by John Glynn
In so many of the clips and photos, we’re hugging or embracing each other. We’re constantly laughing. The rooms are full, never less than seven or eight of us clutching Busch Lights with two hands. The video is set to music: “Such Great Heights.” “Mr. Brightside.” “Man in Motion.” The soundtrack of our college years. We have longer hair, we’re pink from spring break, we’re never alone. We are all so young, but of course we don’t realize this. We’re all so good to each other. We know that we’re going to travel through life together. For the most part we do.
That night, we threw an after-party in our four-man suite. I connected my click-wheel iPod to a set of Bose speakers and played a song I’d heard the weekend before in Montauk. It was a Chvrches remix of an MS MR song called “Hurricane.” The original is morose, but the remix is fizzy, contorting the pain into euphoric release.
Soon our cloistered room filled with people, everyone caffeinated by the backdrop. I controlled the music, read the crowd. We had reverted back to college—shotgunning beers, tossing empties against the wall. Random couples making out in the kitchen. I kept playing the music.
My head throbbed and the room began to shrink. People were literally lining up to get in. It reminded me of our epic college parties, the way, with a few spidered texts, we could commandeer a night. I kept watching the crowd erupt with each new song as though they were attached by a network of strings.
I pressed play on Icona Pop’s “I Love It,” went into my bedroom, and shut the door. Out the window a light illuminated the townhouse I’d lived in senior year. The lyrics I don’t care / I love it thrashed through the door over and over.
I sat on my bed and drank a Bud Light. I felt locked in place, physically unable to move. A sea of people, a cotillion of Solo cups. I was back where I started.
Mike came in, one eye lidded, pink Lacoste shirt dashed with beer. I watched the delayed reaction, the way his squinched face rolled from confusion to assessment to pulses of concern. He sat down next to me.
“What’s up, bud?”
I didn’t know. I didn’t fucking know. I lived a blessed life. I was currently surrounded by my closest friends. All of it just made me feel worse.
I started to speak, but couldn’t. A cheer erupted from the common room, the result of a flip cup game. I leaned my head on Mike’s shoulder. In college he was my rock. We’d fight like brothers—shouts, curses—then midscuffle we’d burst out laughing.
In a sea of people, I’d never felt more alone. I told him so.
He said he knew the feeling.
The table was capillaried with empty beers—Natty Light, Busch, Bud—crunched paper racks, Solo cups, a half-drunk bottle of Jameson. Cold lo mein congealed in a styrofoam shell.
I had somehow passed out in my clothes. Mike and Mallory were still asleep, but Evan had left early to go to his girlfriend’s law school graduation.
In the corner of the room, pressed against the wall, lay a maroon can of Tab. We had no idea where it came from or how someone had even acquired it.
I walked into the bathroom. It was hewn with the kind of thin beige walls you could accidentally punch a hole through. Empty beer cans rimmed the sink. Toothpaste had dried and crusted over the drain. Across the mirror someone had written I DON’T CARE in puffs of blue shaving cream. I took a photo of it. Then I went about picking up the empties.
Chapter Eleven
Penn Station on a summer Friday was exciting and strangulating. The ceilings seemed to compress, the lights to shriek. Windowless vestibules had the time-bending capacity of a casino.
In the catacomb-like halls I wove past affluent travelers armed with Filson bags and golf clubs and pugs in soft carriers. The heat affixed everything with a layer of agitation. I raced through the station, passing bodegas, beer buckets, the Starbucks with its rivers of AC. I loosened my collar. I rolled up my sleeves. Sweat lashed my shirt beneath my bag’s thick arm straps. At Penn Station I was always running late, always racing the clock. I hit play on my Montauk playlist and scrambled to the platform.
The train to Montauk transferred at Jamaica. I gazed out the window at the Queens cityscape, the blur of brick apartments, the replicating latticework of rusted fire escapes. Train tracks stretched across an elevated platform eye level with trees and rooftops. The streets filled with traffic below. On one passing rooftop sat a lone plastic chair. I imagined what it was like to sit there on a hot day, watching the trains pass one by one.
