Be Safe

by Doug Weaver

  “Both the Mazurka and the minuet weren’t what we’ve come to expect from watching Hollywood movies – they were, at the time of their popularity, more like an ancient form of dirty dancing – absolutely ribald and sexually suggestive. Sure the ladies wore yards and yards of satin over corseted middles and the men wore formal Rococo-style outfits. But at that time people weren’t all that hygienic. Picture the Prince’s Ball where he courted Cinderella, but rather than a well-scrubbed room-full of prissy satin-clad ladies and gentlemen, they were all pretty much unbathed and filthy, and heavily scented, the perfume only having the ability to be effective at the very beginning of the ball. Their stink literally overpowered their layers of perfume and garments so that their high-classed ballroom, with magical twinkling candles and dignified string orchestra, smelled more like a skanky locker room with backed-up toilets than what we’ve come to imagine in minuet scenes rendered by Paramount Studios or whatever movie studio that exists in Hollywood. Try to picture this ball. The siren call of the Mazurka’s seemingly unstable rhythm must have been irresistible to just about everybody in attendance. Within the framework of this 3/4 (or 2/4) beat, the people flung themselves at each other and groped and grinded and salivated like some primal mating dance that we’ve banished to ‘lower realms’ of animal life that promised forbidden debauchery – and all that perfume mixed in with all that stink and the ballroom’s heat because obviously no A/C just aroused everyone all the more until sexual desire finally, at the end of the night, devolved into chicken fat-lubed fucking and some gag-heavy cock-sucking.”

  And at exactly the moment when I’m beginning to question whether what’s coming out from the speakers is really a radio station at all, finally – finally the Mazurka starts and what he’s said is true. I’m completely overtaken by the music’s meter, which seems more than I’d bargained for at the moment. It’s grabbed me and, it seems, Korn too. And we’re transfixed with its strength – its tyranny, because it’s grown irresistible. We’ve been grabbed by our collars and the dance is having its way with us, and just like the guy says, I’m trying to count: “ONE, two, three, ONE, two, three” – but there’s a space that, once it’s acknowledged, grows to engulf the entire meter until it transforms into something else – something monstrous – and I can tell that it’s got both of us because we’re both counting and holding our breath after the “two” and before the “three,” and there we are, suspended – smack in the middle of this no-man’s land between the two beats.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The bus Jimmy S. is on is approaching Kenmore Avenue, and Jimmy’s experiencing a slight lull in his meth rush – the high has begun to show its finite side – so he has to make a couple of pretty substantial adjustments to his perception and expectations, so he jumps off the bus when a 7-Eleven store he’s familiar with comes into view.

  Before ducking inside, Jimmy quickly does a quick walk-around of the store’s parking lot, especially over by the dumpsters, because there’s sometimes a couple of crackheads over there who would probably be willing to drop their pants if they think Jimmy’s got a quarter or fifty cents for them. But there’s just some torn up heroin addict who’s actually kind of lounging – no shit, actually lounging in all the spilled Coke and leaked mayonnaise and wilted lettuce and cellophane wrapping paper and pieces of crumbs of discarded Twinkies, and probably not-quite-dried puddles of piss and probably a few aromatic piles of human shit that’s strewn around the dumpster, and he’s like pushing forty or something and he’s got cuts and bruises all over him and Jimmy’s absolutely not going to waste his precious high on him, even though, Jimmy thinks, this guy was probably pretty good looking a few years back – his blond hair has a certain authentic robustness under all that filth and he’s got the build of someone who’s had, at one time or another, pretty good muscles – kind of like skateboarders and fuck! Jimmy loves those guys. And Jimmy wonders for a brief moment about maybe dragging this guy back to Korn’s house and letting him take a shower, and probably feeding him whatever food’s in the fridge. Korn’s probably got some old clothes here or there that might fit him – and he knows he can throw this guy’s raggedy, smelly old shoes right in the trash, because think about how grateful he would be with different kicks and socks! There’s a tiny thrill taking shape in Jimmy’s head shaped by the raunchiness quotient of diving into this guy’s crotch that’s probably been completely ignored and un-thought of by another human being for probably years at this point. Ewww, Jimmy says as he contemplates the unthinkable, the ecstasy of the inexorable descent into filth, and he becomes flushed with a slight fever of desire, and he almost takes a step toward this heroin guy, but he senses, off to his left side, a furtive presence that exudes youth and – what’s most important to Jimmy – an ethnicity – a kind of youthful blur that’s unmistakable – the looseness of black-and-white fabric – a style of dress he’s become inured to while hanging at Korn’s house, which up until a few months ago Jimmy’d only seen pictures of or seen on the news now and then – usually stories that have to do with Middle-East peace or lack of thereof – Jews – orthodox Jews with tzitzis and peyes and fedoras and prayer shawls – and naiveté of unbroken/unexamined faith – and most important: boyhood. This Jewish kid stops suddenly at the entrance and waits until the doors automatically open when some other guy hits the pressure plate of the switch. And this kid waits until the guy exits and the door completely closes again, then he rears back and jumps hard on the mat to trip the switch and open the door: Dogma! Jimmy doesn’t mutter the word, but he instinctively recognizes the concept – the erosion of and rebellion out of youthful belief that’s begging to be helped along and ultimately fouled and ruined – and his dick starts to get hard. In a flash he abandons his homeless heroin addict and darts toward the entrance of the store to check this kid out.

