MORE BATHHOUSE DIARIES
I was back to old habits with new tricks (so to speak). I had been crawling around the bathhouse for years and was feeling rather depressed about it, like maybe I should try meeting guys at museums or the grocery store. My friend who was sixty was over my bellyaching. “One day you’ll be an old man and it’s not going to work anymore, you’re going to want to have a vast library of memories for when that time comes . . . every old man wishes he had had more sex than he did,” he said. With that advice, I felt like someone had restamped my passport to paradise. I had it down to a science. I only went Monday through Thursday 3:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. This way I could catch the after work and after dinner crowd, honest gents as they were. (The weekends and anything later than ten was too tweeker-y for me.) There were still plenty of old trappings here. I was near thirty now, and still saw the same men at the bathhouse I had been having sex with here (and only here) since my early twenties. There were men I had been having casual sex with here longer than all my relationships (or whatever you would call them) put together. On rare occasions I saw these men in public, and was either shocked or horrified to see what they wore in public. Seriously. It was sometimes like, Ew, I fucked a dude who wears sandals and cargo shorts in public, the selfsame dude who saw me and was like, “Ew, I fucked a dude who wears daisy dukes in public.” Whatever. I began to respect the fact that in the confines of a bathhouse, wearing only a towel made everyone equal (in this one way that is). Now there were of course problems. Sometimes you could fuck three hot dudes in a row. That was a good afternoon. But sometimes it was like every lonely, random, fugly dude all there at once. Like, if you put every dude shopping at Target on any given day in towels and put them in this sex maze. But then there were also jackpot days.
Tuesday. 7:00 p.m. You got there at 3:00 p.m. and since then you have fucked your way through six nationalities, six different dick sizes, and six different body types, and even took an hour-long nap with the dude who just wanted to cuddle. God bless America. Give me convenience or give me death.
There are your regulars. Andre. Twentythree. Pilipino. You and him go to the same college. He’s been positive since last year and you keep begging him to go on meds and to get the warts on his dick taken care of. You stop having sex with him ’cause you feel like it’s adding to the problem. There is Mike. Forty-three. Brazilian. Though slightly taller and slightly lighter, he still looks remarkably like a cousin of yours. You and him have a similar body type. God bless Africa. He comes here every day after work because his husband of a dozen or so years won’t fuck him. “Why do you stay with him then?” you ask. “Because I love him,” he says. You’re baffled. Like, who wouldn’t fuck Mike every day? He’s a babe! You have been having sex with him for years. He always has some other dude’s cum in his ass while you’re fucking him. It’s charming and if you ever see Mike you wouldn’t ask why. Terry. Terry’s your big black Bathhouse Daddy. You’ve been having sex with him for seven years. You’ve been having sex with Terry longer than all the men you’ve dated combined. This fact blows your mind one day when you’re getting fucked by Terry. Terry’s a big black archetypal Mandingo-looking motherfucker. Six foot three. Midfifties. All muscle. He’s a vocal teacher and despite having a football player body he has the voice of a church aunt. “Is that pussy clllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllean?” he purrs. And yes. Your pussy is clean.
Next Tuesday afternoon. Three-way. You saw both of them come in. One was Jay. Thirty-two-year-old Puerto Rican and Chinese. He dresses like a b-boy. Then Angel. Twenty-five. Moved from Mexico five years ago. Total hipster. Has a full sleeve of star outlines inked on his right arm. Deep accent. He looks like a cherub. Hairless body. Thick and well-toned. He’s five foot four. He’s the one you love more. During the three way, he kisses the other boy and doesn’t kiss you. He doesn’t use a condom with the other boy and uses one with you. You say to him later in the shower that that hurt your feelings and he laughs it off, but really you’re not joking. There’s a chalkboard in the back—a message board of sorts. “Room 221—Looking for Big Black Cock” or “Room 330—Regular top for ANY Asian bottom.” You pause. Like, when the fuck does a top have to look for a bottom here? Weird. You take the chalk and scribble your room number and message, “Room 125—SEEKING LONGTERM RELATIONSHIP,” and laugh your ass all the way to your room, until, surprise surprise—there’s a knock on the door. What the fuck?