I watched Archer Avenue stream by below: a Liberty Tax, a Chicken and Pizza, a shuttered unisex barber shop. The yellow awning of a China King Express was faded and stained like a truck tire’s mud flap. The train slowed, absorbing the view. Then, just before the details came into focus, before anyone could figure out just where they were, Queens disappeared behind the platform, the station’s flat metal awning blocking the light.
People stood, eyes alert, bags tucked beneath their arms. The transfer train sat ready across the platform. In a moment, the walkway would become a gauntlet, a press of bodies, everyone jockeying. Those who moved too slow were doomed to stand on the next train for an hour or more.
Two tight-faced women were shoving their way through the aisle. Their bone-stiff arms were draped with purses, nothing else. Light travel, I’d learn, was a kind of status symbol. A nod to permanent wardrobes and second homes. The women pushed to the front of the door, complaining loudly. For some, the indignity of public transit was just too much to bear.
The doors hissed open, and a stampede struck the platform. I rode through the crowds as if in a murmuration, swinging and swooping, dropping low to catch a view of the new train through its windows. Many passengers were already nested, unwrapping their chicken Caesar wraps and tapping their Kindles. I boarded amid a sea of people. Movement slowed. Couples pointed across the aisles, scouting for open seats together. By the time I got to the aisle, the seats and staircases were full. I fashioned my bag into a chair and opened And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini. Montauk was three hours away.
When I got to the Hive that evening, Mike, Ashley, and Kirsten were already there. The porch off the master bedroom overlooked the driveway, and they called to me. Ashley and Mike were smoking cigarettes in their workout gear. Kirsten held a stem of wine.
The three of them had the deepest history. A shared childhood in Fairfield. A world before our own.
My own friendships from home were bedrock. I’d met my two best friends, Ryan and Bryan, on the first day of kindergarten, and my other best friend, Dave, on the first day of middle school. Every morning we biked to school together, a bounding pack of neon helmets, the autumn air rushing past the sides of our cheeks.
As we grew older we discovered alcohol. First Smirnoff Ice, then cheap vodka and Keystone Light. Our crew expanded to include girls: Jodi and Jocelyn and Kara and Annie. We drank in the woods or on the backs of people’s cars or on a small uninhabited island in the middle of the Connecticut River. We always assigned a designated driver, we always looked out for one another. Even as our paths diverged geographically and socially, we were still best friends.
That night, we pregamed in the living room to a mix on my iPod. Twenty-three of us total, buzzed and scrubbed clean. A deck of cards swirled across the coffee table. Ashley and Kirsten. Mike, Colby, Timmy. D.Lo and Perrie. The finance bros. We were coalescing, escaping things together. I sensed my veins warm, my shoulders slacken. The city felt far away.
On a wicker table lay Matt’s green sweatshirt. He must’ve forgotten it over Memorial Day.
“Where’s Matt this weekend?” I asked Mike.
“Not sure, he might’ve stayed in Manhattan. Or maybe he went to Fire Island? I can’t remember.”
When I thought about Matt I felt an unfamiliar tug in my chest. It was strange, but if he couldn’t be in Montauk, I wanted him to be in Manhattan that weekend. I wanted him to be alone or with a few girlfriends watching The First Wives Club on TBS because he had a christening the next day in Brooklyn he couldn�
��t get out of. I didn’t want to picture him on Fire Island.
“He’s great, isn’t he?” Mike said.
“Totally. I miss having him here.”
“Ha, I know, right? Me too.”
It rankled, I didn’t know why. Something about Mike’s response, the way he’d laughed a bit, smiled, then taken a sip of his vodka soda. I didn’t know what I expected. I didn’t know what I wanted him to say. But I knew that the way I had begun to miss Matt was different. It pulled like an undertow. It felt like a small hole had been drilled into me.