  Jimmy enters the 7-Eleven with its unnaturally bright interior, which is pretty shocking to nighttime eyeballs, and like a big cat out on a desert savannah somewhere stalking a prospective dinner of water buffalo, Jimmy never lets this kid get out of his sight, even though he maintains a certain distance from him. This is what Jimmy’s good at. He keeps his eye on this kid all the while making his way around the sticky buns and then the deodorant and now over by the bug spray. His confidence continues to grow as he watches this kid pay for a couple of sticks of beef jerky and a Slurpy – two things about which Jimmy can’t know the significance. Both of these things – and thousands more – aren’t kosher. But beyond simply being unkosher, they’re literally traif – explicitely forbidden by God himself. This kid inches his way over to the magazine rack – the left-hand side of the magazine rack, which is the X-rated side. Perfect, Jimmy thinks. This kid’s all but in the bag. Jimmy isn’t unaware of his own age, which he knows might turn off some younger guys, but he’s got a secret weapon. He’s been told for decades now – by just about every kind of person he can think of – that there’s one phrase he’s mastered that’s pretty much irresistible every time he says it: You wanna get high? even though Jimmy doesn’t think he’ll have to resort to using it with this kid.

  Jimmy makes his move. He quietly sidles up to the magazine rack and puts on a pretty convincing show of perusing a few magazines like Car and Track, bending and reaching now and again into the kid’s personal space – a couple times he even squats and reaches over in front of the kid’s knees so he can look up – just momentarily – and meet the kid’s eyes, who are pretty much glued to images of either fully or partially naked people, because that’s what he’s there for.

  “Sorry,” Jimmy says a couple of times, or “excuse me.” Jimmy knows that even one verbal response from the kid and he’s a goner.

  “That’s cool,” the kid says.

  Bingo, Jimmy thinks, then: “I love that magazine.”

  “Huh?” The kid looks away from his magazine. He sounds breathless, a little scared.

 
Perfect.

  “Your magazine. Very hot. I like that magazine you’re reading.”

  “You want it?”

  “No, no…I’m just saying…”

  The kid shrinks from Jimmy.

  “Hey, no worries, man. You okay?”

  “Yeah, fine. What do you want?”

  “Hey, take it easy. I’m just looking at a few magazines.”

  “I know who you are,” the kid says.

  “Wha…huh?”

  “Kenmore Avenue. You live across the street from us – from me and my family.”

  Jimmy’s expression widens into a smile: “No shit.”

  “Yeah,” the kid says. “I see you – and your friends all the time.”

  Jimmy stands up straight and extends his hand: “I’m Jimmy.”

  “Moishe.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  And I think about the musicians performing this mazurka, the courage it must have taken to plant a marker in a rhythmic place that can only really be guessed at. That’s not insignificant, I think, as I imagine the bravery associated with discovery then exploring the unknown.

  “Should we dance for a minute? Just to see?” I ask Korn.

  So we start. Dancing.

