Flannelwood

by Raymond Luczak

  Once my eyes were acclimated to the dimness, I saw that it looked like any other tavern I’d seen growing up north. A long mirror behind the counter? Check. A long bar counter with bar stools screwed onto the wooden floor? Check. A TV showing closed-captioned games at both ends of the counter? Check. A CD Wurlitzer jukebox with floating neon pipes throbbing out country songs? Check. But that was where the similarities ended.

  No woman was anywhere in sight.

  They were all men. They weren’t young snobs trying to fit in with designer label clothes or expensive haircuts. They weren’t trying to be hip with the latest club music. They weren’t dancing just to show how hot and lithe they were. They didn’t reek of cologne. Sweat, and the promise of even more, underlined their every movement. They wore T-shirts and jeans. Some of them looked like truckers, scruffy and tired from a long day on the highway. Their boots were lived in, caked with age and abuse.

  Others wore leather harnesses across their naked chests and jeans tucked into chaps. Some of them puffed away on cigars. They kept their eyes slightly hidden by the brims of their leather caps. This was in the days before the city passed an anti-smoking ordinance for bars and restaurants.

  So much testosterone was packed to the rafters I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. These guys had come from the comic books of my adolescence, but with the novelty of leather accouterments. That, I didn’t understand.

  “Some guys wear leather because it makes them feel hot,” Craig said. “It’s like they go into a different mind zone, and they get to be what they really want to be.”

  He caught my look of puzzlement.

  “Look, it’s like a cigar. It’s big, thick, and manly. You can be a short guy just like me, but when you light one up, you get noticed. They see right away that you’re a man. You’re sending off signals to everyone that you’re man enough to smoke a cigar. Being man enough can really turn some guys on. Leather, cigars, jeans, boots, whatever—it’s like an addiction sometimes.” He smiled at me. “But me? I’m addicted to you. You’re so sweet-tasting.”

  That night I met some of Craig’s friends at the Eagle. I still didn’t like the taste of beer, but I hung out on Friday nights once in a while.

  Then Craig got sick and died.

  I never went back. Just couldn’t. Not for a long, long time.

  There are still moments in the Eagle when I have those split-second flashbacks of Craig talking with his buddies while I return from the restroom. He was surprisingly easy to spot as he was so short. You don’t know truly how much you love someone until you feel how much you miss him.

  James, I don’t believe in organized religion, but I’ve prayed to God many times to bring Craig back. Even for just one hour so I could tell him all the things I’d been so afraid to utter out loud when he was alive.

  Please don’t be so proud like me. You’ll regret it to the end of your days.

  For Christmas I decided to buy you a few cigars known as the Perdomo Edicion de Silvio. I had noted that seemed to be your favorite, so I went down to The Aroma, a fairly large cigar shop six blocks away from work. The front area had comfortable leather chairs and a pile of newspapers. Men of a certain age sat in them and puffed away while they read the papers. My gaydar didn’t flash on for any of them, but I liked how they enjoyed their smokes. They seemed wholly at home with themselves.

  The silver-haired guy behind the counter was quite debonair with a thick ‘stache, its ends curled upward like Frank Morgan’s in The Wizard of Oz. I didn’t know how to pronounce the name of the cigar, so I brought along a piece of paper. “Ah, yes. It’s over there.” He pointed to the humidor room off to the side. It had wide windows so you could see the shelves of merchandise inside. Up close, I was surprised to see so many different kinds of cigars available. I had no idea. All I’d known was the occasional cigar puffing away in movies, and the kind you’d smoked.

  “I don’t speak Spanish at all, but could you pronounce the name of the cigar?”

  “Perdomo Edicion de Silvio!”

  “Per-domo Edicion de Silvio!”

  “No. Perdomo!”

  I tried again. “Perdomo.”

  “Yes. Is this a gift for someone?”

  I nodded. “It’s for my boyfriend.” I hadn’t meant to say it that way, but James, if a guy is going to spend forty bucks on some cigars on a guy he’s having the most passionate sex of his life with, his heart is already hoping to call you “boyfriend.” You may not like my line of reasoning, but most people would agree.

