Sean and I are nearing the office and I unceremoniously break away—I’m sure he’s so deep in thought that he won’t notice that I am gone for another half block.
I take a sharp right and veer into the downtown mall and up to the eighth-floor bathroom, which is tucked into a corridor on the right of a department store.
I have had public sex in this bathroom ever since I have worked at this job. Sometimes I meet Sean’s husband here and we fuck. Today I am waiting for anyone who shows signs of interest and I’m walking in and out long enough to not look like a fucking creep. I am looking under the bathroom stalls and seeing if anyone is tapping their foot suggestively. As I look, I am still stuck on the Joel Schumacher claim.
I too could take my best weekly average and multiply it by my sexually active years and get 780, but I know that number isn’t right, and I guess it just illuminates how math is the most manipulated of all the sciences, and memory is even shakier. Plus, those numbers don’t explain the time I’ve spent simply waiting for the event, or, sadly, the days when there was no one who wanted to fuck me at all.
Had Joel ever in his life had those days? The days when no one wanted to fuck him? If his number is correct then apparently not.
In my experience, there are the days where all you really do care about is the number. The number is the comforting thing, the thing you can actually take to bed. The act in and of itself, the fucking part, quite honestly there are days where it can’t be over fast enough. Like, you just want to cum already to say you did it. Sex is just light points on a grid, stars in the Milky Way, but really, the ether holding them all together is the waiting. Just sitting around, waiting in some feces-scented bathroom hoping to get fucked.
I’ve now worked myself into a mood and I wait in the bathroom for basically anything until no one comes and so I’m another hour late for work but no one notices. No one comes to punish or rescue me.
* * *
THE NEXT DAY Arnold is not at work and I still manage to squeeze off two at my desk thinking about him before lunch. I think about him so much I feel like I owe him, like, a $400 gift card at the next office Christmas exchange.
After my second orgasm I sit at my desk and pretend to do work until Sean comes up to whisk me away to lunch, where he is once again back on his bullshit.
In the span of fifteen minutes Sean manages to reference at least three times how much he likes to get fucked—I am looking at the ground and trying to wrap my head around who it is he is trying to convince. He is 5'6", demonically aerobicized, and wearing a (self?) bedazzled Abercrombie T-shirt (“It’s vintage! I’ve had it since tenth grade!”) and Puma loafers. Like, on what planet is his triflin’ ass, chaotic bottom energy not visually centered enough? Must I always have to bear witness to his soliloquy of love for dick?
Somewhere all along the thought process of tearing my lunch buddy to shreds I begin to feel a secret shame come over myself. I feel like one of those “I don’t mind what they do—as long as they don’t talk about it” reverse-bigoted, whatever you would call it kind of people. I’m a little sick of myself. And besides, Sean is just playing his position. I look at his tight little body and sigh a bit—like, why shouldn’t he be stuffed with dick all the time? I mean, what other purpose would he have in life? He barely graduated from college, he hates his nonprofit job, and our mutual futures look bleak as fuck—I understand why he dreams of fucking all day. I start staring a hole in him and my dick is hard again; I have half a mind to ask him if he wants to skip lunch and go fool around in a public bathroom but I know the answer will be yes so I am immediately bored by the prospect. But I do have this warm feeling inside knowing that I work with a buddy who would readily entertain the idea, as it is always the small victories in life that speak power to truth.
We make it to lunch and Sean continues to talk about Joel Schumacher and his twenty thousand sex partners and I am silent. I think this rumor is for gay sluts what the story of Jesus must feel like for Christians—hearing it makes you feel all holy and gives you a feeling of purpose but if you sat down and thought about it you know that shit did not happen.
Or maybe I was just jealous?
I could easily think of countless people I wanted to murder, sure, but countless people in any given algorithm that I would go out of my way to fuck? Fuck no, no way. There isn’t enough instant karma in the world that would make me that friendly. I was convinced that I simply didn’t like people that much and there was no fucking way Joel Schumacher did, either. Joel Schumacher was a rich white man and by that definition alone I know he was very likely judgmental, cold, and self-segregating. I had worked for enough rich white men to know that they are not by design a deeply friendly bunch, and they are surely not friendly enough to casually fuck twenty thousand people. I decide that I have had enough of this lie and need Sean to shut the fuck up.