  It’s probably not like legitimate mazurka dancing, because it’s obvious: neither of us knows what dancing a Mazurka is supposed to look like. But Christ! It’s easy as shit because who doesn’t know how to count to fucking three? It’s powerful; intoxicating. I forget about everything – every fucking thing – except the 1-2 – 3, 1-2 – 3 of this beat, until that’s all there is, this beat and this space where we find ourselves between the “2” and the “3.” There we are in Antonio’s dancing like fools, and each time the “2” arrives, the chances we take are that much more daring as the gulf between the two beats increases; the space widens and deepens, inviting us to jump further. And both of us are laughing our heads off as we find ourselves in this unknown space – and it’s not like rendered in a way that I can really describe it because I don’t understand it except that I want more and more. And even the fat guy with WOOF printed on his shirt has begun to tap his foot to the music, and he’s laughing his head off too. And the guy on the radio with the overflowing sinuses seems to know we’re dancing, because I hear him urging us on: That’s right! Fuck ‘em all! Don’t forget to count! 1-2 – 3, 1-2 – 3! Keep it real! Fuck ‘em ALL! And the room and all that blue and white metal furniture starts to follow us and all the bullshit of everything starts to fall away: All those “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts” and the fucking HIV doctors who’re so fond of portending doom with the phrase, We expect – like “After a period of twenty years of being ‘infected,’ we (meaning the medical community) ‘expect’ symptoms to arise not only on the physical level, but the cognitive level,” but we’re still expected to be brave and civilized and polite and arrive to work a little early just to make a good impression, and buy donuts for everybody once a week. But I’m not pissed off at these expectations because I’m still breathing, and I’m thinking so what if it’s hard? And for some reason I allow myself – for the first time in I don’t know how long – to imagine traveling a road that isn’t paved with injury and grievance – and I can hardly breathe the word: entitlement. Christ, I think – that’s me. A fucking entitled little bitch. And I think of all those people who died of the virus, and not just AIDS, but of just plain old stupidity – all over the world, and I start to feel ashamed, but all I really give a damn about now is this beat, this 1, 2 – 3 and this dance – this Marzuka. And I can see myself dancing in the reflection of plate glass windows of Antonio’s, and what’s really cool is I see Korn too, and we’re going back and forth looking at each other in real life, then looking at our reflections as we’re fucking dancing our heads off. We’re really dancing – I make a face at myself in my reflection. “Look at you, you fucking idiot!” I stick my tongue out. “Fuck you!” I yell at my own reflection, and I can’t help it, but I’m really dancing like crazy. “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you,” I yell, and I’m laughing my head off like a clown. And then Korn yells “Fuck you!” too, and we’re both dancing and clowning like fools. And every time this space shows up between the “2” and the “3,” we both hop a little bit higher, and on the way up we both inhale with the word “Fuck,” and on the way down, into this space that seems to keep widening, we both yell “You,” and the vowel part is elongated because the distance is elongated each time so it sounds like Youuuuu. And the fat guy with WOOF on his shirt has joined us. And I’m really kind of surprised at how robust his dance movements are, and he yells “Fuck you!” too. And he’s hopping up at the “2” – way up, where he inhales on the way up just like Korn and me, and he’s looking at his reflection in the glass too, and his You comes after the “2” but before the “3” – and there’s all three of us yelling “Fuck” on the way up and “Youuuu” on the way down, and I try to force myself to experience this from a bit of a distance, and when I do this, the consonant “F” in Fuck kind of dissipates more and more until all I can really hear is Uk Youuuuuu repeating over and over coming from all three of us as we dance this Mazurka. And this makes me feel so good. And I feel so proud of this fat guy with WOOF on his shirt, like I get the feeling that this is the first time in his entire life that the phrase, FUCK YOU! has been uttered by him in a public place or around another human being, like up until this very moment, all the Fuck Yous from him had more than likely been muttered in private after yet another day of taunts and humiliation because he’s always been fat and it’s about fucking time. And I wait until this space between “2” and “3” opens up again, and I go over to him and I cup his face in my hands and just kind of goof on his beauty, and I yell “WOOF” at him as loud as I can, then I hug him really hard and I give him this huge wet kiss, and we both keep dancing, hopping up in the air and yelling “Uk Youuuuu…”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  On their walk across the street, neither Gallagher or Rogarth says much; their thoughts are pretty much hovering around the question of how to react when these two guys ask them to get high.

