Swish

by Joel Derfner

  I sought out a former professor of mine, not unacquainted with the seedier side of gay life, and asked him what he thought. “Lift up your shirt,” he said, and I did. “Yeah, you could do it.”

  “But aren’t go-go boys all like nineteen years old?” I asked.

  “No,” he said.

  “But aren’t they all big muscle jocks?”

  “A lot of them are,” he said, “but some of them are small and lean like you.” He named half a dozen bars at which somebody with my body type might find a warm welcome and sent me on my way.

  The one remaining problem was that I did not know how to become a go-go boy. If there was a graduate school I was unaware of it. The Learning Annex did not offer classes. But then I figured, It’s a job, right? I know how to apply for jobs. So I e-mailed Go-Go Boy, praising his blog, and asked him for the contact information of the people who hired dancers at the clubs where he worked.

  His puzzled response read, “Um, usually I just get gigs by showing up and asking the party promoters if they’ll let me audition for them then and there. I guess you could get in touch with some of them and tell them you want to try out. Here are numbers and e-mails for a few of the guys who throw parties on different nights at different clubs.”

  The first part of this explanation was of course inconceivable; I could no more show up at a club and ask to audition than I could translate the complete works of Betty Friedan into Linear A. I had crossed the threshold of a gay bar fewer than a dozen times. The night my friend Stephen wanted to take me to my first New York club I agreed to go only if he didn’t make me check my copy of The Count of Monte Cristo with my jacket. The most adventurous of my bar visits came a few days after Tom and I broke up, when I took a cab to Hell’s Kitchen, walked into a bar alone for the first time, ordered a Diet Coke, slurped it up through the tiny bar straw without making eye contact with anybody, and fled.

  However, I write cover letters (and make query phone calls) like nobody’s business. I hit a snag when no matter how hard I tried I could not find the specifications for a properly formatted go-go-boy résumé. Then I realized that I had no relevant experience to list on such a résumé anyway so the only thing I could do was make first contact and improvise from there. Between e-mail and the telephone I shot off half a dozen requests for auditions.

  And got no reply.

  Then one guy, named either Benjamin or Antoine—it wasn’t clear which—called me back and said yes, he was looking for go-go dancers, I should send him some photos. I had my boyfriend Mike take some pictures of me in the shower and e-mailed them immediately to Benjamantoine.

  And got no reply.

  This was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. People I had never met heard my voice or saw my picture or read my impeccable typing and hated me. The fact that my book was obviously doomed to fail was the least of my worries; my ego was at stake. Despite a life spent avoiding bars, I had begun to tie my self-image to the idea of being their cynosure. I spent week after week in therapy talking about my inability to get a job as a go-go boy. “All I want is to become a piece of meat,” I complained to my therapist. “Why is that so difficult?” He suggested that party promoters were unlikely to be as responsible about communication as most people I was used to dealing with. I suggested that he was missing the point; he suggested that we talk about my mother.

  I thought about Go-Go Boy obsessively. Eventually, after continuing our electronic conversation for a while, we met for dinner, and I didn’t see what was so great about him. He was an inch or two taller than me, with short brown hair and a cute nose. Nothing especially out of the ordinary. Yet according to his blog he was dancing all the time and making heaps of money. I pictured him spending every night in the throes of sybaritic ecstasy and then going home confident in the knowledge that he had the power to make a bar full of men want him. Ordinarily I would have been able to say, well, he may be a better go-go boy than me, but I went to Harvard. I couldn’t do that in this case, though, because he did too. He was pleasant and kind and went out of his way to be helpful to me, and I prayed for the earth to open up and swallow him whole.

  And then finally—yes!—somebody e-mailed me back. His name was Daniel, and he was the very man who had thrown the New Year’s Eve party with which my friend Jim had set this all in motion. “Come by Splash some Wednesday and audition for me,” he wrote, so a few nights later I went to bed early, woke up to my alarm at midnight, and took the subway down to New York’s best-known gay club. I showed the doorman my driver’s license and, keeping my fingers crossed, pulled the door open.