“Sean, I’m fucking your husband. I have been fucking your husband for some time now.” I say it out loud as casually as one could imagine, considering that my stomach had sank into my asshole.
“I know you are, me and Mike are open—we talk about you all the time, we tell each other everything.” Sean has not even looked up from his plate.
“You talk about me with him?! How do you talk about me?” I ask, even though I don’t want to know.
“Oh, we talk about you with great care—he’s fond of you, actually.”
“I have to go, I’m going to be sick,” I mumble, and as I exit the table I catch a quick glimpse of Sean’s face that reads as a confused panic.
I am running back to the office and decide I want to leave this place and leave it for good.
I think about Sean’s husband and how I barely even think of him as having a name, much less a title and duty, i.e., “Sean’s husband.” Like, ew.
I fucked this man a handful of times—after he pissed in me at the bathhouse we agreed on some dates and I went to his minimally furnished and overly neat apartment. We said nothing and somehow, I had felt suffocated by the vibe; I cannot tell you much more than that. But there was something too sobering about the coincidence of Sean and meeting this man all again. I wanted to pick apart all the projected reasons I would have around why basic bitches like Sean get wifed up and why jaded, judgmental borderline misanthropes like myself end up fucking in shit-scented public restrooms, but I didn’t have to ask—I had already answered the question.
There had to be a hundred stray men in my Rolodex who were whores like Sean’s husband—that is, ever present yet faintly existing—but he was the one whose memory had come back to strangle me. It wasn’t like I was in some indispensable place with lots of options—I was stuck at a nonprofit job, fucking my coworker and his husband. It was time to run.
I am packing my desk like a new fugitive ready to book it for his life, shutting off my computer and leaving a note that says SHE’S OVER IT on my desk. I am tossing all the self-help books I never read away like bad avocados. I am holding my book bag close to my body as if it contains valuable things, but it only hides a stapler and other supplies I stole from the office closet. No one in the office even looks up to notice me frantically escaping, and even in the perfect protective coverage of being ignored I still feel like my eyes are revealing too much of my inner worry, and in my mind, I sit at my desk, disheveled and breathing off beat. I opt for more psychic armor so I imagine I am sitting at my desk with a towel over my head.
MEANDERING (PART ONE)
HE WAS SURROUNDED BY BORING (yet STRONG) stray thoughts; they were clogging his ability to fix the mess. The mess of his room surrounded him.
“When did I get all this bullshit?”
It wasn’t anything a bunch of clear plastic office-store boxes wouldn’t fix, but it made him nervous nonetheless. He had been to the houses of responsible adults before and didn’t really dig it; adulthood all seemed to be about boxes, mostly boxes, actually. He didn’t want to compartmentalize anything else, and unlike all the people he knew, he felt he lacked that
synapse in the brain that could easily label stuff. Most objects in his head were beyond classification, anyways. For example, a picture you didn’t want to hide away but didn’t want to be confronted with every day—where the fuck do you file something like that? Dear god, everything was like that and therefore deserved its own special place, and god forbid you ever own enough stuff, eventually there are special things covering every inch of everywhere and you become some well person trapped deep in the earth suffocating on sentimentality. A normal person would detest this room but the boy wasn’t normal.
He preferred the choose-your-own-adventure stylings of a junk drawer or, even better, a junk room.
If you lived in a junk room, every so often you would look under something and find something else—an important memory you lost, and say, “AH!” or “Awwwww!” It was a lottery where you just kept fucking winning.
The summer before, he had worked as a mover and discovered the secret lives of the bachelors who lived in Tiburon. So many male bachelors in their fifties! Single men who lived in two-story duplexes packed to the gills with straight-up bullshit—this one man whose garage was all old answering machines and water skis that hadn’t been fucked with since the eighties. The boy with the messy room wondered if this was the fate of all bachelors; does a lonely man just keep buying shit? Would we really all just go shopping? Rad, he thought.