THE BALLAD OF MR.
We had a writing exercise in Barebackers Anonymous: Who was the first gay man you knew to die of AIDS? I had one man in mind—Mr.
Mr. was also my first memory of any gay man, let alone gay and black (that is alongside Hollywood from Mannequin and Lamar Latrell from Revenge of the Nerds; who are both today latter-day saints of mine but I digress). So Mr., this is what I remember about Mr. . . . He was my aunt’s brother in law. He owned a Camaro. He had a Jheri-curl mullet. There were years of my life that I “forgot” about Mr. but I tended to remember that, as a boy, when I pictured myself as a man, I always saw myself with a Jheri-curl mullet. (Ah-ha! It all makes sense now!) He walked with a cane and he owned peacocks. I was a little boy when this happened and I thought that I had dreamed the birds up, but when I called my mother and asked about Mr., she confirmed, “Oh, yeah! He had big beautiful peacocks!” Peacocks! What a fagette!!! I feel like the late eighties boasted a very different generation of gay men. Muthafuckin’ peacocks, dude. I’m so “modern” (i.e., emotionally checked out) that I don’t even want to own plants. My father had other stories about Mr. Turns out at some point Mr. was a janitor at the local Historically Black University (the same one my parents met at and the same one I would be laughed out of years later for being too punk and too gay). My dad said he would see Mr. trolling the showers in the gym and the head had him kicked out because of it. Seeing the very obvious hole in this story, I was all like, “Well, Dad, if he was in there ‘all’ the time that means he was probably consistently hooking up with people . . .” and my dad was like, “Well no, son, I never really thought about it like that . . .” Years later, when my dad sees Mr. again, shit fuck Jesus Mary—he’s a preacher! (He’s marrying my aunt’s next-door neighbor and her husband—Mr.’s brother!) I have these short snapshots in my head of Mr., but nothing that runs too long. But I only remember him in sunglasses and I remember him as handsome. Some years later (in the early nineties), I notice that I hadn’t seen Mr. in years. “Hey mama . . . what happened to Mr.?” “He was gay, he died of AIDS.” One sentence. These days though when I ask about him both my parents want to talk for an hour. My father gives me his version of an apology and often says of the past “Well, son, we didn’t really know better . . .”
NEWEST DANCES: FLOOR WORK
I was not just an American Waiter bored at work. I was also an experimental choreographer. (“What do you mean by ‘experimental’?” asked a coworker. “It means I can do whatever the fuck I feel like,” I said.) I was really having too much fun with all of it. I was taking a class from this beautiful California cuckoo. He says we are going to engage in a “movement laboratory” and explains that we’re also going to explore textures. “First,” he said, “move across the floor as if your body is only made of muscle, then move your body across the floor as if it were only made of skeleton, then as if only tendon. On top of that, initiate movement from a place you don’t usually initiate from, be it your head, elbow, shoulder, or hip . . .” At his command, a room of about forty-five dancers go across the floor looking like the zombies from the Michael Jackson “Thriller” video. There are younger men in the class. They actually move like dancers. Even in simple movement exercises they choreograph densely and move very lyrically (I tend to move more percussively). They move as if they don’t have to think very hard about it. And goddamn, their bodies! Jesus. Their bodies. They look like they grew up in California eating organic food and had parents that took them to swim class—their feet have bold arches. I look like I grew up avoiding every moment of gym cla
ss—and I have flat feet. This is truth. Their firmness reminds me of my cellulite. Like, is a dude supposed to have this much cellulite? I even say it in a sentence in an effort to actualize and not disassociate: “I have a debilitating amount of cellulite . . .”
I also don’t choreograph densely. My last staged (or rather “site specific”) piece was in a DIY movie theater. An audience member came up after she witnessed it and said, “I thought this was supposed to be a dance performance, all you did was walk across the theater chairs and dive on the floor! That’s not dancing!!!!!” (said with a tone that could only be registered as horrified disgust).
