Taking Chances

by John Goode

  A knocking at my door broke me out of my stupor.

  Without thinking, I opened the door and found Tyler holding a bouquet of flowers in his hands. From the look of shock on his face, I had missed something. Like getting dressed. “Um, come in,” I said, retreating to my room, hoping the towel around my waist covered enough.

  He closed the door and called after me, “Don’t hurry on my account.” I could hear the smile in his voice from my room.

  I pulled my clothes on in a rush, frustrated with myself that I had lost so much time in the mental masturbation that was my life. I checked myself in the mirror, hated what I saw, and walked out of my room. I hated the way my breath paused a second as I saw him looking through my bookshelf while he waited. He turned and smiled at me, and I felt everything inside me go to mush.

  Forcing the feeling away, I asked him, “So do I get to know what our plans are yet, or is it still a surprise?”

  “Still a surprise,” he said, picking the flowers off the coffee table. Walking over, he handed me the flowers. “These are for you.”

  Refusing to let my emotions get the better of me, I took them and headed to the kitchen to put them in water. “Thanks” was my only reply.

  “You know, we don’t have to do this,” he said as I filled a vase up with water. “I can just go if you aren’t interested in the date.”

  Lack of interest wasn’t the problem at all—in fact, just the opposite. It was the knee-jerk feeling that this man was perfect that had led me to this point in the first place. My attraction was as persistent as a dog that keeps trying to jump on someone even though its owner is screaming at it to get down. “I’m fine,” I said neutrally. “I’m up for it if you are.”

  He cocked his head and paused, as if he could read the feelings behind my words. For a moment, I thought he was going to call me out on my bullshit, but instead he just shrugged and asked, “Okay. Are we waiting for your friend or we picking her up?”

  As if on cue, my door burst open and Sophia spilled into my apartment. “I’ll get you, my pretty…,” she screeched and then stopped when she saw I wasn’t alone. “Oh” was all she said, mentally and physically checking herself. Whatshisname walked in behind her. I could see in the way she lost her momentum that Sophia thought Tyler was hot but there was no way she was going to admit it. “You must be the boy who broke Matt’s heart,” she said, walking across the room to him, her hand extended as if she expected him to kiss her ring.

  She stopped in midstep when he smiled at her and said, “You must be the fag hag.”

  I thought she was going to explode as she glared at him in silence. Instead, she moved past him and hugged me. “Happy New Year, Matty!” As she squeezed me, she whispered. “I hate him.”

  And the night had just begun.

  Tyler

  I HONESTLY had been on some bad dates before but so far, this one was taking the cake.

  Sophia stopped attacking me directly, instead opting for the always fun passive-aggressive approach. When we got to my rental car, she made some underhanded comment about it. I didn’t catch the exact sentence, but I heard the word “cheap” and that was enough. Her boyfriend creeped me out because he kept staring at me like I was a piece of prime rib and he was a starving wolf. If he wasn’t gay, then he was living in a walk-in closet that had to have its own en suite.

  Matt looked more and more miserable the longer we drove through the crowded San Francisco streets. I would have never guessed the city would be this claustrophobic from what I had seen from TV and the movies, but trying to drive made me feel like Godzilla. We got stuck at an intersection, which gave Sophia the opportunity to pounce. “So where exactly are we going?” she asked, leaning forward from the back seat.

  “It’s kind of a surprise,” I told her, trying to find a way to shove her back in the backseat without being rude.

  “Well, I hate surprises,” she said, not moving an inch.

  I mentally tried to will the light to change as I forced myself to stay calm. “Well, the surprise isn’t for you, so I think you’re safe.” She refused to budge and glared at me in the rearview mirror. She was so busy giving me the stink eye she didn’t see the light change. I did, and I shoved the accelerator down in an attempt to get through the intersection before the light changed again.

  Sophia gave a small yelp as she tumbled back into her seat. I saw Matt cover his mouth to hide his laughter while we followed the flow of traffic. Sophia went back to silent seething that lasted all the way to the theater. We pulled into the parking lot, and I heard her go off again. “Really? A couple of movies that we could have watched on Netflix? This is your big surprise?”

  I found us a parking space and began counting to myself in my head as a way of ignoring her diatribe. After, I turned off the car I turned to Matt. “Do you remember when the Vine had these playing, and Eli Cole and his friends ended up setting that smoke bomb off and everyone ran out?” Matt nodded with a small grin on his face. “Well, I never told anyone this, but I was with them that night, so it was kind of my fault too. So I thought I owed you a repeat showing.”

  His face lit up and his grin turned into a huge smile. I thought for a second we were going to kiss, but Sophia ruined that as she burst out from the backseat. “Oh, nice. You were a douche in high school and it’s taken you this long to make up for it?”

  “I think it’s romantic,” her date said to me. He sounded again like he was hitting on me.

  “Shut up!” she said, jamming her arm into his side. “I hope they serve drinks,” she added, getting out of the car. The guy with her slowly followed her, his eyes still on me, his lips still turned up in that creepy smile.

  “So he is…?” I started to ask Matt about Sophia’s date.