I woke early the next morning; I couldn’t sleep. I was assigned to the big bedroom in the basement, Bedroom 4. It was windowless, like a closed-off cabin. I’d been too drunk to turn off the bedside lamp, and it bathed the pinewood walls in a warm, honeyed glow.
I spotted Shane in the driveway through the dirt-splattered window in the hall. He was already dressed and showered, his hair parted, his shirt tucked in. He was washing his Land Rover with a thick yellow bone sponge. I watched as the soap trickled through the brush guard and frothed at his feet. When he was done, he streak-dried the windshield with a squeegee.
I walked outside to join him. We were the only ones up, we both needed coffee.
“Let’s go to the Montauk Bake Shoppe,” he said. “Hop in.”
Shane worked on a trading floor in fixed income sales. His office was situated in the heart of Times Square. At night, when darkness fell, the blinking signs of M&M’S World bathed his desk in cloying light. He wore an Oxford suit, a Brooks Brothers non-iron shirt, an Hermès tie. His shoes were polished. His hair was combed. His desk space held three computer screens. He had worked there for three years and was completely in the closet to almost all of his coworkers.
Shane woke each morning at 5:45 flooded with dark thoughts. The mornings were the worst. How could he keep doing this? How could he keep pretending? Not just that he was straight, but that he actually liked his job. That he could do this indefinitely.
To work was to suffer. He knew this, he accepted it. But there had to be more.
One of Shane’s gay friends, a buddy from Montauk, sat a few desks away. Sometimes the gay friend would come over, say hi, his voice carrying. Shane’s shoulders would scrunch, his spine would bolt, his words chilling to ice.
Shane and I were not natural friends. He cared about things I did not. He knew how things were built and built well. A penchant for quality ran in his blood. His grandfather once managed the finest silver company in New England.
He sought power in stasis, in custom, tradition. At the Ditch Plains parking lot he’d point out the Land Rover Defenders, informing whoever was around that the vehicles accrued in value each year. He had a calm, neutral voice. He walked through the house with a masculine broadness, a strong neck. His green eyes were rimmed with soft sunken circles. His small nose and sharp chin lent him a regal maturity. He took Propecia and his blond hair stopped receding.
Shane, like me, was an only child. Space and silence, for us, were Janus-headed. He was always watering the plants, arranging the deck furniture, finding new spaces for the beach chairs and Kadima sets. I recognized the instinct, the quick bursting need for a solitary pursuit, a stepping away from the mayhem of inclusion. And its opposite: how a dinner alone, in front of the TV, could instill a dread so potent it cinched the lungs.
Shane was more closed off than I was, more discerning, more tart with new people. In middle school he got called a faggot and was barricaded in the locker room. He knew that his bully did not come from money, so he made a point to accumulate the best of everything, to show him he was better.
Shane was handsome and doting. He was immensely loyal. We’d chafe at each other like brothers, nip at the other’s heels. But as only children we understood each other on a molecular level.
He drove us along the Old Montauk Highway, past the Beachcomber and the Breakers and the three yellow smiley faces painted on a motel with a chevron roof. In the car we rehashed the night. At the Mem, Colby had gotten blackout drunk. He had made out with a dude in the middle of the dance floor. The dude had gone to school with Ashley. Worlds were constantly colliding.
The gay scene in Montauk was not like the gay scene on Fire Island, Shane explained. There were lots of gays in Montauk for sure, but no designated gay events or spaces.
“The Mem is a gay bar. The Point is a gay bar. Every bar in Montauk can be a gay bar. Just ask Colby.”
To Shane—so convincingly straight at work, yet so openly gay in his private life—the signposts of heterosexuality were nothing but. Even the straightest guy in Montauk could be just like him.
The Montauk Bake Shoppe (known to locals as the Bakery) was wedged between a liquor store and a surf shop in a row of old storefronts. Down the street sat a boutique owned by an actress from the television show Hey Dude. A sign in the Bake Shoppe window read TRY OUR FAMOUS JELLY CROISSANTS. It was written in black Sharpie and tacked next an old mimeographed printout that read BEST COFFEE IN TOWN. Inside, the glass counter contained doughnuts, cheese danishes, muffins, and cookies shaped like lobsters.
