Could it be that, without realizing it, I am instinctively seeking in my confused fashion, something which will make my life complete – love, adventure, a woman, an idea, my fortune? Is it that I long to escape from myself and my surroundings, the tediousness of my situation, and wish to start a new life? Perhaps it is something of the sort, or all of these together. At any rate it is a most unpleasant state to be in, this fervour of nervousness regularly followed by total inertia.
Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin
Dispositif[§]
My business school class was, as you might expect, rife with ambition. Most of my classmates spent at least a little while in the dregs of our highest paying option, the ill-reputed investment bank, where they slaved for some period bound by golden handcuffs and comforted by binge drinking. Over the span of a couple of years, one by one, most quit the grind for greener, less demanding pastures of various profiles. After three years, Ben and I were among the few still working hard for the money.
My gay boyfriend Wesley Worthington had escaped. He always just wanted the cachet of “MBA” near his name, anyway. Since he got it, he’d taken a few political positions, and I assumed he meant to gradually climb the ladder of political society until he reached the top.
Wesley had been clawing for a while. He came from a big family without much in the way of means. He’d gotten scholarships to a long line of prestigious schools, the last of which was the site of our meeting. For the first year and a half that I knew him, neither of us was aware that the other dabbled in same-sex sex. Without a trained eye, you’d never know he liked cock. His family still didn’t, not even his siblings.
Wesley stood an inch over six feet, but felt more imposing than even that height because of the tangle of grand, large, tight muscles that flexed uncorrupted by fat around his body. He stretched flawless onyx skin over high thin cheekbones, punctuated by strong apples in his cheeks that formed classic dimples when he flashed white teeth in a wide grin. He dressed as pristine as any man I’d met, and more so than most women, but never overdressed. Tonight, he wore a dress shirt with small yellow, blue, and grey stripes under a bright yellow hoodie, and well-fit jeans over Prada loafers. Nothing was loose, but nothing was tight either. That didn’t mean you couldn’t see his abs through his sweatshirt. There was little of the man that didn’t approach perfection, I thought, but my favorite feature was always his big deep eyes, which gave him the appearance of youth, and perhaps innocence, clear through to his late 20s. He looked the teddy bear when he smiled at you.
Naturally my first thought upon meeting him was that I’d like to fuck him. There’s a particular pleasure in sex with men built that way, a way of being overpowered. Of course I harbored a certain taste for black men, perhaps in rebellion to the environment of my upbringing. When I discovered he preferred men (though not without a lingering attraction to women), we instead bonded over our looser sexuality definitions and what I think we both saw in the other as a talent for charming. Charming is the wrong word, I suppose. Maybe a facility with conversation and a tendency to bring the folks we met around to our point of view. Whatever it was, he had more of it than I.
He’d advocated a devoutly liberal candidate for whom he served as office staff. Tonight, he explained, he’d considered bringing one of her petitions out to get some signatures. The petition wouldn’t be used for months, and he’d have plenty of time to garner signatures, so he was debating.
“Why not?” was my simple reaction. I wasn’t the least bit insulted to have the goals of our night supplemented in this way, and I was curious to watch him work (it). So, we set out from his apartment, petition in hand.
As we walked, I explained the frustrating interaction with Claire that had spawned my recent alcoholism. “So what, she’s just crazy,” he surmised.
“Maybe. But more likely thought it prudent to string me along for professional reasons.”
He laughed. “I think she misjudged you.”
“She hurt me. I haven’t been hurt in a while. I know better than to open up.”
Wesley wrapped his heavy arm around my shoulder. “Nah. Don’t think of it like that. You keep yourself sexy. There’ll be others, worth more than this one.”
“Oh, it’s hardly about her individually. I barely knew her, even less so than I’d thought. What really bothers me is that I opened up to someone, at least opened up my mind to the possibility of being with someone, let myself feel excited, and then failed. I hate failing.”
“Don’t we all.”