He looked at his room and calmed down a bit; he had only one room’s worth of shit, not two stories and a basement. It was all Fred Perry polos, Levi’s, records, records, records. He lived with six roommates whose rooms looked the same. “I don’t feel like an adult,” he accidently said out loud.
But messy rooms were fine. He liked the two weeks it took to clean it up. He liked watching things go from chaos to order. It was godlike.
He was aware how the room had got into this mess. The month before had been the breakup. Supposedly it started over a missing Troggs record but really it was about the boy cheating on the other often. It turned violent and they took time apart. Three days ago, the attempted reconciliation turned violent again when his ex-boyfriend, Matthew, had come back over to talk it out. It didn’t work.
At the end of the day he just figured he was no good for Matthew—the man wanted other things. He could look into Matthew’s eyes and see that he wanted a white-walled, white-doored, white little house in the New England countryside. They would make their own jam together. Every time Matthew crawled on him at night he could see in his eyes how he wanted to make sweet boyfriend love. It made the boy sick. He went out at night and had nasty whore sex behind Matthew’s back. Their circle was small—he knew who Matthew knew. He could say he was sorry but it was a lie. It was the only way he could get off. He still loved the previous man. It would never work.
The main problem with Matthew was that he had an English accent, so everything he said “sounded right,” or at least reasonable. Unlike Matthew, everything the boy said sounded less than feasible and was punctuated with “like” and “you know what I mean?”
Again, it escalated and again one of his roommates came to intervene and again he was left alone in a dirty room.
That was three days ago. “A fight with my ex, and a walk to calm my nerves,” he said, putting his bag in order.
He put a notebook in his tote bag and some pens. He was going to get wasted then get some writing done.
He trotted up the street fast, chest forward, and heavy-footed like a man who was trying very hard to walk away from a fight he had just lost. No one looked him in the eye.
Now up on the corner was the old bar, the place he used to go—he’d even DJed a party there. Like every goddamn thing else on the old block someone had bought it, painted it an offensively inoffensive earth-toned color, put salvaged wood and air plants every fucking where (the “newest” modern), and charged ten extra dollars for drinks.
All the drinks had names now.
He wandered in. What was once a whiskey and soda at this bar was now called a “Peter Paul” and made with in-house barrel-aged whiskey and in-house fermented aromatic bitters. The poor boy could only stomach so much “newness.” A drink that had once cost five dollars and took fifteen seconds to make now cost eleven dollars and took two minutes. Just how far were they going to take this bullshit? He was afraid to ask.
He remembered the days it had been a “punk” dive bar (i.e., a shittier and cooler version of itself). He remembered when all the booths had holes in them and there was graffiti everywhere, some of it even dating back to the late eighties. It looked dirty, it felt dirty—it was dirty. His mind switched quickly to how ok the “newness”—and the gentrification in general—felt, but then on the flip side was the flawed reasoning of loving something or thinking it “authentic” just because it seemed to be surviving neglect and abuse. He wondered if this was how he saw himself. Then the scene in his head switched back to the fight with his ex-boyfriend.
He noticed that he and Matthew acted the way one would expect two weathered queens dating in adulthood to act. He couldn’t characterize all the dysfunction exactly, but he could calculate that it was a mix of compulsion, exclusion, obsessiveness, jealousy, infidelity, always wanting to “outsmart” each other, and, amid all of this, an extreme sense of separation anxiety when the other was away.
He turned to a page in his journal he had written about Matthew while he was asleep next to him—Matthew had somehow passed out and the boy was still high on drugs.
March 22, 20__
My heart is beating out of my chest and Matthew is sleeping. I want to wake him, confront him, and accuse him of taking the last Xanax but I know that it will lead to trouble. I see him heaving his chest rhythmically like an angel—I fucking haaaaaaaate him. I hate how comfortable he is in the world. He derails all my concrete thoughts with platitudes, like “everything happens for a reason” or “that’s just how the cookie crumbles,” and, my least favorite, “you’re just high on drugs and paranoid.” I don’t know how to explain to him that I’m not just high on drugs. I AM DRUGS …
He was maybe beginning to see Matthew’s side.