I ordered an egg sandwich and an iced coffee, which came with a plastic domed lid. Shane got a slice of quiche. The girl behind the counter spoke in a thick Irish brogue. Most of the workers were young, younger than Shane and me, and European. Our clerk shouted “Egg up!” toward the kitchen. She gave Shane the last of the jelly croissants.
The Hive, Shane explained, was not an accurate reflection of the gay world in Manhattan. Most of the gay guys Shane encountered were superficial and stuck-up. They hid their insecurities beneath designer clothing. They judged everyone around them. They talked shit. They lied. They betrayed. They fucked the whole town.
At one party, a group of guys had rented Range Rovers to drive from Chelsea to an apartment on the Upper West Side. It didn’t matter that they all lived a short cab ride away. It was about the appearance.
I silently took this in. I wanted to point out that Shane himself was driving a Land Rover back to his Hamptons share house. But then again, he was giving me a ride in it.
The Hell’s Kitchen gays were “tragic.” The Brooklyn gays were “out there.” The Chelsea gays were “queens.” The West Village gays were “dicks.” Gay guys who were actually good people, who were fun and adjusted and only slightly damaged, were as rare as unicorns.
He didn’t look at me as he was saying this. He kept his eyes glued ahead. I wondered if he could read my thoughts, if he knew how I was struggling with my own Gordian knot of feelings. I wondered if he was trying to scare me.
“It’s honestly terrible. There is nothing more depressing than being a single gay man in New York City.”
“I can only imagine,” I said.
Shane put on a song called “Second Summer” by Yacht. The lyrics were about a couple’s second summer together. The singer questions whether the physics of their love can endure. The song is up-tempo but haunting, the vocals esoteric, the lyrics artless enough for the listener to graft meaning.
“So where are they?” I asked as the song ended, half in jest. “Where are the unicorns? The elusive good gays?”
The windows were down and the breeze whipped Shane’s hair. His sunglasses reflected the scroll of the sea.
“The Hive,” he said without taking his eyes off the road.
That Saturday was our first true beach day. When Shane announced it was time to go, the house shook to life. The girls donned bikinis and cover-ups. The guys wore Vilebrequin bathing suits and board shorts from Saturdays surf shop.
I remembered waking early on the day of our family’s beach vacation and packing my things in an old canvas bag. I was sentimental from a young age, imbuing my belongings with emotional value. I packed my favorite blankie, second-favorite blankie, and third-favorite blankie. My Cabbage Patch dolls Bronson and Emily and my teddy bear Poppy. I spent the week dragging them around our small rental cottage. These treasures were my entrée into worlds of make-believe, and my first a
nd strongest bulwark against the creeping hands of loneliness. I couldn’t bear the thought of them being alone and feeling the same way.
I drove into town with Perrie, my coworker. Since Memorial Day our boundaries had dissolved, and we’d frequently meet in her office to talk about our personal lives. Our roles at Scribner were divergent enough to prevent awkwardness. In the first weekend at the Hive I’d learned Perrie was a history buff. On our drive to the beach that day she gave me an overview of Montauk.
“See that? That’s the Second House Museum. It’s the oldest standing house in Montauk, from the seventeen hundreds. The railroad didn’t even come out here until almost two hundred years later. It was just a fishing village until Carl Fisher came.”
She pointed to the Tudor revival buildings on Main Street that were designed by the aforementioned Fisher, an American entrepreneur. He had planned to turn Montauk into a Miami Beach of the north, constructing a manor, a surf club, a yacht club, and polo and golf clubs all in the same Tudor style.
“Then a hurricane hit. And the Depression. He never completed it. But that’s why you see some of these stylized Tudor buildings. Including that huge apartment complex on the plaza.”