“Anyway, I’m not stupid enough to be hung up on this girl, certainly not months later, but I am hung up on the pain of opening up, and I don’t want to do it anymore. I just want to forget. These courtship exercises are too much trouble. I don’t know how many times I can survive being ripped from revelry.” As we approached the line at Badlands, I was almost pleased to find it devoid of women.
Badlands is really no place for women, though women demand admittance anyway. It’s nestled just off Castro Street on 18th, behind a line of snappy dressers seeking bacchanalia. At any given time, there are maybe four women in the place. But the men are having a hell of a time, drinking in a large space to music that includes Madonna but would otherwise make her proud.
Wesley hugged the bouncer. “Rick, man, wassup!”
Rick smiled sheepishly at Wesley. “Goin’ on. How about you?”
Wesley explained that he was searching out support for his candidate, and Rick sung her praises. She was the one who’d fixed up the public transit system by letting you use a single card everywhere, wasn’t she? Rick remembered when she ran a float through the Pride parade the previous year. “Good luck!” Rick gave Wesley a flirty punch in the arm and let us in ahead of the line without checking our IDs, offering his signature in the process.
Wesley moved through the place, a magician, recognized everywhere he turned. This was Kyle, Derek, Jason, Jake. This was George, Doug, Lucas, Adrian. He seemed to know everyone in the bar, and every one of them looked at him like a cuddly, juicy sausage after a wheat grass cleanse.
I made friends easily – I had no problem befriending gay men. I chatted briefly with most of them, in most cases discussing Wesley, our only known connection. But I was only half in those conversations. Most of my attention was following Wesley around the room. For people he knew, he explained pretty quickly that he was out for the evening seeking support for a valuable cause, and in fifteen minutes he’d filled half the signature lines on his petition with suitors’ autographs.
“Next?” I asked when one group of known quantities departed and left us standing alone.
“Let’s grab a drink.”
As we approached the bar, I watched him catch the eye of a dude rocking a Burberry jacket. Wesley reached out and tugged at the sleeve.
“I love the spring stuff,” he said simply. The pretty, well-kempt admirer smiled in response and said, “Thanks! I may have spent a whole paycheck.”
“What do you do?” Wesley asked. The admirer explained, and Welsey mentioned casually some service done to the industry by his candidate. Before we reached the bar he had the admirer’s signature, and three more the admirer had solicited on his behalf. We pried onto two adjacent barstools and ordered beers, exchanging enough words with the bartender for Wesley to ask for his signature, which was readily obtained. When the bartender left to attend to others demanding intoxicants, I beamed at Wesley with admiration.
“You really are quite magic, you know that?”
He only smiled.
“Can you teach me?”
“Teach you what?”
“God… charm... advocacy… how to play a room full of people like a harp at one time….”
“Aww… darlin’ you know if I told you that I’d have to kill you…” We both cracked smiles and I chuckled a bit. “I’m sure you do the same to straight men,” he offered.
“You flatter me. Realistically I’m guessing I’m better with lesbians.”
As if to prove my point, when we walked out of Badlands an hour after arriving with a petition signed to the brim, a girl passing by me reached up, took my arm, pulled my cheek to her and kissed it, then continued onward, following the girl she accompanied in. I glanced back at Wesley to find laughter in his eyes. “See,” he said, smug.
“Darling, you know I’m only really into straight girls.”
He laughed, and we left a debonair hole in the place where Wesley had once been.
So all my unsatisfied passions churn around silently inside of me, feeding on each other through lack of nourishment, like so many animals in a zoo where the keeper has forgotten to feed them.
Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin
Of Right Mind and Right Action[**]
Soon after my night canvassing with Wesley, I was buried in some menial calculations stretching painfully through my afternoon, tied to my desk, when Jackson texted: “It’s your turn.” It took me a moment to recall what he was talking about.
“Fair,” I replied. “But I have no one with Sauce.”
