Roberto gave me a quizzical look when I found him outside the clinic. I grunted at him, then sneezed again. “You gonna live?” he asked. When I nodded, he thrust out his arm to hail a cab and said, “You can thank me when you’re feeling better.”
“People always expect you to be grateful when they run your life,” I said. I mimicked his accent when I added, “I ain’t your bitch.”
“I took you to the zoo,” he said, opening the cab door for me.
“I ended up getting a shot,” I said, sliding inside.
“I’m paying for your cab fare home,” he said, slamming the door.
“To an apartment full of snakes.”
“You win,” Roberto conceded.
“You know any place we can rent movies?” I asked.
“You got anything to watch ’em on?”
“Damn,” I said. We stared at each other a few seconds. “Maybe Morgan has something to watch them on,” I suggested.
Roberto pulled my hood over my eyes. I didn’t push it back, pretending that it made me invisible.
February 23, 2003
Dear Nick,
It was strange to get back from my trip and find you gone. I knew you were moving out, but it was weird when it actually happened. I hope you’re settling into your new place okay.
I know my reaction to all this hasn’t been great. I can be stubborn and worse when engaged in a contest of wills. (You hold your own just fine, too.) I’ve probably been smothering or controlling or overbearing. I’ve heard I can be that way from time to time.
Fortunately, Daniel reminded me that really, none of this is about me. It’s about you making your own decisions. And why shouldn’t you? That’s part of being your own man.
One thing worried me. You took so little. You left your computer and most of the other stuff in your room. I hope that wasn’t because I bought it. Those things are yours, and you can take them any time you want. Maybe you left them here on purpose. Maybe you want to know you’ve always got a room here. That goes without saying. If you need to use anything here, or come here to crash occasionally (everybody has roommate problems from time to time), you have a key and you’re always welcome.
That’s all I guess I can say except that I love you.
Uncle Blaine
2
A Man Could Get Arrested
There were many advantages to getting horizontal in bed with a man. Mainly, I appreciated the way my flaws weren’t as noticeable under covers. If a cop brought a guy to a lineup and asked him to point to the man who screwed him silly the night before, odds were good that the person singled out would be a muscular hunk, not some scrawny twink. I wasn’t like my beefy brothers—or my beefy gay brothers in the larger sense—and it mystified me when people felt compelled to point out how thin I was. Only the nagging mother of an overweight person would dwell on the obvious. But total strangers would tell a slender person to eat because he was too skinny. Or they’d use code words to express their criticism. Rangy. Lanky. Wiry. Gangly. Wasting away.
I wasn’t as thin as my height made me seem, and I had big bones. But even I had to admit that being sick had left me looking borderline emaciated. Still, no one ever complained about being wrapped up in my bony arms and legs in bed, Mark included.
I went to see Mark because my boss, Benny the Whiner, wouldn’t let me come back to work without a release from my doctor. I figured the clinic was closed on Sunday, but when I called the number from my prescription, I got the option of paging Mark. A couple cell calls and a brisk walk later, and I was at his apartment near Columbia University.
“I’m not sure you’ve had enough bed rest to go back to work,” Mark said after he let me in. He looked more appealing than he had on the day I’d met him. Kind of rumpled. Like he had no plans for Sunday except parking himself on the couch and eating junk food.
“Are you coming on to me? Shouldn’t you be worried about doctor-patient ethics?” I asked.
Ethics didn’t seem to be an issue. An hour or so later, the sheets were twisted around and between us like Morgan’s snakes. Which wasn’t an image I wanted in my head at that time. I started to tell Mark about my bizarre roommate, but he already knew from Roberto.
“How do you know Roberto, anyway?” I asked. “Is he a patient?”
“My current breach of ethics notwithstanding,” he said, while tracing my sternum with his finger, “if he were a patient, I wouldn’t talk about him. He’s a friend. How do you know him?”
“We went to school together,” I said. “Broadway High School for the Arts.”
“Right. I forgot how young you are,” Mark said.