  Rogarth’s tries to imagine the dialogue:

  You guys party? You get high?

  And just as Rogarth imagines his answer: “Well, no, but we used to get high,” he remembers a similar time years ago when that answer produced nothing but searing, abject failure.

  In a moment of Los Angeles pique, Rogarth had gone to the airport one weekend and taken a flight to San Francisco on a whim because he’d decided that San Francisco’s scene was so much more authentic – more straight forward than what was happening in LA or Hollywood. So once he checked into his Folsom adjacent motel, he headed to one of SF’s storied sex clubs/bars, one of those bars where real men hang out and that had straw strewn on the floor and smelled like beer and butt sex.

  This all happened during a weekend when he’d just stopped smoking, so he’d only taken four cigarettes with him for the entire weekend, and he’d smoked the last of the smokes before leaving his motel.

  So Rogarth wades into this bar – the testosterone hits him in waves, and he realizes he has to take a piss, a feeling that is pretty much thrilling for him because he knows about the bathrooms at San Francisco gay bars. It’s a fucking party, very unlike LA heads, where there’s a certain level of decorum, probably due to a particularly vigilant police force in the City of Angels. So Rogarth heads to the men’s room and there’s a line of guys waiting to go inside. And Rogarth is minding his own business and the line inches forward, and then the most handsome, sexiest, most self-assured guy in the entire universe takes his place in line just behind him. He’s dressed in denim and is sporting a cowboy look, something that Rogarth suspects may not be an affect, because he has the look of authenticity, the kind of authenti
city spawned by genuine humility that, if spoken, would produce the phrase, “Awe shucks, ma’am. I don’t know ‘bout that, but I thank ye kindly.” Rogarth has been able to deduce the blinding degree of this guy’s handsomeness simply by virtue of the vague quarter turns of his head that could have been explained away as simply curiosity about one’s immediate surroundings – nothing to get upset about, so Rogarth has worked himself up into pretty much a frenzy, wanting to connect with this guy – on any level at all beyond, god forbid, actually getting him into bed – more than anything. But being restrained by shyness, or any number of legitimate psychological equivalences, he keeps silent. Finally, it’s Rogarth’s turn to enter the bathroom when the guy ahead of him exits, so he breathes deep and walks to the urinal, being absolutely careful to not appear too gay in his gait or walking style. And he pulls out his dick and only a couple of drops of piss come out because Rogarth is feeling so fucking nervous. And he wants more than anything to apologize to his Marlboro Man Adonis in line behind him, but all he does is look at the pathetic cock he’s holding between a couple of fingers, and he gets the feeling that his cock is mocking him. Mocked by my own cock! because it’s all shriveled up and might as well be dispensing grains of sand rather than piss at the moment. Actually, the only moisture escaping his entire body are a couple of beads of sweat that trickle their way down the back of his neck, causing Rogarth to worry about being judged for the prominent perspiration stains he imagines are growing on the back of his shirt. Time has slowed to an unacceptably slow pace, and finally – finally – Rogarth takes a chance and turns his head to see if his man’s still there. And what he sees just makes matters worse: This best looking man in the universe, whose clothes fit just so, and – every fucking thing about him – Christ! The only thing missing from this guy’s look is a piece of straw from the floor that he’d decided to suck on, that nonchalant awe shucks ma’am, t’weren’t nothin’! kind of thing. And he’s looking right at Rogarth and there’s an unmistakable look of interest – desire? – there. Rogarth can’t take his eyes of this guy because he’s just so – just so goddamned handsome and this can’t be happening to me right now! And as if the move were choreographed, this cowboy – all the while keeping his eyes pinned on Rogarth – reaches over to one of the bales of hay – Shit! Rogarth thinks, THAT’S where the hay comes from! Bales of hay all stacked here and there for “atmosphere”! Why couldn’t I have seen that before? Anyway, this dreamy cowboy grabs a straw of hay and literally sticks it in his mouth while Rogarth’s self-conscious paralysis has engulfed him entirely until he’s feeling pretty much like a tower of salt. And just as Rogarth thinks he may as well just die right there in the bathroom of this gay bar, this cowboy speaks: