“How’s that working out for ya?”
“So far, not well. We’ll see. I’m off, Grot. Be well.”
He nodded, and I walked the bit farther to the Lookout.
The Lookout is set up like a fort in the center of the Castro. A single street-level door cowers between storefronts. An ATM greets you in the staircase, as the Lookout does not appreciate credit cards. Half the place is siphoned off to be a restaurant (where nobody really eats – most of the patrons are manorexic), the other half a bar with a modest dance floor and sliding glass doors opening onto a wrapping balcony, with stools nailed to the floor looking out over the intersection of 16th and Market. Televisions on the walls stay tuned to porn or Mixed Martial Arts most of the time, and no one has gone through the trouble of furnishing the place in anything but 50s vinyl. I surveyed the room for Jackson or Eric, finding neither, so I ordered a Bourbon and Ginger Ale and sat out on the balcony, watching the peripheral view of the sunset and the people on the street below.
These streets are always filled with at least a majority of well-dressed, clean-shaven, in-shape men who like men. Sometime Castro streets read like GQ. But the longer you watch, the more outliers you see.
Today there was an obese lady in blue furry boots walking her cat on a short leash down the thoroughfare. She waddled against the will of her pants, which were working too hard to stay in one piece to permit much more activity. Behind her, a pair of hipster lesbians holding hands. Across the street I saw something hanging from a telephone pole. Upon closer inspection I found it to be a butt plug – or at least a device designed to stimulate the prostate in a similar way – and, yes, indeed, the sign stapled above the chain from whence it hung touted a “free butt plug for rent.” I wondered who’d rented it, and hoped they’ve gloved it first. I’m sure someone had at least drunkenly taken a bet to plug the thing up his ass. That’s a hell of a Saturday night. After a few minutes a couple of boys stopped to poke at it, leaving it swinging on the pole.
I watched the pokers proceed to the 16th street crosswalk. As they left the sidewalk they revealed my second familiar face of the day behind them, approaching the intersection.
She was probably fifty feet away, across the street. It was the hair that caught my eye first, long and thick and dark and bouncing with each step, but I could then see the glow of green eyes, and I felt a familiar pulse from within, despite the distance. Who does she remind me of? She had a brown paper bag propped against her hip, looking up Market and away from the bar. Looking back, I can’t calculate how I could have seen her eyes, but I swear at the time the light shone into them and they looked a maniacally bright green. I felt enchanted.
“Bacchus!” I was jerked from my revelry by Eric’s innocent excitement. I turned.
“Hey buddy!” I forgave Eric’s interruption of my mental gymnastics, rushing with friendly pleasure at seeing him, and I hugged him. We got him a drink, returned to the balcony, and he talked on his professional machinations for a moment. Then, a gentleman walked below us wearing skin-tight red leather pants. “That cannot be comfortable,” he said, pointing.
“His ass is better than mine,” I moaned.
“Nah! Well… it is a bubbly sort of thing.” He watched the red pants walk away, and I suppressed my sigh.
I’d informed Eric of my complicated sexuality years after I’d met him; I’d been shielding the identity of my first girlfriend, the one I’d cuddled up to fucking, who was a mutual friend of ours. But, after enough time had passed, and she was no longer a part of my life, the demands of true friendship with Eric required me to come clean. We’d traveled to a sunny location with other friends, scuba diving and languishing during our sunny days there. Walking the beach, having revealed to him that I was even less straight than he’d imagined, I told him I thought I might have fallen for another girl.
I’d told him, “It’s difficult to explain… I wish I could just give you a label and say ‘this is what I am,’ but I can’t. There is no label. Most of the time I don’t know what my own sexuality is. I just know I haven’t quite felt this way about anyone before, not any guy or my first girl, and I’m not one-hundred percent sure what that means yet. I was just out with her, in a gay club, and I just looked around and I had no interest in the women around me. The only thing I wanted to look at was her. There were pretty women, but I couldn’t have cared less about them. But her… her, my eyes are always drawn to.”
“No,” he told me then, “I get it. You fall in love with people.” He’d said it so perfectly, interpreted what I was saying so accurately, it made me want to cry.
“Yes, that’s exactly it,” I’d said. Soon, the idea of that girl I’d invented to be in love with had crumbled in the manner of so many ancient ruins. Loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded upon crumbles, they too fade away, says Mr. Kundera. But, my respect for Eric’s understanding had remained.
Jackson joined us at the Lookout soon after Eric had arrived, hugging Eric hello despite their having met only once before. He took a seat on the stool to Eric’s right, so that Eric sat between us. Our conversation was pleasant, but relatively shallow, as the boys knew little about one another that hadn’t been run through the filter of me.
A round later, conversation seeped toward pansexual – given our surroundings, that was hard to avoid. At least for me. And a little bit for Jackson. And Eric loosened up.
As they engaged one another, I looked out onto the street, imagining what the people in Mississippi, at least the older ones, would think of what they saw if they were standing on this balcony at the Lookout. I thought of my living grandmother, who’d introduced me many times to her beloved, obviously lesbian cousin, a cousin who’d lived with a “roommate” for at least 30 years, a cousin she clearly admired and actively involved in her life. At least in the 26 years I knew of her, this cousin seemed beloved by her older church lady companions.
I’ve talked before about this cousin’s pulsating lesbian vibe. With my father, frequently, and once with my mother, with my uncle, and once at a Christmas dinner. The discussions had a singular conclusion: the cousin was an obvious lesbian. But my grandmother has never once heard this spoken of or spoken about it herself. She told me only that the cousin lived with a female roommate. She is a perceptive lady, and I can’t imagine she didn’t understand that this was a companion, a sexual companion. But, of course, she might have chosen not to know.
My grandmother would stand on this balcony in stark disbelief of the circumstances surrounding her. In our time on this Lookout balcony we had probably seen a few people fucked out of their minds walk by, some without knowing we’d seen it, and she’d have undoubtedly judged them for that vice. She’d be shocked at how tight folks’ clothes were, how revealing. She’d likely notice that people in the City were generally in better shape than the average folks in her town. She would probably think the buildings were beautiful, the light falling on so many colors, and would say so. And I think she’d be shocked to see men walking down the street holding hands, or women walking down the street holding hands. She might note the number of tattoos, or potentially ask the gentleman next to her if he’s a homosexual, though I’d never heard her use the word. She is, after all, quite old.
“It’s different here, no?” I asked Eric in response to my thoughts when his conversation with Jackson reached a rare lull. He swallowed and nodded at once, gulping at his scotch and water.
“It’s not unique, I suppose,” I clarified. “There are parts of Boston, Miami, Los Angeles, DC, New York, where you’ll see the same thing. Compressed urban areas densely populated with a gay community. High fashion. Some homeless, fashionable and otherwise. Same-sex couples holding hands… but, I dunno man, something about the architecture of this place frolics in the mystical parts of my brain… it feels somehow more spirited here.”
“Oh good lord,” Jackson chimed.
“No… I like it a lot,” Eric finished.
The hills rose around us and i
nto the Sierras thereafter. Buildings a century old, trickling in bright colors all over the streets. Disjointed fingers of bridges clasping intently to clip the shores together, encircling the Bay. Sheer rocky cliffs, white (but fucking chilly) beaches billowing for miles, a couple hundred feet wide, algaed barriers against a raging Pacific. Hilltops drizzled with colors and lights, and it took my breath away.
“It’s so worth the money to live here,” Jackson pursed his lips as he echoed my thoughts.
Naturally it formed no small part of his conclusion that the City was so gay friendly. Jackson had spent his childhood using his male-male relationships that were non-sexual as fodder for sexual relations with himself. Here, he needn’t bother with that repression. He was hardly the only dissatisfied teenager that came here to escape indignant parents. The City welcomes them all.