He didn’t look too bothered by it, but if he was beginning to dwell on my flaws, he’d soon be stressing over my weight and shoving food down my throat. To head him off, I said, “I’m not young. I’m nineteen. Why? How old are you?”
“In gay years, I’m ancient. In doctor years, I’m young.”
“Gay years,” I mimicked. “I hate that. Sounds like dog years.” He only shrugged as a response, so I asked, “How young?”
“Thirty-one.”
“Ugh. It’s like I’m in bed with my uncle.”
“I can think of worse things,” Mark said.
“Do you know him? Is he your patient?”
“Roberto told me that Blaine Dunhill’s your uncle. You can’t be my age and gay in Manhattan without knowing who he is. Also, I’ve been part of AIDS and HIV fund-raisers with Daniel Stephenson.”
My uncle’s boyfriend, Daniel, was a C-list actor who’d been the focus of a very public outing a few years before. Even though it was old news, for a while he and Blaine had been the celebrity gay couple, constantly pictured or interviewed in Advocate, Out, the New York Blade, HX, and for some reason, Martha Stewart Living magazine.
“Their fifteen minutes were nearly over around the time I moved in with Blaine,” I said.
“When was that?”
“October”—I had to think a second—“of 2000.”
“Where’s your family? Or is that an insensitive question?”
“They’re in Wisconsin. I came out to them that fall. My father was completely not cool with it—he still isn’t—and my mother just hoped it would go away. My brothers are big jocks. Actually, my older brother was away at college, but Chuck—my twin—couldn’t deal. When our fights got physical, it seemed like a good idea for me to go away.”
Mark was a good listener, lying on his side and absently running his thumb up and down my arm while I talked. The swing I’d taken at Chuck came after years of dealing with my family’s crap. What made it different was that in the aftermath, I’d impulsively blurted out to my parents that I wanted to move in with my uncle.
When they sent me to my room so they could discuss the idea, I jumped online and researched art schools in Manhattan. I downloaded and printed a brochure from Broadway High School for the Arts. Next, I Googled Uncle Blaine. We’d spent a little time together and exchanged e-mails, but I thought it would be a good idea to see what I was attempting to get myself into. I knew he was an advertising executive for Lillith Allure Cosmetics, but I’d never bothered to check out his work.
With a few clicks of my mouse, I found his company’s Web site and saw pages of ads with beautiful photographs of models in extravagant settings. It was good stuff. Everything popped. My mind wandered, imagining the effort that went into putting together even a simple ad. The models, props, costumes, lighting, photographers, location, poses, product placement. The final result.
I wanted to be in the middle of that kind of creative buzz, surrounded by artistic energy and innovative people. I didn’t think I wanted to get into advertising, but if I was going to be sent away and hoped for a life in art, Uncle Blaine and his friends seemed like the kind of people I needed to be around. Plus they were a thousand miles from my family.
A few weeks later, I was in Manhattan, in public school for a couple months until the new term started at BHSA.
“T
hen I met Roberto,” I told Mark. “Our group of friends stayed tight even after graduation. When I moved out of my uncle’s place, Roberto was looking for a roommate, too.”
“What are you doing now? Are you in college? Art school?” Mark asked.
“I was at Pratt for a semester. Then I dropped out. Now everyone in my family is pissed at me.”
Mark’s phone rang, and while he talked a patient through some crisis, I thought about my confrontation with Blaine. I’d chosen to break the news over dinner in a restaurant, sure that my uncle wouldn’t make a scene in public.
“What do you mean you dropped out of college? Your second semester started two weeks ago. Are you telling me that you’ve been pretending to go?” Blaine hissed.
“It wasn’t for me,” I said in a way that I hoped sounded offhanded, as if I had everything under control. “It was boring. I want to start my life now.”
“Oh? How? Do you have a job lined up? A career?”
“Kinda. I got a job with I Dream Of Cleanie.”
“The gay maid service? You’re going to be a maid?” Blaine laughed and looked around, as if he expected Ashton Kutcher and a cameraman to jump out from behind a ficus. “That’s not a career, Nick.”
