Such Pleasures as They Might Be

So he stood, in the din of city noise, leaning against the wet brick wall papered with his small sweaty body as the world and his thoughts and his head went spinning round and round and he wanted the roller coaster to stop. For he was in imminent danger of falling off. And falling off meant he would have to be somewhere. And somewhere was a place. If somewhere was a place, it had to be better than floating in the miasmic summer air in the stench of this city. Listening to the twang of country guitars from the bar from which he had just extricated himself.

He had hurled on the sidewalk three times. More booze and dope than could possibly come out of his system at all exits that were formally entrances. How he stood there with his thin body in his tight Levis and his small tony chest with the pecks of reddish nipples all creamed by beer and slobber and tonight's desperation. But he loved it for it was the kicks. Because he had no idea how to spend the weekends without this. And he loved it because he was supposed to. Because BLUEBOY said to. Because THE ADVOCATE said to. And don't forget DRUMMER. And the on line stuff said you want it, face it, come and get it, for a little number on a piece of plastic, the world of sex heaven will open in your face.

But he didn't want it. He didn't want the muscles and the tank shirts and the baldheads and the idiotic thick black mustaches and the words, the codes, the keys to the kingdom, and why was it so hot in gay bars? In the middle of summer? It was so hot there was barely space to breathe. He had done what they wanted him to do for ten long years now. He had been the popular kid, the newie in town, and everyone wanted a taste of the little blonde kid who could take everything they had to offer before they passed him on, like a vanilla sundae, before totally finished.

And his nose ran with a bit of blood. As he put his finger to it and tried to staunch it. But coke had done enough to his nasal cavities that really anything at this point would not cover up the hole except surgery. And who is going to care really? And if even he had the money or could get the money, if he were a boy for the rest of his days, and there weren't that many left, not in this trade, then he would be on the street for good, and that would fill his head with suicide as a laminated ticket that was all his shitty little life had come in for.

He had believed in love, Christ, forever ago. He had believed what they said. And he had grown old at 25 believing it still, that mocking hopeless hope that shared a bed with him alone more and more or a bed with him and some other witless wonder whose feet smelled or whose cologne could put a plug in the Grand Canyon, odd pun, he meant to laugh, and an arm, mostly now more and more a thin arm with little gray hairs on it and little blue veins and little needle tracks, widening with his experience. He would believe in love till the day he died; till the guy in the cool Stetson looked his way and said in some John Wayne-ish voice, don't you want to come home with me tonight. Because this former boy was a moron to the edge of hell.

He had believed the pick-up lines at the beginning, because he was naive. He believed them now because he had to. There was no middle ground for him. He slid down the brick wall, hearing the songs and the guitars and the shouts and laughs from The Brown Stallion—and sat plop on his butt and he put his head in his hands and wept. He was drunk and spaced and tired and could not go home. He sang quietly some old songs he once loved. About a blue Montana sky. About finding love just in time.

About darkness hiding him. And here he sat, hidden in darkness, in this alley behind this bar, and he was scared. He was so freakin' scared it was unreal. He still looked young in his spattered bathroom mirror in his grim little room, he did, he was honest, ok a couple of bruises now and then from the S&M boys now and again, but they didn't mean it, really. But save for those, his skin stone looked good. He managed enough on his cook's salary to get the right creams and moisturizers and he used them and they made him look young.

Ok, somewhere in the world, someone could hear the word "young" and not want to throw a fist in the face of the person who said it. It was mantra here, mantra over in Frisco, in L.A., in Manhattan, everywhere there were queers, there was that word, young, said most loudly when it was not said at all. Just the eyes said it. And the lips formed it and there was this great cultural divide that involved pumping steel, getting flexed, getting hard as stone, being the Hulk in muscle and drive intensity—tear a roof off a Buick, for sure—without breaking a sweat, and if a letter of steroid pill or two or twenty a day came in for laughs—well, it was all to the good, after all, c'mon, it don't make your pennie smaller, it rustles it up bigger, if anything.