“I’ll bring the Sauce. It’s your year, year of the tiger.”
“I’m no tiger, I’m a dog. Anyway, what’s the Sauce?” I wrote.
“Can you call?”
So, I dialed his number.
“Hello, Lover,” his honey voice offered in greeting.
“Hi there. So what’s with this Sauce?”
“So,” he began. “My friend Amber from med school. Lifetime of angst.”
“Why angsty?” I said, waiting.
“For the first three years of school, she was dating another friend of mine, a guy.” My email dinged, but I ignored it and let him continue: “Everything about her screams ‘lez.’ Voice, walk, manner, interests. Loves sports. Played basketball.”
“Hot?” I interrupted.
“Bacchus, I’m disappointed in you. Since when have looks determined whether someone is deserving of a public service?”
“Oh, of course, darling, you’re right.” I let the sarcasm drip from my voice. “For my next trick, I’m going to pull a troll with Sauce out of my hat and make you fuck him.”
He laughed from the other end of the line. “Anyways, it took almost a year after they broke up, but I finally had her admitting she thought she might be bi. I don’t know if she’s hooked up with a girl, though. She’s not the biggest player ever.”
“Does she live here?” I asked. “Cause I don’t think I’m really in the sort of mental place to be imprinting anybody…”
“What do you mean, imprinting?” he asked. My email dinged again, and again I ignored it. I reasoned that I had five minutes to pretend I was in the bathroom, but I grew nervous leaving the email unaddressed.
“I mean, I know you’ve been someone’s first gay interaction before.”
“A couple of times,” he admitted.
“So you know damn well there’s an attachment that occurs. Even if they don’t fall for you, they become emotionally sensitive to you. At least they can.”
“Eric didn’t,” he said. “He told me he didn’t enjoy it. Well – that it didn’t mean anything to him.”
“He did?”
“Yeah. I emailed to him after he went back to Jersey. I told him what happened meant something to me, but he’d closed off already.”
“And you don’t think he was lying?” I asked.
“Maybe to himself.”
“Probably to himself. But, look, homes, girls are different. Men are far better at detaching from their emotions.”
“Bach, I’ve never met anyone more detached from their emotions than you.”
“I’m fucked up. In many, many ways.” This morning I stubbed my toe on my own desk, for the love of god.
“Psshaw,” he said, and then he was chiding: “Anyways, look. She lives in Miami. I appreciate that your colossal ego makes you believe everyone just falls madly in love with you at first touch—”
“Don’t be an asshole.”
“Aw, you know I’m kidding. Look, everyone has issues, but she is quite mature. I think she needs to know how she really feels about women. Don’t you think she should?”
I had to confess, I did. “Yes, I suppose my life would be much better if the women out there yearning to try being with a girl tried it and admitted they were interested. And if I understood why they did.”
“Well,” he said, “this is sort of tangential to our Saucing task. She’s told me she thinks she’s bi, she’s not in denial, but, frankly, I think she’s only going to be happy with women. But I don’t think she knows that, cause I don’t think she’s sexed a lady yet. And I don’t think she’s the type to try to make anything permanent from 4000 miles away.”
“Hang on,” I said, and I turned back to my computer and typed out a response to my boss, promising to get on whatever the fuck he wanted me to do ASAP. Then I turned my attention back to Jackson. “Okay, well, I’ll consider it. I doubt I could do a good job of enlightening her if I’m not really attracted to her, at least physically. I assume you’re bringing this up because she’s coming to town?”
“It’s the Chinese New Year parade tonight,” he explained.
“She’s in town for Chinese New Year?”
“No, she’s in town for some dermatology thing, but she’s half Chinese. I broached the parade with her and she seems interested. Why don’t you meet us out?”
I looked at the clock on my desk phone. 2:30. I drew my cheeks back skeptically. “Ooh… okay, I will try, but it will be on the late side. At least I’ll only have to walk a couple blocks from the office. I’ll do my best.”