  The man stepped back an inch.

  I didn’t smile, but I knew I’d scored a minor triumph. Do you know why, James? He’d assumed that I was straight, so he has to learn that we gay people are everywhere. Money doesn’t have a sexual orientation; people do.

  “He said that this was his favorite cigar shop, so.”

  “That’s . . . good.”

  In that moment I wish I had taken a picture of you with my iPhone so I could show him what a hunk you were.

  As he rang up the sale, I turned to look closely at the sitting area. There were six plush chairs, three facing the other three. Each had an ashtray set on a knee-high stand, and a reading lamp arching from behind the chair. The side tables had the day’s newspapers. Above us were huge ventilators, but they were fairly quiet.

  An older man sat with his cigar by the window. The winter light made his skin look quite pale, the haze of smoke from his mouth enveloping his face for a moment such that I couldn’t see what he looked like; just his body. He wasn’t a tall man, but he had a pronounced belly that strained against his Oxford shirt. For a moment I thought it was you sitting there, not as you now, but as you twenty years from now.

  I glanced around the cigar shop and realized that in twenty years, it wouldn’t be a big deal for straight men to be smoking their favorite cigars and having amiable conversations with gay men, talking about their women and their men in equal measure. No one would feel threatened. Straight men of a certain build and bulk would take to calling themselves bears, and straight women would identify themselves as bear chasers. Young girls would oooh and ahhh over teen idols labeled as otters. Straight men would realize how much hotter they would be if they stopped shaving their faces every so often. College girls would say they wanted a cub boyfriend, and everyone would know what they meant. And it wouldn’t be such a big deal in high school if two football players slow-danced with each other at the prom.

  Only time will tell.

  Do I believe that ghosts exist? No. There’s been much talk of people experiencing visions of spectral beings, but I think it’s a figment of their imaginations. Sometimes they experience something so intense that words fail them, and the concept of an apparition is the next best description. Ghosts appear and reappear, revealing the state of our minds at the time like a mirror back to us. We feel the chill of recognition, and we say we’ve just seen a ghost when it’s always been us all along.

  Craig still haunts me from time to time. I know that if he were alive, he would be sleeping right here beside me. He was a major cuddler, and I liked that about him. He may have been very short, but he felt of the right height when he wrapped his arms around me. His legs draped all over my thighs, leaving my feet free. I liked that. Those nights when nothing moved except the sighing of our chests I felt as if our arms, hands, fingers would burst forth into vines budding and expanding and weaving in and out of each other until we were inseparable. It was scary to feel that, and yet so wonderful.

  When he died, my entire trunk was chopped apart and left to rot. I had no branches, no roots. I was a stump ripped out and wood-chipped into pieces. My heart was squished with slugs that couldn’t get enough of the pit blackness of rage at the injustice of death. I was no longer a young man with a worthless MFA; I was an old man with nothing to show for his heart and his art. I flitted like a plastic bag in the wind, hoping to hook a tree branch so I could hang on and not float away to the cemetery of the forgotten stumps. But no one was having
me. I was good enough for a fuck, but too ethereal to keep.

  I said I was grieving.

  I said I was a widower.

  I said I wasn’t ready to date.

  I said I wasn’t ready for a relationship.

  What I never said was: Mr. Loneliness is my husband, and I can’t divorce him right now. Just can’t.

  Then you appeared and beckoned me into your truck, house, bed. It was the most wonderful affair of my life. Not once did I miss my husband on those weekends. I saw how miserable he was, but I didn’t care. I was tired of being miserable. He was always annoyingly right whenever we argued.

  I cheated on my husband so recklessly that I was due for payback.

  Did he tell you that he’d never divorce me as long as I lived because he’d married me first?

  Then I realize Mr. Loneliness is the biggest bigamist alive. He will marry anyone who’ll have him and break their hearts. Divorcing him will be the hardest thing they’ll go through. Remember, he’s your husband too.