“It’s a political statement . . .” I said very matter-of-factly, just to be a bitch, and left it at that. I don’t dwell on the other boys though. Dance class isn’t about difference. It’s about commonality. We move on. The next thing is a contact improv jam. It’s all really uncomfortable. We do this thing called “base pairing” where one partner gets on all fours and the other partner planks over them belly to lower back and does a full 360-degree turn over their body. Me and my partner look at each other hesitantly. I didn’t want Ms. Ching’s vagina on my forehead. We barely knew each other! Pretty soon class is over and I’m washed over with the same feeling I always get at the end of dancing. That peculiar mixed feeling of running on fumes and dancing despite the fact that I have flat feet.
TOUR DIARIES: DENVER
This band I used to be in was in Denver for its second (or third?) time, and nobody had told me that it was the Mile-High City and the air was extra thin. It was the second (or third?) time I was exhausted, crashed out, wasted on the gnarly carpet rug in the basement of the Longneck, Bottle Neck, or Empty Bottle, or whatever the fuck the club was called wondering why I felt so fucking wrecked. “You’re five thousand feet above sea level. That’s why! You were shaking it pretty hard up there. Fuck man, you can dance.” I was basically somewhat of a hype man. Got too wasted too often and shook it in my tighty-whiteys. It really was too much fun. My ultimate goal was to kill off that wide-eyed “people just standing there” era of indie rock that I felt had gone on long enough. Let’s get wasted and dance and fuck. Let’s get wasted and anything. Anything but just stand there, right?
We spend the night at a mini-squat. The fag we are staying with is kinda everything. This little Latino twinkie with glasses. I’m lightweight smitten. He has quite possibly the second-biggest dick I’ve ever seen on a tour, ever. I sit on it. It makes me feel good. I am of course too drunk, and after we fuck I end up stepping on a broken beer bottle in his room and go outside in my underwear to bleed. My bandmates are outside smoking, and I go to the sidewalk to walk around in circles and talk to myself (my favorite pastime). My bandmates often comment on this pastime. They’re usually like, “Dude, what the fuck?” (I’m often irritated by how easily these bitches get all shell-shocked. How the fuck are they so well adjusted? Are they on pills?) They seem genuinely disturbed, and I guess I can’t always blame them. I really am a lot sometimes. I’m often drunk, naked, crying, blacked out, disoriented, confused, walking the streets of strange cities in my underwear sparking up conversations with homeless people, waking up with my hands in the pants of roadies, sucking dick in the tour van (after I was asked not to), etc. Being in a band is like being in a multiple relationship with hella people at once. It really is its own unique kind of hell. We are a diverse group but, of course, diversity is bullshit. We like diversity as long as someone acts close to what we’re used to. The second that’s out the window, fingers get pointed, and walls start going up. I honestly feel pathologized by my bandmates sometimes. Looking back, I have to say it’s very hard to discern what a truly rational or irrational reaction is when one is under a truly absurd amount of stimuli. I remember when the conversations became repetitive and scripted:
Accusing party: You were DRUNK!
Me: So were you . . .
Accusing party: Yeah?! Well you were DRUNKER!
Me: LAY OFF ME BITCH, I WAS MOLESTED! (cue uncontrollable crying)
It happens so much it gets to be boring. I never let any of my ego get too beat up by any disciplinary talking to ’cause alongside my admitted problem-childness I watched each of them pull what (at least I felt like) could be construed as some pretty evil shit too. You stay around anybody long enough and you’re most certainly going to watch them pull some evil shit. If they don’t, then that just means they’re good at hiding it and that’s the motherfucker you’ve got to be extra careful of. Either way, you’re afraid to ask why you were generally the most blacked out in the band. There are of course theories . . .
And besides, bands are not supposed to revel in differences but, rather, revel in commonality. When we were on, it was on. I liked that. I remember that. But then time passes. You get less (or more) mad or happy about this or that. There are other sounds you’re hearing in your head now.