  He nodded. “Oh yeah, completely.” He took my hand and squeezed it. “This is an awesome idea! I’m glad I came.”

  “So am I.” I began to lean forward. I saw him move toward me before I closed my eyes.

  “Come on!” Sophia roared, banging on Matt’s window. “It’s freezing out here.”

  The moment was sufficiently ruined, so we got out of the car and raced into the theater. Once inside, we were seated at a table and a waiter took our drink orders while we looked over the menu. I wasn’t sure if alcohol was going to help or hinder the night, but by the time the first drinks arrived, I knew it couldn’t get much worse.

  Halfway through her second margarita, Sophia stared intensely at me from across the table. “So you were what? A total closet case in high school and college?”

  She of course had asked in the middle of me taking a drink, so it was all I could do to not sputter out an answer. Before I could speak, Matt chimed in with, “I never said that, and you know as well as I do that I was in the closet for high school and most of college too.”

  The facts rolled off Sophia’s back like water off a duck. “Sweetie, you’re still in the closet,” she said, looking back to me. “You were, right?”

  Putting my drink down, I said, “There are a lot of people who are confused about their sexuality at all ages.” I looked over to her “boyfriend” and then back at her. “We all get there in our own time.”

  Obviously not the answer she had been looking for. “Right, but you dated girls? And never told them you liked dick.”

  “Um, I dated girls too,” Matt added, but she ignored him altogether, instead focusing on me.

  “These girls had no idea you were gay, and you dated them?” she asked again.

  “Yeah,” I admitted. “I did do that.”

  “Kind of a shitty thing to do, don’t you think?” She leaned forward with the same intensity I had seen Barbara Walters give in interviewing mob bosses.

  There were several different ways I could have answered that, but I opted for the one she probably wasn’t expecting. “Yeah, it was shitty. In fact, one of the things I most regret about growing up was lying to people about who I was. I felt like shit every time I led a girl on, which is one of the many
reasons I just sat down and accepted I was gay instead of trying to continue lying.”

  You could see by the look in her eyes these were not the words she expected to come out of my mouth. In fact, from the way Matt was looking at me, they were not the words anyone was expecting.

  “I didn’t know you hated it that much,” Matt told me.

  I shrugged and took another drink. “You didn’t ask.” I wished I didn’t sound as bitter as I did, but I couldn’t help it. There had been so much ground Matt and I hadn’t covered over Christmas that it seemed impossible for either of us to know anything about each other. I wondered again why I was here and trying so hard.

  “Yeah, right,” Sophia said after a few seconds of uncomfortable silence. “You just felt like crap every time you nailed a girl. Like there was a gun to your head.”

  “It wasn’t a gun,” I answered as calmly as I could muster. “It was something much worse I was afraid of.”

  I could see her opening her mouth to ask what could be worse than a gun to my head when Matt answered. “Having people find out you were gay and treating you different. I think getting shot would have been better than having to go to school with everyone knowing I was gay.”

  “Oh please,” Sophia said as the lights began to dim for the movie. “Plenty of people out there are gay, and they are just fine.”

  I lowered my voice, but it was hard since I felt like screaming at her. “It isn’t that easy in a place like Foster,” I hissed at her. “Especially if you play sports.”

  She didn’t even look at me, instead waving me off with one hand. “Closet cases always have an excuse.”

  Now I wanted to jump across the table and throttle her, no matter how much I hated guys who put their hands on women. I looked over at Matt, who gave me a small, apologizing smile. “Wasn’t making an excuse, was answering your question.”

  She just looked over at me with a condescending smile and said, “Your movie’s starting.”

  I looked at the candle-filled jar that made the table’s centerpiece and wondered if I could just crack her across the skull with it.

  They started with Pretty in Pink, a move that did not go well with Sophia because she sighed and muttered. “Awesome, two hours about a perfectly fine girl who ends up choosing the douchebag in the end.” She looked across to me. “I have seen this story way too much lately.”

  Matt threw his napkin at her. “Knock it off,” he grumbled. She settled down some as the movie began.

  We got to the computer lab scene when they brought us our first dish. The menu had a variety of items from burgers all the way to Italian food. It wasn’t fancy, but I had never eaten dinner in a movie theater before, so it was all new to me. I’m sure no one is surprised to hear Sophia did not like her meal at all.

  “Well, you can really see where the sixteen bucks went in this dish,” she said, pushing the plate back. “It’s like being in a Gordon Ramsay show while they play John Hughes.”

  Her boyfriend said with his mouth full, “I kinda like it.”

  She batted at his arm. “No you don’t.”

  He paused, a noodle halfway out of his mouth. “I don’t?” She shook her head no. The end of the noodle slipped into his mouth as he looked down at his plate sadly.

  “It’s not bad,” Matt said, taking a bite of his burger.

  “Which is a way of saying it’s not good,” she countered.

  I had already lost my temper a while back; now it was just a battle to keep my tongue in check. A task that I was failing at badly. “Then order something else,” I said to her.

  She turned back to the movie. “No use. Not sure what I was expecting, ordering food in a place with sticky floors.”