“Great. We’ll start drinking without you. And, for the record, she’s cute,” he promised.
“I’ll text you if and when I can get out of here.”
We said our goodbyes and hung up. I spent the next five hours maniacally calculating to finish my assignment, drank fourteen or so cups of coffee, and attached the Excel spreadsheet I’d finished to an email. Then I set a Boomerang script to send it to my boss in three hours, which I decided still technically counted as “today,” but adequately displayed that I’d burned midnight oil to generate it. I reached into my purse and grabbed keys, a credit card, an ID, and my phone, slipping them in my pocket, leaving the purse tucked under my desk. I left the office light on and closed my door behind me, then scurried down the hall past the masses of analysts toward the bathroom, from whence I scurried down the back route to the elevators.
“I’m free,” I texted Jackson.
“Smashing,” he wrote back, “we’re under the clock near the Montgomery Street Muni station.”
I could hear the drums as soon as I emerged from my concrete spire. Montgomery Street was filled with people, an odd sight for the Financial District this late at night. Crowds of twentysomethings dressed in jeans mixed with heroes of the Orient, sarongs and silks, sparklers and Pipas. In heels I was one of the taller components of the crowd.
I was at the clock in five minutes. I craned my neck around the intersection and caught Jackson’s blonde locks near Market Street, watching a late-parade float carrying a crouching incandescent tiger, flanked by a troupe of drummers and a set of silken women spinning ribbons on sticks. As I walked towards him I saw Amber, a relatively tiny thing, about five foot one, cartoon skinny with big boobs, hair falling over her face. Not a troll body, at least. I tapped Jackson’s shoulder.
“Hey!” he said in greeting. “Glad you got out! This is Amber,” he gestured toward her. “Amber, Bacchus.”
I held out my hand. “Nice to meet you.” Maybe it was the beating drums around us, but I felt a sting of tension from her eyes. She carried big brown eyes, pooling in clear, alabaster skin. She was cute, that much was true.
“Same,” she said in a raspy, deep voice. I glanced briefly to catch Jackson’s eye, to say, “Yes, there’s protein there for sure,” before I looked into her eyes intently and released her hand after a bit too long.
“I’m surprised I
didn’t miss the parade,” I told them.
“You tried really hard,” Jackson told me. “But I think it started late. You did miss a very amusing troupe of contortionists.”
“Blast,” I said. Amber smiled, and took a swig from a bottle of Diet Coke.
Jackson turned back from watching the circling drummers that passed us by, color swarming, flashing adornments covering the floats, as a dragon made of men nearly swung its tail into him. He leaned into me.
“Liquid courage?” he asked quietly, holding out a flask so big it should more properly be called a bottle.
Both of their hands held soda bottles, capped. “I must say I didn’t expect you’d encourage me to drink alone.”
“I’m not!” He held up the bottle in his hand, “These are half whiskey.”
“Ah. Okay.” I accepted the flask and swallowed thrice, feeling the burn in my throat but neglecting to flinch. As a set of girls dressed as teacups or soup bowls – I couldn’t discern which – passed us by, I handed Jackson back the flask and leaned toward Amber, proximity justified by the jeering of the crowds and the ever-present beat of drums. “So Jackson tells me you’re from Miami?” I could smell her hair now, a pleasant scent of a familiar perfume, vaguely brisk. But it was not the most pleasant girl-smell I’d smelled in recent memory.
“Not originally, but I live there now.”
“And how are you finding it?” I was forcing her to turn toward me, bringing our faces six or so inches away from one another. I looked right at her while we talked, the conversation periodically interrupted by a rush of decibels from the adjoining parade. Her answers were polite, but not terribly deep. Of course, it was hardly an environment for intellectual conversation. She mentioned the beauty of Miami’s women, or rather, the superficial beauty of its women. It seemed, she said, that South Beach was nothing but models, and their physiques made her self-conscious.
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