Then there was the realization that I actually lived in a small place. I didn’t want people to get to see me in such raw states on stage then be able to bark orders at me at a shitty diner. Fuck that. But despite all the bullshit, I was just glad I got to have fun, fun being sometimes so rare in life. But, it was this particular night in Denver, with my party boy wreckedness and my bloody foot, that I make a particular vow (while my bandmates thought I was simply talking to myself): “I’m not crazy,” I said, “I’m writing my book.”
TRIO IN SOUTHERN GOTHIC
I skipped work at the diner that day but not writing class. The theme of the lecture that day was the Southern Gothic writers. What constituted Southern Gothic genre writing, the handout explained:
Southern Gothic is a subgenre of Gothic fiction unique to American literature that takes place exclusively in the American South. It resembles its parent genre in that it relies on supernatural, ironic, or unusual events to guide the plot. It is unlike its parent genre in that it uses these tools not solely for the sake of suspense, but to explore social issues and reveal the cultural character of the American South. The Southern Gothic style is one that employs the use of macabre, ironic events to examine the values of the American South. Racial tension and gun violence are often featured.
I took this to mean “fucked up stories about growing up in the Deep South,” and, oh bitch, I got a million of them. With that much preparation, I decided to rip this genre a new asshole and wrote “Trio in Southern Gothic” . . .
1. The Graduation: I had been away from Alabama so long my family started calling me “California Boy.” I had been away so long I forgot things. I didn’t eat fried catfish every Sunday anymore, and I forgot about the heat or rather how it was not the heat but the humidity. But dear god—how could you forget? I also regretted things like how I never did acid as a teen. I sat on my mom’s porch the night I flew in watching all the fireflies thinking, “This would look so much cooler if I was on acid.” There was the stench of the poison the planes sprayed on the cotton field surrounding my house. Defoliant. It was used to make the leaves fall off the cotton faster, but sometimes I felt like they were secretly spraying it to kill us. The man across the street who was my mom’s age and had been a farmer and mixed around with it too much had died from too much getting in his bloodstream. I had come home for the graduation. My younger sister and all the kids from her age group that had grown up in “the field”—about twenty-something kids—were going to finally walk across the stage. I would be a witness. I took a midday walk because in the backwoods all you can do is walk, walk, walk, say hi to a cousin or faux-cousin (i.e., you had grown up so close and they were black too, so you’re basically “cousins”), and then walk some more. I looked around and cotton was not king anymore. They’d farmed it too long and it drained all the nitrogen out of the soil. Soybeans (as it was explained to me) put nitrogen back into the soil, so they grew mostly soybeans now. Up the road three houses and one crop field over was where I got attacked. I stared at the house . . .
When I was twelve, two girl cousins (eleven and thirteen) invited me
over. They put me on the floor, fully clothed, one laid on my pelvis and one sat on my face and they both dry humped me furiously for thirty minutes. I remember being able to smell the younger one’s pussy through her leggings and wishing I was somewhere else, and no, not because I’m a fag who hates pussy but because fuck, no foreplay?!?!?! Couldn’t we have kissed with tongue first? Those bitches were jocks. Another time, I roller-skated over to the two cousins’ house and four more neighborhood girls knocked me off my skates, held me down, undressed me, and all started laughing at my penis.
Years later, when I told my mother, she surmised that, surely, this was why I was gay. “Naw girl, calm down,” I said. As a gay man in touch with and in control of his emotions (at least up to 20 percent of the time), I knew that my faggotry was pretty fucking epic. It seemed like a lot to blame any one person for. I kept it chill. I attended the community fish fry that was being held for the graduating babies and one of the cousins was there. She had seen a picture online of me dancing naked on a stage in Paris and said “Damn, you moved to California and got turned out, didntya?” It took quite the restraint not to slap her and say “Bitch, you started it . . .”
Johnny Would You Love Me if My Dick Were Bigger Page 5