And he put his hand on the V of his crotch held hidden by his torn and soiled Levis, and he thought, hey you, hey putz, I gave you everything you wanted, I gave you the best hand jobs you could have ever had on anyone else's body, I started at 9 or 10 and I gave you such an incredible work out, and then I brought you to play with others, didn't I? I gave you the best, didn't I? The best sex you could enter into, right? You're like my damned hair. I'm already losing it, I gave it the best care too-man what's wrong with your clowns, it's you who should be embarrassed, you staging a walk-out for no reason, just that I treated you like my baby. I tinted you red white and blue cause I am one patriot for sure. Ha. And I got the best-cut job the best salon in town could give me. And I got my eyebrows pierced and my tongue and my titties and my cock head. I was one smooth looking dude. Hey Baby. And then he remembered:

Mr. Joyboy. Well, really his named was Mr. Joyce, but he looked like Rod Steiger in the movie of Evelyn Waugh's comic novel "The Loved One." Gay as the day is long, Mr. Joyboy and Mr. Joyce. Evelyn?? Don't know about Mr. Waugh. We all laughed at Mr. Joyce, teacher in tenth grade English lit. We did pantomimes of him and talked real lispy and just cut him up into mincy meat—again-ha—he was little, plump, balding and fat and was a clown, till he asked me to stay after class that afternoon. He sat at his desk and his face wasn't funny then, and his mouth stopped lisping all of a sudden, and he looked at me straight in the kisser, and he told me with more assurance than I had ever seen before in him, in the whole school year, which was almost over by then.

I sat as if I had been ordered to by someone who wasn't raggle headed like he was. I did not even think about not sitting at the front row desk, in front of him. He looked at me, tented his hands, no jokes for today, no clownish horse race for the stable of clichés after all clichés. He said, "You are a homosexual." He said it like it was the kiss of death. Well, hell, I knew that. So did everyone else in school. I mean my hair, my flamboyance, my extra flamboyant clothes, and my highly energetic voice. Then he added, "You are a fake and a fool. You think they're not laughing at you like that laugh at me?"

"Wait," I started and was aware my left arm had done a dance, one I had never noticed before and what about the rest of me, Ronald Reagan?

Then he, without blushing or perspiring, as he usually did as he held class, told me he loved me and that I could laugh if I saw fit, but I did not see fit. He said some things that upset me and made me wildly sad, but I could toss things off then, and mostly now that I saw he was just trying a pick-up line, I figured I should start getting used to that, me, Mr. Champion American Heartthrob and all, then he said the word that no one of my persuasion wants to hear, and the words said, simply and plainly, god, I wished then he would go back to lisping, it would have been easier to take then, and then of course he soiled it all by extending to me the expected pick-up line and I told him to go to hell and walked, not flamboyantly, but in my own inimitable way out of the room, leaving him to going back to sweating and wondering if I would rat him out. And there was a rat.

I brought my knees up and flicked my left sandal at it but it just sat there, as in what are you going to do about it. I never had any acne. Not one time. Not one pimple to pinch, not one whitehead to pop, which always seemed to me very unfair, very clannish on their part. One thing though, one thing about Joyboy I forgot to mention after alluding to it beforehand, as I walked my own way honey out of the door he whispered something and the something was the word "baby" as if thinking back on it, as I have often lately done, consigning him from the dust heap of too many memories too much sex and drugs and booze and one night stands and one knife fight between two body builders over yours truly, I now think of his saying "baby"—was it his remembering some former lover—him—having a lover?—c'mon—or was the word directed at me? Or was it him wishing he could be a baby again—Mr. Joyboy in swaddling clothes, held in the arms of his mother who breast-fed him—god, was that ever a laff riot image.

