Let's Get Back to the Party, page 10
Oscar
Several hours before dawn, there’s an explosion across the street. The kind of boom that throws you out of bed, bare-assed, onto the floor. The kind that shrinks your balls up inside your stomach. Terrorists, you think. But no. There’s no light with this explosion, no fire. Just noise, epic, like something out of the end of days.
I cling to the floor beside my bed and wait for another salvo. Nothing. Slowly, movement begins in the apartments above and around me. Doors open in the hallway, releasing the angry murmur of busy people roused unexpectedly from sleep they can’t afford to miss.
Hugging the dark so as not to flash the wakening street, I creep out onto my balcony for a look. And there it is: the small construction crane that once stood tall and proud next to the skeleton of the Echo now lies like a storm-struck tree along the eastern side of Fourteenth Street.
The bulk of it, I’m sad to report, rests inside Fourteenth Street Baths: one of the last relics of old gay life in D.C., having survived the online chat rooms, the dating apps, the bars and clubs and theme parties but not, it seems, the forward march of urban development. An unimpressive one-story building scaled in blue tile and fronted with wide frosted windows, now just another wreck. Goodbye, sea-green hallways. Goodbye, empty exercise rooms. Goodbye, hiss of steam, grunt of release from behind louvered doors. Goodbye, old queens sitting naked in upholstered armchairs or lying naked on sauna benches. Goodbye, private rooms, in which I’d occasionally wait for a passing stranger, thinking of shameful pleasure but also of my father, wishing he could see his son now.
Of course, I don’t tell my friends about my visits. They say I’m not allowed to go there.
Bart (holding, as always, Jackson’s hand): “It’s tragic.”
Drew (pursing his lips and shuddering): “Dirty old men.”
Tom (eternally single, probably a virgin): “Where’s the love? The romance?”
Jackson (holding, as always, Bart’s hand): “Why bother? It’s all on your phone.”
I’ve stopped trying to convince them about the beautiful queerness of the whole enterprise. They just don’t get it.
Later, in sweatpants and a wool sweater, I sit on the balcony and listen to the peal of police and ambulance sirens grow louder, watch as the scene is cordoned off with tape, as fire trucks fill the street with their noise. I wait for bodies, for blood.
Nothing.
Bored with the scene, I go back inside.
That evening, Sean invites me over for scotch at what we now both affectionately call the Ambrose Bierce House. It’s his second week in D.C., and he has me over every few days, usually just for drinks. Once, I came over to find him stirring a pot of boiling water, and we ate spaghetti with garlic and oil in our armchairs, watching leaves drop from the trees inside Logan Circle.
Tonight, I bring Sean a fresh bottle of scotch I bought with what little money I have to spare on sundries for myself. I ask him over the slow burn in my throat—which I’m slowly getting used to—if the sound of the collapsing crane woke him up. He takes a sip of his drink and winces.
(Sorry, Sean. Bottom-shelf is all I can afford.)
“Slept through it,” he says. “Only saw it on my way across town to meet a friend. What a mess.”
“I still feel that noise in my bones. I mean, just imagine if that crane had fallen in a different direction. It might have been the Beardsley taking the hit, not Fourteenth Street Baths. I’ve been thinking about that all day.”
“That’s trauma for you.”
We sit in our armchairs like lords while outside the window an evening boot camp performs jumping jacks and burpees in the circle. We sip our drinks. We talk, as always. Me about my life, he about his. Mostly, I try to impress him with my sexual escapades while I remain in thrall to his ancient ones. Occasionally, still, I’ll ask him to read. I’ve grown less self-conscious about having an old man read books to me, grown more and more attached to the heavy sound of his voice. I’ve started to hear it everywhere, even when I’m alone. It’s a voice in which I’ve started to think and dream.
Sean finishes a particular moment of debauchery with laughter that turns wistful when he looks back out at Logan Circle, at the fit and flabby boys exercising under the trees. He seems small tonight in his white button-up shirt with the brown slash of a coffee stain I’m not convinced he knows is there. Lost in another of his melancholy moods. To bring him back to the land of the living, I tell him about two hookups I had last weekend. A delicious shiver runs along my body as he crosses his legs, rests his chin in one hand, asks questions. I tell him everything. Where it happened, when it happened, how many times it happened. How long I lasted, how long they lasted. Who came first. Who fucked whom. Cut or uncut. Protected or bare. Spit or swallow. Kissing or no kissing. I give Sean demographics: age, race, eye color, hair color, weight, length, girth. I want the details to impress him, to keep him hooked. But as the words come out of my mouth, they start to lose what power they contained in my head. Stories that seem like such an essential part of myself, a display of my power and pride, now sound dull in Sean’s company. Uninspired. The more time I spend with Sean in such concentrated doses, the more I start to worry how plain, how banal I sound to someone like him. If our storytelling is a dick-measuring contest, I’m woefully at a loss.
Still, I talk.
Still, he listens.
Occasionally, I’ll come back from the bathroom to see him staring out the window, scribbling something into the notebook he always keeps on the side table.