He was right. It wasn’t a career. Then again, I hadn’t said I intended to slave for I Dream of Cleanie the rest of my life.
Plus—I liked the job. It got me inside some really cool apartments, places I’d never get to see any other way. Not to mention that it gave me surprising insights into the dirty underbelly of human nature. The stuff you found under people’s beds….
It was that night, with Blaine at the restaurant, when I’d run into Kendra. She was our server. Her uniform was stained and slightly disheveled, like it realized it wasn’t up to par with the ritzy décor and was rejecting its wearer. She’d gotten the order wrong and begged us not to tell her manager.
“You’re not a vegetarian, are you? Thank God. I’m this close to being fired, and I really need this job. Even though I also work at Manhattan Cable. I’m looking for an apartment that I can afford in the city.”
“You are? Me, too.”
My uncle dropped his fork, but I refused to look at him. He could’ve offered to get me a job in Lillith Allure’s art department, but he didn’t. Fuck him.
“Sorry,” Mark said. “Where were we?”
I wanted to change the subject. “I rented Casablanca. Their world was crumbling around them. Their romance was sacrificed for a greater cause.” I made air quotes around “greater cause,” even though people who made air quotes annoyed me. “I don’t get it. How does Casablanca prove that anything lasts?”
“Forget the movie. I told you to listen to the lyrics of the song,” Mark said. “People will always fall in love. The world always welcomes lovers. You did hear the song, right?”
“The world welcomes lovers if they’re straight. The rest of us they’d sacrifice right along with the polar bears.” When Mark opened his mouth, I said, “Don’t tell me I’m too young to be cynical.”
“Actually, only the young can afford to be cynical,” Mark said.
“Yeah, you old dudes are always swooning over romance,” I said.
Mark attacked me to prove how young and energetic he still was. By the time I finally left, I was feeling less cynical but no older, since I was bearing my permission slip for Benny the Whiner as if I was still in grade school. In a brighter development, Mark and I had scheduled a movie date to see How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days. I tried not to see the title as a bad omen.
Especially when I came face-to-face with another bad omen on my walk home.
Even though I shared an island with a million and a half New Yorkers, there were certain people I saw over and over. Sister Divine was one of them. The first time I spotted her, I was with my friend Fred, who’d just paused outside St. John the Divine to light a cigarette. A woman shrouded in layers of dark fabric that resembled a medieval nun’s habit appeared in front of us. She pointed at Fred and yelled, “Your body houses twenty of Satan’s lieutenants! Cast them out and do God’s work!”
I made an effort to act indifferent and not gawk at her, but Fred was the real thing. He didn’t even blink. I fell into step next to him as he walked away from her.
“What the hell was that?” I asked.
He shrugged and said, “Twenty cigarettes to a pack, I guess. Do God’s work. I wonder what God pays. If there’s overtime. Just think about calling in sick to a deity. God would be all, ‘You’re not sick. You’re hungover. Get your ass to work. Stop stealing Mrs. Vela’s newspaper. And I wasn’t joking about that masturbation thing, mortal.’”
The first boy I dated after I moved to New York was Pete. Pete was also the first person who broke my heart, when he had a fling with Fred. Not because I was in love with Pete. Because I wished I’d gotten to Fred first.
Although I’d jeered about romance to Mark, I wasn’t against the idea. I just wasn’t the kind of person who constantly sized up the boyfriend potential of every guy I met. I didn’t make mental lists of what I did and didn’t want. But if I did, it would be easy to think of reasons why Fred shouldn’t be a boyfriend.
He smoked too much. He was always late. He thought monogamy was outdated. Actually, he practiced serial monogamy. Fred treated boyfriends like most people treated fashion: seasonally. Hot summer love migrated south at the first nip from autumn. And the man who blanketed Fred’s bed in winter would melt away like snow in the spring.