  We sat in relative silence for the rest of the movie. Matt and I picked at our food, too upset to really enjoy it, and the other guy just looked down at his plate from time to time like a kid who was being punished. The lights came up as the credits rolled and a good number of people got up to stretch or use the bathroom or even go outside and smoke.

  Sophia took it as her cue for round two.

  “So explain to me why we aren’t somewhere fun, like a club. A gay club,” she added for emphasis. “Like normal gay guys do.”

  “Normal?” I asked with skepticism in my voice. “So normal gay guys who are lonely go to clubs to celebrate?”

  “They do in my world,” she said, finishing her glass of wine. “The only ones who don’t have issues with being gay.”

  “I don’t have issues with being gay. I’ve been to plenty of gay clubs before, I just don’t find they are the best place for a date.” My voice was rising with anger, but I was way past caring.

  “And bringing another couple is a good choice?” she asked me.

  “That was my choice,” Matt interjected.

  She ignored him. “I just think you don’t want the competition a gay bar brings.”

  I laughed out loud before I could stop myself. “Competition? You think I brought him here because I think someone better-looking is going to hit on Matt?”

  “Someone who doesn’t have issues with being gay.”

  I leaned forward “I don’t have issues with being fucking gay.”

  “Prove it,” she said with a smile.

  Forty-five minutes later, we were walking to a gay bar.

  Matt

  AS WE filed into Strut, I kept yelling at myself to turn this date around and leave.

  Sophia had been nonstop on Tyler the whole night, and I couldn’t get her to let up. I admit I wasn’t trying all that hard because I know talking to her is a wasted effort most of the time, but her goading him to take us here was a mistake. I’ll try to explain.

  There are gay bars. And there are gay bars.

  Meaning there were bars gay guys went to and hung out in, and then there were bars that had an attitude. I’m not sure what your personal level of interaction with gay bars has been, but believe me when I say if you’ve been to one of the places with attitude, you know from your first step inside. Everyone is pretty, well-dressed, young, and likes to show off. What few clothes they are wearing are stylish, and of course let’s not forget the very best in designer drugs. Places like Strut make things like Ecstasy not just popular but somehow glamorous to others. I wasn’t a fan of Strut and others like it, but Sophia loved them and had always assured me if I was going to find someone, it would be in a place like this.

  We paid the cover and walked in and were assaulted by a thundering backbeat from the music.

  Tyler screamed something at me, but there was no chance of me hearing him. We followed Sophia and Whatshisname upstairs where there were tables available. The music became a little muddled up here, making some forms of conversation possible. Tyler offered to grab us some drinks, and I took the moment to pull Sophia aside.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I asked her over the music.

  “I’m just looking out for you,” she screamed back.

  “You’re attacking him.” She nodded with a smile. “Why?”

  “To see if he really is into you,” she answered, which just made me more confused. “If he’s willing to put up with me, then you know he’s serious about being here for you. It’s like a test.”

  I hated to admit it, but she was making some sense.

  “You spent the last weeks chasing him—let him chase you for a while.” I shouldn’t have believed her, but I did. Tyler came back and put our drinks down before sitting next to me.

  “So is this better?” he asked her across the table. She just shrugged and said something to Whatshisname. Tyler turned to me and asked, “Did you want to come here?”

  I wasn’t sure how to answer that, since we would have most likely have ended up here if he hadn’t shown up, but want was a little too strong a word for my desire to be here. This was just what Sophia and most guys around here did. We went to Strut, we drank, we danced, and we pretended not to be that interested in any one guy. This was the gay life I had grown to know. It was
n’t about like or dislike, it just was.

  “Do you like it?” I asked him, curious what his answer would be.

  He didn’t even think about it. He just said “No.” and took a sip of his beer. His eyes scanned the room in the same manner I had seen cops size up a room as they walked in the door. He was distrustful, almost hostile. In other words, he was everything I had been when I first arrived in the city. “It’s a fun place once you get used to it,” I tried to tell him.

  His gazed moved to me, and I swore it was as if he was just staring though me. I could almost hear him lip through the possible responses to my statement; instead he just gave me a small smile and nodded. “I bet.”

  This was miserable.

  No one talked. We sat there, nursed our drinks, and watched the chaos move around us. The upstairs was basically a pit stop for the club, a place where you could drag the guy you met on the dance floor to so you could talk or just make out. More than a few couple were opting for the last choice, and it was hard not to stare.

  I was about to turn to Tyler to say we could leave if he wanted to when someone tapped me on the shoulder.

  It was Coffee Shop Boy.

  Now, I name him that for a couple of reasons. One, because no matter how many times I had gone to the coffee shop and noted he was cute, I had never once caught his name. Hence the Coffee Shop. The last word is the important one, though. Boy. This guy was in no way a man yet. I mean, it wasn’t like I was the old man of the mountain or anything, but he wasn’t a day over twenty-two, which meant he was still smack in the middle of his “I have no idea who I am and could honestly give a fuck” phase—that space of time in the early twenties all gay men go through where they become a complete mess and then vow never to return to once they’ve outgrown it. Some guys phased out of it fast; others were well into their forties and still stuck in the middle of it.