The following morning, after what Sean tells me is a good spell of writing, I invite him outside the Ambrose Bierce House for a walk.
It’s early November. Bundled in coats, clutching coffees, I take Sean through Logan Circle and down to Lafayette Park, where we pay our respects to the ghosts of gay men who, under cover of night, still slink among the green in search of illicit, illegal sex. I ask Sean if he ever cruised here. He shakes his head. We sit on a bench near the Executive Mansion and I tell him about the building’s brief rainbow makeover this past summer, about the crowds cheering outside the tall black gates.
“Must have been a sight,” Sean says through a mouthful of muffin.
“I guess. I wasn’t there.”
We wait for a break in the wind, then get up to leave. As Sean turns to brush muffin crumbs off the bench and into the grass, I lock eyes for a moment with the nuclear war protestor squatting, eternally, under her tent of white tarp.
We break for lunch at a small bistro recommended by Sean’s journalist friend. I take my phone out, and Sean and I watch videos of the High Heel Race from several weeks ago, the annual mad dash of drag queens down several blocks of Seventeenth Street to the cheers of the crowd. I complain about the breeders, there to see us minstrel for their pleasure. Afterward, we watch men come in and out of the restaurant, pick our favorite parts of their bodies as if they were rotisserie chickens. (Light meat? Dark meat? Thigh? Ass? Forearms?) I tell Sean about the game I play with myself on the Metro, where I search a crowded car for the one person for whom I’d be a slave forever.
“Slavery doesn’t sound like you,” Sean says. “Too much commitment.”
“Har har,” I say, and gently kick his ankle under the table.
Then our food arrives: chicken Caesar salads delivered by a stocky server in black shirt and slacks who I’m pretty sure I’ve seen in drag somewhere. While we eat, a gorgeous man comes in for what must be a business lunch. Fitted blue suit, perfect blond pompadour. I look up as he passes our table, wait for that secret glance I always think of as a holdover from days of cruising in secret. Sean’s days. I get nothing. For all he knows, we’re just any other two people eating lunch on a weekday in downtown D.C. Tourists, maybe. Father and son, perhaps.
“Do you miss it?” I ask.
“Miss what?”
“Your books. I mean, not the books but the things you write about. That life.”
“Yes, there are some things I miss about it.” He puts down his fork, wipes his mouth with a napkin. “There are things I don’t miss, too.”
“Like?”
Sean widens his eyes, frowns. “Really, Oscar?”
“Oh. No, of course. I get that. I just mean. I don’t know what I mean. Like, if my dick were to fall off tomorrow morning in the shower, say. I don’t know what I’d do with myself.”
“So you think just because I’ve retired from that life, I should go dig a hole somewhere and lie down? While what? You shovel the dirt over my corpse?”
“I’m sorry. That’s not what I meant.”
Sean shrugs, leans back in his seat and opens his arms as if offering himself up to the world. “ ‘Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.’” He drops his napkin on the table and excuses himself to the bathroom. The server comes by to ask if I’m still working on my salad. I tell him to take it away. God, I hate this about myself: that I can never talk clearly about what I want to talk about, that something gets lost between my brain and my mouth and so instead I just stumble through my words like some kid who’s just discovered and cleaned out his father’s liquor cabinet.
I sit there, alone. I debate whether or not Sean’s ghosted. A minute later, I feel his hand on my shoulder and almost sigh with relief.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Let’s keep walking,” he says.
Yes, I think. Walking’s more productive than talking.
In silence, I lead Sean over to P Street Beach, the fat slant of grass overlooking Rock Creek where, years ago, club kids would lounge and smoke and go off into the bushes with one another. We take a series of worn wooden steps down the grassy plain and sit. Below us: the swerve of traffic and water bending toward Georgetown. Behind us: the shell of an old gay club, the first I ever went to, now a restaurant specializing in Peruvian small plates. I tell Sean about the massive warehouse of Wet, long since razed and replaced by Nationals Park, where hunks hit home runs on the same sacred earth where other hunks once played with different bats and different balls. I run Sean through the old names, the disappearing memories of earlier generations.
Hung Jury.
Best Friends.
Delta Elite.
Mr. Henry’s.
B.F. Keith’s Theatre.
Metropole Cinema Club.
Tracks.
LaZambra.
The Lodi.
Chaos.
Nob Hill.
The Brass Rail.
Places I only visited once, places I never got to visit. Places now just pictures in cheap history booklets.
“What a loss,” I say, picking at the grass around my hips.
“You’ve gained a lot,” Sean says. He flicks a paper cup away from us. “Our work’s paying off. Don’t forget that.”
The afternoon skies threaten rain, so Sean invites me to an exhibit of old German woodcut prints at the National Gallery of Art. I think about the freelance work I need to finish, the job applications I need to start, but I join anyway, if only for another hour in Sean’s company. I can’t end this day on such a sour note.
Sean’s the kind of person, as I imagined, who reads every museum label, gives every work at least two minutes of his time. I follow behind him as long as I can bear. Then, exhausted, I slip out of the exhibit and move through the rest of the museum, checking my email, checking social media, checking Cruze to see who else might be in these cavernous halls.