Fred was one of my few friends who had no inclination to do anything artistic. A year ahead of Roberto, Pete, and me at BHSA, he’d gone there only because the tuition was free. His uncle was the headmaster. He’d sneered at the school’s creative programs. Fred’s classes focused on the technical: set design or sound or lighting. He managed BHSA’s photo lab, although he had no interest in photography.
Now Fred worked at Starbucks, which in itself wouldn’t disqualify him as a boyfriend—after all, I bleached people’s bathroom grout—except that he enjoyed brewing java for the evil empire. He said the benefits rocked. He liked leaving the job when his shift was over and not thinking about it again until he went back. And if he felt like it, he could abuse the customers. Fred said they expected it, because most Starbucks employees were miserable and looking for a gig as an actor, musician, model, writer, illustrator—anything, it seemed, as long as it was creative and far from the grind of coffee beans.
Fred’s disinterest in all things artistic could be conversationally limiting. And he didn’t atone for it by having a flawless face or a great body. He wasn’t ugly, by any means. Just an average guy, the kind who played the sidekick in movies or was friends with your girl cousin.
But Fred had one habit that turned me on, even when it wasn’t directed at me. In a place where you could see or hear anything, so you tended to tune out everything, Fred paid attention. No cell phone, headset, or handheld anything ever got between him and another person. When he spoke to you, he looked at you. When you spoke to him, he heard you. His ability to completely focus on someone was erotic in a way that was beyond sex.
I never made the mistake of thinking he was flirting with me. Fred was my friend the same way Roberto was. I’d never tell Fred or anyone else how much time I spent thinking about the way his hair sort of curled against the back of his neck when he needed a haircut. Or how sexy I thought it was when he was mixing a Venti-whatever-latte and bit the tip of his tongue in concentration. Or that I once lied for three weeks and said I couldn’t find a jacket he left at Uncle Blaine’s apartment. I liked having it in the room with me. Maybe that was obsessive, but it was my little secret, and it hurt no one.
After the day Sister Divine accosted Fred, she seemed to pop up everywhere. I saw her outside Lincoln Center. At Seventy-ninth and Broadway. Skirting Columbus Circle. I wasn’t sure whether or not Sister Divine was homeless. Maybe she was just crazy. Whenever I saw her, she was skulking along, the same layers of black cloth shifting and settling aroun
d her. Until she’d go rigid and fix her gaze on some unwary tourist. Or anyone moving slowly—like a predator assessing the weakest potential prey. Then it would happen.
“Forty-two generals and six thousand lieutenants of Satan are in your body…. two hundred field generals…. five hundred captains…Repent! Cast out your demons! Do God’s work!”
Most people ignored her. I regarded her with affection, because she gave me a reason to call Fred. He enjoyed the Sister Divine updates. He’d picked up a transit map and map pins to mark my Sister Divine sightings, sure that a pattern would eventually emerge. Friends began placing bets on it. So far, the face of Jesus was losing to the face of Donald Rumsfeld two to one.
I was a few blocks from Mark’s when I saw Sister Divine. Or worse, when she saw me. She stopped, pointed at me, and shouted, “Legions of demons inhabit your body! Drive them out! Find the silver cord. Get inside yourself before it’s too late. Do God’s work!”
No one paid any attention to her, and I whipped out my cell so I could brag to Fred that I was possessed by more demons than he was.
“Oh, good,” he said. “I was starting to worry about her. Where are you?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere near Murray Hill.”
“Wow, she’s spreading faster than West Nile virus,” Fred said.
“She’s not that far from the first place we ever saw her.”
“What are you talking about? She’s practically—” He cut himself off with a sigh. “You said Murray Hill. What address?”
I looked around and said, “I don’t know. Somewhere near 119th and—”
“Never mind. Right letters, wrong neighborhood. Morningside Heights, Nick. It frightens me how little geography you know after almost three years here.”
“At least I know Harlem,” I muttered. “How many New Yorkers can say that?”
“Everyone. Harlem’s the old and the new black. You can’t swing a gold chain in Harlem without hitting a once or future president. And you do realize that Morningside—never mind. Where are you going now?”
When You Don't See Me Page 3