  I stepped into a room where sex suffused the very air. Everywhere I looked, I saw men chatting at the bar, men adjusting their coiffures in the ubiquitous mirrors, men dancing with an abandon reached either by sheer will or by very good drugs, thrusting their hips in time to the wild thump-thump-thump of the music. The shirtless bartenders, smiling flirtatiously, handed drinks to patrons who then turned back to one another and recommenced devouring one another’s lips with the fierceness of leopards. And on a platform in the middle were two go-go boys, haughty, aloof, unapproachable. One was tall and blond, muscles bulging in places muscles shouldn’t be allowed to exist; the other was shorter, black, compact and tight. They danced together as if they were the only two people in the world. I hungered to fulfill my newly discovered destiny, to leave behind the troubles of the common folk and join the aristocracy of the gay demimonde, in whose company I would be transformed into an animal of such raging heat that men would have to avert their eyes in my presence or be burned to ash. Then out of the corner of my eye I saw a composer who’d won three awards I’d applied for, and I had to hide behind a column so he wouldn’t see me.

  In order to audition for Daniel I first had to find him, but I had no idea what he looked like. I approached the shorter go-go boy on the platform and, since it seemed rude to ask for information without offering anything in return, stuck a dollar in his underwear. “DO YOU KNOW WHERE DANIEL IS?” I screamed in his ear over the deafening music.

  “SDFDZXUYVILJSJIUHVLE!” he screamed back.

  “HUNH?” I screamed, and he screamed again; if my life had depended on it I could not have identified a single morpheme. I thanked him and trudged off to repeat this conversation with increasingly intimidating go-go boys and patrons alike for forty-five minutes, both on the ground floor and on the lower level, until at last somebody took pity on me, led me through the crowd, and introduced me to Daniel. The man I had been searching for was tall, with a long face and dark brown hair; he said it was nice to meet me and told me to get up on the bar near the entrance and start dancing, so I did.

  I was instantly filled with terror that I would get it wrong and that people would laugh at me. What the fuck did I know? I should get down immediately and go home and eat ice cream while Googlestalking old boyfriends. Scratch that; eat ice cream and M&M’s while Googlestalking old boyfriends.

  Clear your mind, I told myself firmly. Focus on details to remember when you write about this. I did so, and I was instantly filled with terror that I would focus on the wrong details and that when I sat down at the computer all I would remember would be the bar’s gaudy decorative scheme, so I went back to being filled with terror that I would get it wrong and thinking about ice cream and M&M’s and Googlestalking old boyfriends.

  But eventually I began to relax. The great thing about go-go dancing, it turns out, is that you don’t actually have to dance. In fact, you barely have to move at all. My boyfriend, Mike, who is a great dancer, had attempted to teach me some impressive moves before my audition, but he went too fast and made me cry, so I stuck with the basics: stepping languidly from foot to foot, gyrating at the hip, and sometimes running one hand or the other over my pectoral muscles. Every couple of minutes I moved a foot and a half to my left and stepped and gyrated and ran there. The terror subsided—how could it not, when men were looking up and smiling at my nearly naked body?—but neither did I feel transported to
the higher state of being I had expected to reach. Possibly this had something to do with the fact that I kept having to apologize to people for kicking their drinks over.

  After I’d traversed six feet of the narrow bar, a well-dressed guy grinned at me, pulled out his wallet, removed a dollar bill from it, folded it in half as I bent my knees to get within arm’s length, and tentatively put it behind the band of the skimpy underwear I had bought expressly for this audition. I stood up, gave him a smile that I hoped hit the halfway mark between sweet and salacious, and moved on. His physical properties were different from those that usually attract me to a man. But still something in me thrilled at having stepped into a land where the laws governing the sunlit world held no sway. If I had been at a movie theater and somebody had come up to me and shoved his hand into my underpants, I would have been disconcerted (though not necessarily upset, depending on how cute he was). But in this bar, whose denizens breathed not oxygen but alcohol and sweat and desire, such a gesture was no less decorous than a handshake.

  An hour later, when the official go-go boys started to leave, I had five dollar bills in my underwear. I wanted desperately to ask Daniel whether this was a good sum of money to have earned or a bad sum of money to have earned, but I suspected the latter and I feared he would scorn me, so I just nodded to him on my way down to the clothes check. As I bent to put my pants back on, I realized that when I’d banged my knee against the column on the bar I’d actually gashed it open, and blood was oozing down my leg (this had happened only minutes earlier so unfortunately it did not explain the bad tips). When I got home I showed Mike the wound, which he immediately started calling my go-go boo-boo.

  I couldn’t sleep, so afire with excitement was I. During a rapid flurry of suggestive e-mails with Daniel it became clear that my audition had gone well and that I was on my way to go-go-boy superstardom. Then at one point he asked, “How would you feel about dancing naked?” and I e-mailed back that I would have to ask my boyfriend and Daniel didn’t write back, which worried me. I asked Mike the next day and he said he was fine with my dancing naked, so I e-mailed Daniel again and told him so, adding, for good measure, “I haven’t been this excited since Madonna’s performance of ‘Vogue’ at the MTV Awards in 1990!!!!!!” Daniel maintained e-silence. Finally, after weeks of torment, I decided that he was not interested in hiring me unless I was available for fooling around. This made a welcome change for my therapist, since now instead of talking about how I was failing to become a go-go boy I could talk about how it was my own goddamn fault I was failing to become a go-go boy and how by admitting that I had a boyfriend I had ruined my life. I hated Go-Go Boy more viciously than ever, even as I searched and searched his blog for the key to his sortilege. Finally, in a moment of inspiration, I e-mailed Daniel again and told him that Mike and I had broken up, which was a lie, and within a day he had written back and asked whether I could work a party that weekend.

  The party, to be held in the outdoors on a pier by the Hudson River, celebrated the opening of a gay media conference. I would not actually be dancing; instead, I would just wander around in my underwear. It rained the whole day of the party and after it stopped raining the air was still bitter cold, so Daniel wrote and told me I didn’t have to come if I didn’t want to, especially as the gig didn’t pay. I ignored this, since I would have shown up if the party had been in Pompeii and Vesuvius had been showing signs of disquietude.

  When I got to the pier and stripped down to my thong, however, I panicked. This was my first official engagement as a go-go boy and I had no idea what to do. I called Mike, frantic.

  “You’re going to be great,” he said.

  “But what if they hate me?”

  “You’re so sexy. They’re going to love you.”

  “You have to say that, you’re my boyfriend. What if I have to talk to people?”

  “Just act like a very sweet, very nice, not very intelligent twink. Pretend like you’re pretending to know what they’re talking about. You know”—here his voice turned vacuous—“‘Oh, really? I think my cousin did that once. Where did you get that jacket?’”

  This sounded exactly right, so I went back to the party and within twenty minutes had ensnared myself in conversations about the differences between Judaism and Shinto, the virtues and flaws of two different productions of Handel’s Acis and Galatea, and the constitutionality of jury nullification.

  Then one guy started talking to me about the party he’d been to recently on the tugboat tied next to us on the pier. “It’s a really cool boat,” he said. “Do you want to go see it?”

  “Sure,” I said, and for five seconds I actually thought he wanted to show me the tugboat. Then we stepped aboard and he pulled me to him and started biting my neck.

  I had never found the romance-novel phrase “he pulled her to him” credible when it described the action the arrogant yet compelling nobleman performed upon the plucky serving-maid heroine, but now, in a flash, I understood. The power of attraction calls to something deeper than human volition, and more shadowed. Though I found the fellow in front of me moderately sexy, I had no interest in being unfaithful to my boyfriend. Yet this man’s desire was a tractor beam, drawing me not just toward him but also away from an existence in which I had ever been the object of anyone’s derision, away from the kindergarten room in which I had crouched on the floor picking up pieces of the puzzle map, cheeks burning, trying to remember whether Zaire went above or below Angola and hating Samara Zinn’s guts.

  If I had the opportunity on this tugboat to leave her behind, even for a moment, how could I not seize it?

  So my new friend bit my neck and ran his hands over my back and squeezed my ass and tried to kiss my lips, though I wouldn’t let him, and I watched the misshapen self he couldn’t see grow fainter and fainter, until it was almost more fantasy than reality, instead of the other way around. But when he became more daring, I forced myself to say, “We need to stop; I have a boyfriend.”

  “I’ll behave myself,” he said, “I’ll really behave myself,” which I took to be about as honest as “He won’t mind if you eat the apple” or “We found the weapons of mass destruction.” Then he reached down between us and I said, “No, we really have to stop, ’cause you’re so hot I’m not going to be able to control myself otherwise.” This is my standard lie when I want to deflect a man’s advances without offending him, except that it’s never completely a lie, even if he isn’t somebody I want to spend the rest of my life with, because the specter of Samara is always with me and any chance to forget her seems a chance worth taking.

  So I pulled away from him, regretfully but firmly, and led him back to the party, which lasted another couple hours and during the busiest part of which I was given the job of leading performers to the radio-show booth after their sets were done. Then I went home, fell asleep, and woke up the next day racked with guilt that I had let a man touch me who wasn’t my boyfriend.

  During the aerobics class I taught that morning, I was so worried about how Mike would react when I told him what had happened that I paid no attention to what I was doing and almost caused one of my students to fracture her tibia. At lunch afterward, however, what Mike said was, “I don’t have a problem with it. I know how that world works, and I understand the difference between what you give them and what you give me. If you started engaging these guys sexually, I’d feel uncomfortable, but that’s not what this was about. I feel secure in our relationship, and I trust you.”

  (When I relayed this conversation to my friend Jim later on the phone he was silent for a moment and then he screamed into the receiver, “DON’T YOU DARE FUCK THIS RELATIONSHIP UP!”)

  The next day, Daniel asked whether I could be the regular go-go boy for his Saturday-night radio show; apparently I had performed my task of walking people twenty feet in a straight line with such aplomb as to make clear that here was someone who could be depended upon. “I can pay you a hundred dollars a show,” he said. I did not understand wh
y a radio show needed a go-go boy—were people supposed to hear me running my hands over my pectoral muscles?—but it was clearly a leg up and I needed the money and besides who wouldn’t want to be paid for sitting around in his underwear? My chief responsibility turned out to be mixing drinks for the guests, a duty I discharged admirably, since I believe the correct way to make a cocktail (learned from my mother) is to fill the glass to overflowing with spirits and then wave the mixer somewhere vaguely near the rim.

  At my first show I had a moment of panic when I mentioned the book I had written, Gay Haiku, and Daniel’s cohost, not aware that I was claiming to be single, revealed that his next-door neighbor had told him her brother was dating the author of that book. “Are you still going out with him?” Matthew asked, threatening unwittingly to expose my deception.

  “Um,” I mumbled, “it’s complicated,” and refused to say any more. The next morning I called Mike’s sister and forbade her to mention me to anybody until further notice.

  But over the next few Saturdays I realized I’d been completely wrong about Daniel and that he couldn’t have cared less whether I was single or not. The better I got to know him, in fact, the more generous and genuine I realized he was. (“You think too much,” he said genially as he bought me dinner one night. “It’s not attractive.”) Furthermore, working for him brought me into contact with people I could never have predicted I would meet and admire. The aptitude test I had taken in tenth grade did not suggest that I would one day be all but naked in a radio booth laughing as I handed piña coladas to drag queens and bons vivants and lesbian punk-rock bands. “You have weird jobs,” Mike told me one evening, but I heard pride in his voice.

  Yet I still felt like a failure. I was wilting in the shadow of Go-Go Boy. I had danced in my underwear and been tipped, and I had been paid to take most of my clothes off, but the two had yet to be combined in the same endeavor, and I understood that it was because I wasn’t good enough and I never would be.