At one point, I find myself in front of a massive painting of an eighteenth-century shark attack, and I stop. I know this one. The goofy fish, the helpless twink. I put my phone in my pocket and sit on the bench in front of the painting, remembering another afternoon, decades ago, when I stood here with Sebastian. I’m ashamed to think of the unanswered text message buried in my phone. Just checking in to see if you still want to catch up sometime. Sebastian, who all those years ago came up to me and asked if I wanted to eat lunch with him. Sebastian, who on the bus ride home asked if I played Nintendo, if I liked comic books. And I remember, now, more than anything else from the subsequent years we spent together as boys, that first night, after the field trip, going home and sitting upstairs on my bed and crying while my dad yelled at something downstairs; crying not because my dad was yelling but because I felt, for the first time, seen by someone else.
“There you are.”
Sean sits down next to me on the bench, but he’s not looking at the painting. Now it’s my turn to make that Jell-O face, to force myself not to blink because if I blink I’ll start to cry.
“What’s wrong?”
I shake my head, and Sean scoots closer to me, wraps an arm around my shoulder. The warmth is enough that I give in and tell him it’s just the painting.
“What about it?”
“It reminds me of someone.”
“Tell me.”
“No one. Just an old friend from childhood. The one I told you about when I first met you. Sebastian. It’s fine. It’s no big deal.”
“Big enough of a deal to make you cry.”
“I’m not crying,” I say as the first tears slither down my cheeks.
Just checking in to see if you still want to catch up sometime.
Sean laughs and grips my shoulder.
“You’re alright,” Sean says. “I can imagine he means a lot to you.”
“It’s not him. I’m not crying because of him.”
“Then what is it?”
I turn to look at Sean, this man almost twice my age, and I’m laughing and crying at how ridiculous this all is, what I must look like to someone walking past this gallery. I see the genuine concern in Sean’s eyes, the half-frown you’d give to a wailing baby you couldn’t really do anything to help, and then I drop my head into his coat and laugh through my tears and say, “I don’t want to be invisible!”
On one of the first evenings I spent with Sean at the Ambrose Bierce House, I mentioned Martin, a sporadic regular in my bed. An executive at a small event-planning team specializing in queer dance parties, sports leagues, happy hours, trivia nights, themed evenings for every sort of sub-group and fetish. The following night, after my childish breakdown at the National Gallery of Art, Martin texts and says he wants to meet up.
You host? I host?
Neither. You said you needed freelance work. May have a job for you.
We meet on Sunday morning outside Captain Dave’s for their drag brunch, an event I normally stay away from but agree to come to only because Martin knows the manager and says he can get us an easy seat. Still, my heart drops in my stomach when I see the line of people stretched outside the door, when I see an entire family—father, mother, son, daughter—waiting to be let in for the next performance.
Martin takes my hand and pulls me around the line and through the crowd at the front door. “Look at this wall of vagina,” he says to me, loud enough to be heard by the people around us. “You don’t happen to have a stick, do you?”
We’re seated over by the bar, at a small table for two, in the middle of a routine. Wearing a floral caftan, the drag queen lip-synchs, flirts, shyly pulls folded dollar bills from eager hands. A zoo of suburbanites that’s commandeered three tables by the window is going, appropriately enough, apeshit. There’s a husband and his wife, an older couple that has to be one of their parents. Look. There’s a fucking baby in a fucking high chair. The drag queen passes by, rolls her eyes at us. Martin and I offer a limp wave of moral support. I think I see Paul, the boy from Rehoboth Beach, come downstairs to use the bathroom, and I shrink into my coffee. A girl cheers from somewhere over my shoulder, and I feel the ghost of a slap on my face.
“Guerilla warfare,” Martin says from behind a mimosa. “I thought of it after what you said last time. Death of gay culture and all that. How we were losing our spaces, how we should be fighting to get them back. So I thought up an idea for a new monthly theme party. We get a bunch of guys together to drink and party specifically at straight places. Family restaurants, sports bars, chain restaurants. Here in D.C., maybe in Maryland and Virginia if we’re feeling adventurous. We give them a taste of their own medicine. A reverse colonization sort of thing.”
“A theme party.”
“I know, like we need one more. But I sold the idea to some of the guys on the team, and they told me to explore it. See what I could come up with. So I thought: Why not go to the man who inspired me? It’ll be a fun little revolution.”
“A revolution.”
“Yeah. Who doesn’t love a party?”
I think of the last party I was at, just the other night at Empire, when I went up to this beautiful lumberjack of a man, introduced myself, asked what his name was, what he did for a living, then felt his hand on my shoulder and heard him apologize into my neck and tell me he was here with his girlfriend and she’d just gone to the bathroom. I think about Patrick’s wedding, the little brat and the Becky at Poodle Beach, of all the thrill-seeking breeders sitting at the tables around us. Our tables. I think about everything I hate about the way we live now. I think about Sean, about how tired and vulnerable he seemed during our walk, possessed by an exhaustion I can’t find in his books no matter how hard I look.