No sooner had his thoughts stopped on drugs than who should walk into the gentrified bar other than Martha, everyone’s favorite dyke drug dealer. He hated that bitch. She represented newness in the same form that overtook the once cool, now spruced-up bar. He remembered when drug dealers in the city were plentiful and you could just drop by their house, collect, and get the fuck on with your life. Martha was a particular breed of drug dealer, one that insisted that in order to sell to you, the two of you MUST be friends and sit and gab. Normally it grossed him out but he needed to unload about his failed relationship, and who better to talk to about a failed relationship than a dyke high on coke? The two of them sat there until the bar closed and the boy scored a bag as he was leaving, on his way to the apartment of one of the boys he cheated on Matthew with, or maybe he would just walk around aimlessly, like a story or love affair that had a strong start and stake at the beginning but toward the end just meandered.
THE BOYFRIENDS (INTERPRETATIONS)
Boyfriend #7 / Nicholas
Let’s say for a moment you find yourself confined in a room of fractured rays of light (or we could say “little rainbows” to make them sound prettier). Now, would you feel empowered? Or like you were being attacked? I found no way to answer when a friend confronted me with this autobiographical question and revealed that the protagonist in the story for sure had felt attacked. She also asked me to bear with the protagonist, as he was not always easy to love. As my friend explained it: “Well, it’s very easy, easy, easy to love the easy to love … isn’t it?”
Boyfriend #331⁄3 / Oscar
I drink firewater, often and late at night. Double-barrel—like a shotgun—and knock down every evening like a building past its prime making way for the new. Usually after midnight (after the fourth, fifth, sixth shot)—that’s when he comes to me. (I come back to me.) Fresh from a blackout dream, like a ghost I’m
not afraid of anymore. I see him in the mirror and I recognize him. The boyfriend beyond? The boyfriend within? No—he’s real. You could just eat him up. There’s a feeling of fleetingness with him. I’ve tried to escape before. To the canals in Amsterdam, artist in exile–style. But it feels like a fabrication on my part. (My exile was self-imposed. No one begged me to do it.) Why does it feel like this has to happen? I wish I could explain better … He felt the days creep like an old muscle car, gunning its way up the highway. He was in the back seat between two lovers. Ain’t love grand? In the nighttime, one of the lovers shakes violently—it happens all the fucking time. He wakes up in a panic of red all over his brown face. He looks at me calmly and says, “I had a dream they were coming for me again and I couldn’t escape with my true love.” That statement cuts deep. True. Love. He says. Just by themselves the words “true” and “love” are pretty sturdy concepts. Put together they can knock down any man who’s lonely enough to believe a lie as long as it’s said politely. But back to the lover. This fake dream lover he was dreaming of. This fig of his imagination. Am I really fucking jealous of this ghost man? I am. “TRUE LOVE”?! DAMN! WHAT ABOUT ME, BITCH?! I feel as useless as a paperweight now, in stark contrast to the weightless feeling I get when I sleep next to him. These people who are coming for him in the dream—he fights them. But if the dream were mine, I would probably let them take me. It seems more reasonable than waking up all the time, and then maybe one could finally know thy enemy. I guess?
Boyfriend #0.000001 / Theo
It had been easy to him. What was not to ? I would see his Black blank flesh caressed in my nigger sheets of dawn; he would be always burrowing below the sheets. Relaxing his way into fetal position, the blanket wrapped all over his head and feet. It seemed that it became easier and easier for him to forget the things he had promised me. Like the rock I was, I parted the bedsheets in a pillowy white truce of surrender, his body slamming into my root chakra like a thunder god of undetermined ethnic origin. For the moment I pretend to be transformed by prompts and lies like any out-of-work actor whose ego demanded a paycheck. Let’s say for instance, if by magic, and very suddenly, some small part of the eternities we are wrapped in could agitate the dark particles and turn time into a loop (or rather, picture a loop here—it’s hard to get the right picture sometimes). As sure as our love had found its way into the dark one night, it evaporated as soon as the light switch clicked on.
100 Boyfriends Page 5