Eric hailed from New Jersey, where Jackson had once lived, and he and Jackson began to swap stories about its bars, restaurants, sights and sounds. I looked out over the balcony at a Drag Queen, fluent in her heels, then turned to make friends with the gentleman sitting to my left, leaving Eric and Jackson to pitter back and forth comfortably.
Eric excused himself to use the restroom. “Sir, at long last, I present to you, Sauce,” I said to Jackson as Eric slid the glass door closed behind him.
“Hmm. I dunno about this one,” he replied with obvious skepticism.
“Do you not think he’s interested?”
“I’m not sure,” he said, his voice drawling.
“Hmm,” was my only reply. I didn’t know whether to point out how involved Eric had been in his conversation with Jackson. “Well, we can but increase the debauchery quotient and see,” I suggested. Jackson nodded, but was quiet when Eric returned, without cocktails, explaining he was too tired to drink much. I went back to the bar for a round for Jackson and myself.
After Jackson and I completed our fourth round, I suggested we switch neighborhoods and hit Trax in the Haight. I knew the drinks to be strong, the patrons to be gay, and the pool table to be frequently unattended. Eventually we stumbled into Trax and dropped Eric between us again. I’d grown increasingly mute, and had taken to observing Jackson’s charm. He made easy conversation, flashing white, straight teeth and boyish smiles, growing more gesticular with the alcohol.
The crowd at Trax is a tad rougher than the Castro’s fine-looking men show. Sometimes older, sometimes less svelte, but generally more intimate. The bar was relatively quiet – it was a week night after all. I suggested we play nine ball, and the boys accepted.
Standing didn’t inhibit my silence, as Eric and Jackson quipped back and forth and appeared to get to know one another much better, Jackson holding welcome eye contact with Eric through the vast majority of their conversation.
Two drinks later, as Jackson and I grew more obviously drunk, I offered up the successor to Grot’s nug to entice them back to my apartment. Jackson accepted the drink and the invite, Eric accepted the invite, and Jackson and I smoked and laughed together through intoxicant and intoxication, until eventually I felt my bed pulling me away.
“Boys, I have to sleep. I have to work tomorrow.”
“Let me know how that works out,” Jackson chided.
“Likely not swimmingly. You can crash in the guest room if you don’t want to travel.” I neglected to mention that Jackson lived only blocks away. There were certainly horrors of my employ, but the paycheck, and the guest-bedroom lifestyle that it permitted, was not amongst them. I crumbled into my bed and left them alone.
The next morning, I peered through the cracked guest room door to see them both sleeping there and smiled. After lunch I called Jackson.
“So?” I asked as he greeted me.
“A lady never kisses and tells.”
“So there was kissing?” He laughed at me over the line.
“And some fondling.”
“How was he?”
“You mean performance-wise? Or emotionally?”
“Both.”
“I tried to rouse him this morning when I got up for work, but he was sleeping, or feigning sleep. I left a note.”
“Shit, I hope he didn’t miss his conference. I blanked completely on the lack of an alarm.”
“It’s pretty likely he was awake when I left.”
I texted Eric when we hung up. “Conference ok today?”
“Conference is fine. I am deathly ill.”
“Sick?”
“Hungover.”
I recalled his having only two drinks all night and wondered at the hangover. I considered mentioning Jackson and decided against it. “Feel better. I’ll work on escaping so we can grab dinner.”
Although I made a successful escape, there was absolutely no mention of Jackson at dinner. I was forced to sit and wonder what Eric had thought about the experience, whether he had some greater understanding of his Sauce, whether he remembered it at all. His anxious state suggested he did. But, I didn’t push him, and consequently I gained no new insight from the Saucing. We discussed other topics, news of the day, the City. He left the next morning still not having mentioned Jackson, and, soon after arriving back in Jersey, he informed me of a growing facility with the ladies and a resulting increase in his sexual activity. I was forced to wonder if Jackson had been the motivation, and suspected with regret that Eric was no more aware of himself than he had been before, despite Saucing all over the place.