The rat has Mr. Joyboy's eyes. Give them back to Mr. Joyboy. The hurt squeezed the chest and the chest was of a third person, not this aging man in the alley. He knew in that instant he was going to be cursed with a very long life. That he was all dancing on the rain puddles sunlight-and he had had fun, his senses had and his nerves and his nerve endings—he had pretty much done everything a man or boy could do with another man or boy. He had danced to all the right tunes. Bought all the right CD's, had then downloaded all the right music. Had done everything people had told him to do and he had faked not believing in music and dances and himself and that day when the right man would come his way. And he was forgotten.

His eyes gave way to something molten coming out of them. He remembered the cup of tea. The cup of tea on the doily under it. Sitting in the wood desk. The wood desk of Mr. Joyce aka Joyboy. How many blowjobs and how many fucks had he had and had he been given as personally as though they had been doing it to a turnip, and as of late, and earlier than late, he had been doing, himself. The doily, Mr. Joyce, girl's name too, damn, why did it take so long to think of that? But there sat that stupid little tea cup of hot tea, always refreshed in the teacher's lounge, the little cup with old fashioned painted roses, some of the color faded and coming off, as Mr. Joyce—how old had he been, really? Back then? Forties maybe. Centuries in gay years. The doily he said his mother, never mom, always mother, like he hated her, or like they were from another century, though, now that was true of him too, and his life, and his lovers, not tricks, lovers—the doily he said his mother gave him to remember her by and he treasured it beyond pearls—and it was so stupid---

Everybody laughed. It seemed when they did, the gay kid in class too, more heartily than any of them, who has stolen his/my soul? A succession of rooms and undressings and kisses that were lies, right, Mr. Newley? Or had he sucked out his own soul in order not to be Mr. Joyce/Joyboy/Baby/wa wa wa? Men were leaving the bar now, almost closing time, and he wished he had a bottle or a snort, cause Saturday night was hell to get through on his own. But he had been on his own a long time after all, for Mr. Joyce had that goddam doily with the tea cup sitting on it, and the heat piping from it, and the tag and the string of the tea bag arranged so properly over the side, but what did this 25 year old man have left him other than fingerprints left by men and boys who forgot him as soon as they dressed and left, who he had forgotten as soon as he dressed and left.

For the first time in forever, he took a deep breath, a respite from the memories of the colliding, the groping, the clinching, the clenching, the pounding and pummeling of flesh against flesh, trying to keep the night far afield, mostly he realizing he had been remembering too often as late instead of doing, now he breathed in the fetid garbage cans and litter and used condoms and stale sickness in addition to his own, and poppers and promises only someone as stupid as he could have ever possibly believed in, and found himself remembering an episode of some rerun of a cowboy show in which the town drunk said to someone who had begun liking the sauce too, "Welcome to hell, buddy boy. Welcome to Hell."

So buddy boy stood up almost falling twice, got his bearings, and leaned down to breathe best he could, then stood back up, and pushed his sweaty hair back, what was left of it, maybe he would have it dyed shocking neon purple for next weekend, and his mascara could be purple too, the green he had worn tonight was no go, and the eyelashes needed to be a tad thinner and a tad longer. So putting one hand on the brick wall, he attempted to do this thing he used to have no problem with, which he laughed at, walking, dumbbell, and maybe he would go by Gold's Gym, after all. Wouldn't hurt to build some muscles. America has become an early Nazi Germany after all, and not so early at that, lonely boys do lonely things, like read and compare and hide out and hide in-could probably get some steroids too—just to help his body. Need to find out if that will make my hefty snake less hefty.

So he reached the end of the alley, was blown backward a little by a city bus stopping at the bus stop middle of the block, all that heavy hot air tossed his way and jagging his breath so he had to stop and gather himself together again, and thought, I am a color delight, I am a puzzle, I am a keepsake, I am something that remembers, that keeps time, yep, as the song went, in a bottle, and tea in a cup and that is not such a bad thing to be, though no one, he thought in fluent drunkenness, will want me for a legacy, because I'm my own doily colorful as can be, little lace doily Mr. Joyce's mother made for him, now she made for me, I am holding on, I really am, would someone, for the night, I don't really care who, hold on to me?, little lace doilies get lonesome, you see?