to stay longer, so he was relieved when he heard him say, “I used to think that I hated going to museums because I’d spend the whole day inside and be so sick of it by the end that I wanted to puke. But now I just go, catch one exhibit, then get out. It’s better that way.”
“Sounds good to me,” Alek agreed. “I’ve had enough.”
* * *
Alek and Ethan sat rigidly in the bathroom of the NJ Transit train heading back to South Windsor. The regular chut-chut-chut of the train against the track and a leaky faucet were the only sounds they could hear. A drop of water lazily accumulated at the mouth of the nozzle, then eventually plopped itself down into the sink.
Alek focused on the forming droplet, counting in his head how many seconds it took to accumulate enough weight to fall.
“You got any plans this week?” Ethan asked.
“Nope,” Alek responded.
“I’m thinking about heading into the city again.”
A few minutes passed before Ethan spoke again. “You gonna tell your parents about today?”
“No,” Alek said, without shifting his eyes from the sink.
“My dad doesn’t really care,” Ethan bragged.
Another awkward silence followed, until Ethan asked, “You want me to show you how to forge a note from your folks to the guidance counselor?”
“No, thanks.”
After fifteen drops (approximately forty to fifty-two seconds per drop, assuming the train didn’t lurch and jostle it prematurely), Ethan turned to Alek.
“Okay, Polly-O, I just gotta ask—why’re you being such a dick?”
“You’re the dick, Ethan,” Alek fired back.
“What’re you talking about?”
“I’m not the one who goes around using words like faggot.”
Ethan looked stunned for a second, then burst out laughing. Alek stood up and put his hand on the bathroom handle. He was so infuriated that he didn’t think he could be in the same space as Ethan.
“Alek, I’m going to explain something to you. Please stop me if you know what I’m going to say, okay?” Alek gave the barest of nods, and Ethan continued. “When you’re, like, a member of a certain…” Ethan trailed off, trying to find the words. “Let me put it this way. Take the N-word.”
Alek looked at him, appalled. “That’s another word that I don’t think it would be okay for you to use. Are you trying to offend me?”
“I’m just using it as an example,” Ethan responded quickly. “But if you heard me drop the N-bomb, that wouldn’t be right.”
“No, it wouldn’t.”
“But you’ve heard one black guy use that word when talking to another black guy, right?”
“Sure, but that’s different.”
“How come?”
Alek searched to articulate something he intuitively knew to be true. “When you’re part of a group, you can use words that would be inappropriate otherwise,” Alek finally managed.
“Exactly!” Ethan exclaimed triumphantly. “I couldn’t have put it better myself. That’s why it’s okay for me to use the word faggot.”
“But that would only be okay if you were actually…”
“Gay. I’m gay,” Ethan said, surprised. “I thought you…”
“What?” Alek asked.
“I thought you knew. No biggie, man.”
Alek leaned back and cataloged his Ethan interactions. When he thought about the comments Ethan made, like not minding when their bodies collided into each other on the subway, or how comfortable Ethan was dancing with other men at the Rufus concert, it all made sense.
“You coo’ with that?” Ethan asked.
“Yeah, of course. I mean, sure I’m cool with it. It’s not like I’m homophobic or anything,” Alek stumbled. It wasn’t a big deal. He just hadn’t had any gay friends, but then again, who did at fourteen? This was probably around the age people would start coming out, Alek figured.
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