From Eric, I learned that one could want to Sauce enough to do it, and might totally understand what it means for others to be in the proverbial middle, but might run away holding hands over one’s ears and eyes afterwards just the same.
In the mind of woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Holiday
An inkling of doom hatched in my bowels. It peered outward as a mild nausea, clamping upon my stomach, churning it, discreetly. My abdominals grew tense and sore. It crawled into my spine, my back, my shoulders. It corroded my quadriceps and my calves began to flex and tense of their own accord. Arthritic tension filled my fingers, my wrists. At first, I wondered why I’d begun to snap at innocent salespeople whose only failing was that they worked a job they hated. But soon it occurred to me what was materializing over the course of that week, post-Eric.
My body recognized that I’d soon drag it south, to a world it no longer recognized – a world where the supermarket chains were different than San Francisco’s, where Trader Joe’s may as well be a myth, where gas was two dollars cheaper and beer was a quarter of the price, where the vast majority of the populace would not recognize if my clothes happened to emanate from some famous designer. In fact, I wouldn’t bring my normal clothes. I thought some of them were too obviously gay.
I’d leave my makeup at home. I loved that particular protest. All the dames in Mississippi – including my mother – would fight tooth and nail if you tried to get them to pop over to the grocery store without makeup. The half-makeup I wore was some of the heaviest in the City, on the other hand – or at least the heaviest outside of the Marina –, and I only wore it out at night. It was unfortunate that I appeared so disheveled, to my mother’s public shame, but I told myself I’d make it up to her.
No, I’d bring athletic shorts, t-shirts, hoodies, and flip-flops, though I’d risk blowing their minds with a brand of jeans that wasn’t available in their stores. They weren’t interested in the fashion that interested San Francisco. I’d tried not to think of what I’d do with myself for a week when I got there. They didn’t show the movies I’d want to see, and the bars were full of persons offended by a man’s wearing tight jeans. I’d tried to push such thoughts from my mind, but diffuse apprehension lumped in my bowels, having plagued me for almost a week before my departure.
My plane from San Francisco to Houston was full of iPads, laptops, Wired magazines, and Sudoku. After I changed planes in Houston, the accents changed and the technology
disappeared. Deboarding in Jackson, I met a humid breeze around 70 degrees, a tad warm for Decembertime but not unheard of. My mother collected me at the airport and drove us out to her house off the Pelahatchie Bay. There was a special kind of comfort being near her, almost enough to put a dent in the discomfort of being in that place. Even if she didn’t understand me sometimes, she had a way of conveying that I always made sense to her. I had a blessing few of my sexuality could claim: my nuclear family accepted me without question.
I watched the “city” of Jackson pass from the car window, house after boring house with a single story and a single architectural style and a single shade of vinyl siding, interlaced with broad swaths of dry grass, gas stations, dollar stores, and churches. It seemed so foreign that I was forced to remind myself that I’d once lived here for more than a decade.
I proudly wore my sweatpants into the grocery store we visited en route. When we arrived at home, I buckled down for four days, happy to see family and entirely uninterested in seeing any more of Jackson, the city, missing Jackson, the person, who’d always made it a bit more tolerable. I missed my family, of course, being so far away, but I much preferred to see them out west. There I was simply myself; I didn’t hide behind the masks I still had to wear around the extended family down South.
I’ve long suspected that much of people’s difficulty with accepting gay relatives lies in their concern that gay relatives mean gay genes – in their family – gene’s they couldn’t raise right out of kids. Maybe the brash reactivity of fathers to their sons’ confessions of homosexuality stems from their suppression of the homosexual instincts in themselves, or maybe from fear of propagating a gayed gene pool, or maybe just from listening complacently to the suppositions of the wrong pastor. In my youth I’d seen no shortage of church-sanctioned instructions to hate. The Southern church was especially good at espousing the ancient practice of creating an “other” and then instructing supplicants to hate it. Sometimes the “other” was gay, but the “other” could as easily be “persons who think the Earth has been around more than 6000 years.”
No Church in the Wild Page 8