  The wind of loneliness is what propels ghosts to sing silences and suddenly vanish. The gusts of chill play tricks on the mind’s eye of our bodies until we think our bodies are seeing what we were afraid to see in our own mirrors. We are transparent; we float; we sigh endlessly. We turn into oceans that are smaller than a drop of rain, and we are perpetually falling from the sky, waiting to splash on something concrete but the earth below is too far away. How we long to crash and feel the lightning jolt of pain, just to know that we aren’t figments of our own imaginations. Let us bleed so we can exist.

  The kisses we shared have turned into gray curls of smoke. They float away, sometimes dropping back to tease me, and they rise up just out of my reach.

  When Craig died, I felt I couldn’t love again. I didn’t see the point. And what’s more, one night at the Eagle some years ago I overheard three guys standing by the wall over there, right near where I saw you for the first time. I didn’t know who they were at the time, but they were all very hot. Each one of them was a veritable stud; they wouldn’t be lying if they said they were VGL in their online profiles. Most of them wore leather armbands on their left biceps to show that they were tops. They wore leather caps, and they groomed their facial hair. One man in particular had a beard that was so black one wondered if it was actually dark blue. I couldn’t tell, but his eyes were brown as chestnut. I was in lust.

  Of course, he didn’t know I existed. He acted as if most of us didn’t. He was there to revel in his own hotness and to remind everyone that he was too hot for them. It’s an ego trip of the worst kind. Still, I couldn’t tear myself away from looking. Until I met you, I thought he was the most perfect specimen of manhood I’d ever laid my eyes on. I never overheard his name. I stood over there, unsure whether I should ask for another glass of ginger ale, when I noticed him talking with his buddies. They were pointing out this and that guy lining the bar and elsewhere while talking with each other.

  He said, “Had him, had him, had him . . .”

  The other said, “Had him, had him . . .”

  I felt sickened. What was this? Had the bear community become an arena of sexual sports where it was all about statistics?

  I didn’t want to be just another number, another notch on someone’s bedpost.

  Uh-huh.

  That’s why I didn’t come back to another bear event for a long time. Years, actually.

  I went online instead and discovered that many bears had felt rejected at bear events. It was no surprise that a few bear events were cancelled in recent years when there weren’t enough RSVPs. The bears do not treat their own kind very well.

  Bears online told me stories. Oh, a lot of stories.

  One told me how he went to a bear party at Jolt, a bar that used to be on Speck Street. He was of Scandinavian descent, so he was naturally blond. He had been so excited to learn about the bear community, so he showed up. He didn’t know anyone there, but within five minutes of his arrival, he overheard two guys shouting into each other’s ears over the loud music: “Look at that Swede! We gotta fuck him first before anybody does!”

  He turned around, and he never went back. He hangs out online because he feels safer. I don’t blame him. Do you? What kind of a community are we if we keep rating each other on fuckability? Quite astonishing, actually, when considering that so many of us were often overweight growing up. I’m sure we’ve been picked on because of our weight, and we have to turn around and reject anyone we deem unattractive, or reduce them to potential cum receptacles? Are they remotely aware of what they’re doing to each other and to themselves?

  You shrugged every time I brought this up. “So?” you said. “It’s just the way things are.”

  Oh, really? What about your missing foot?

  Surely people had to have freaked when they saw it. Did they ever make an effort to maintain their distance from you? Did they avert their eyes from yours in the elevator? Or did they tell you how amazing and inspiring you were to move around with your prosthetic foot, which was really a passive-aggressive reminder of how superior they still were to you?

  Did you ever want to tell them to shut the fuck up?

  Did you ever want to look them in the eye and say, “Well?”

  Did you ever want to shout at everyone to stop looking at you like a freak?

  One of the reasons why I loved you so much was the fact that you didn’t want pity. You didn’t become an alcoholic or a junkie when you lost your foot. It must’ve been a hard adjustment, but you were a man. You were still that tough quarterback out on the field, and you were playing the last home game of the season. You were set on winning, and you did. You scored a lot of touchdowns with me, many more than you’ll ever know.

  You taught me not to pity anyone because they were different. They were still people. I’ve never forgotten that.

  All I want is one more chance to tell you all the things I’ve always wanted to tell you but had felt too scared to share. I’m tired of dreaming the conversations we will never have.

  I will never forget the taste of your sweat and smoke. Some nights, when I’m not thinking of anything at all, it all comes back. I inhale as much as I can, which is ridiculous since the memory is not contained anywhere in my nasal cavity, but embedded deep somewhere in my brain. I only have to close my eyes and gently pull in the draw of you until I breathe nothing else. I jack off this cigar of mine right here on this lonely bed of mine, and when I finally smoke out, I know it’s because it’s the only way my body can grieve for you.

  Each puff of cum is a tear, a pearl.

  Sometimes I wish I could move like an invisible spirit through the Eagle on Friday nights, but I’m afraid to join the army of ghosts still floating inside, overhearing the animated conversations of their friends, still alive, as they drink their cheap beers. For them it’s always Happy Hour.

  I don’t want to hear what these ghosts want more than anything to say, because I know that they’ll say the same thing: I still love you I miss you so much I can’t bear to leave here and say good-bye to all my friends. Even though I know the bar is air-conditioned when I step inside on hot summer nights, that initial chill always makes me think of those whose names I’ll never know. They’re still crowding the place even on nights when it’s dead. I feel their eyes everywhere, but I don’t mind that actually. They are men who’ve had sex with other men, so they know what it’s like to want to just fuck this or that hot stranger, to explore boundaries of kink, and to ache for a deeper connection with someone who’s unfortunately chosen someone else. And of course, there’s the camaraderie. They don’t judge each other for what they like to do with their cocks and balls. They just are: bar buddies, platonic good friends, potential tricks, and married but not dead husbands in open relationships.

  The living have so many possibilities to choose from, and the dead have only one possibility. They simply don’t want to leave. They are too in love with the memory of their younger selves. Doesn’t matter that the men t
hey’d loved back then have gotten old, or that a few of them now require pills to sustain their erections. They snuggle against these beautiful men, who will remain forever young in their doomed eyes, and try not to weep from too much happiness. When these dead men were alive, they hadn’t wanted much else, and now, here in the chapel of the Eagle, they can continue to pay their respects.

  James, you must’ve known how badly I wanted to pay my respects to you. I wanted to stand next to you on that barstool and rest my head on your sturdy shoulder while you shot the breeze with your buddies. Sometimes you would give me a kiss on the lips when you caught the look of expectancy in my eyes. Everyone would know that I was yours and yours alone, and that would make me feel so proud.

  What have I done to make you feel so ashamed of me?

  What?

  Tell me.

  I dreamed I was a somnambulist, walking with eyes closed and yet never bumping into walls or tripping over curbs. Somehow the further I walked, the more my clothes melted and faded away from my body as I walked the miles and miles along the cinder-filled shoulders of a loud highway until I turned right and right again until up the hill and down the road was your house. Awakening, I was startled naked as a skeleton. Chill snapped at the very flesh inside my bones. Moonlight, caked of embers, lit the deep indentations of my ribcage. There on the road was a half-finished cigarette. I shivered; I thought I was going to topple over, but I picked it up. It still had a faint glow, emitting my mother’s death breath, as I inhaled. Just then you opened the door, a shadow beckoning me into the fireplace of your house. Felt like centuries before I finally arrived on your steps, but arrive I did.

  Sometimes I dream of being a cigarette.

  Isn’t that funny, James? You said you were a cigarette smoker for twelve years until one night a buddy offered you a good cigar of his to try. Cigars eventually weaned you off cigarettes altogether.

  I want to be the last cigarette you missed. You’d light me up and inhale me, storing each puff of memory deep into the cham ber of your lungs. I would stuff each bronchiole of yours with cotton balls of want and need to the point where the only way you could breathe would be through me, my perfect set of lungs.