Issue 20

Mike Dressel

2013

It was the summer I was into armpits.

It was the week the mercury didn’t dip below 98 degrees.

It was the weekend we didn’t get back together.

On Thursday it had been ten days since we’d last been in touch. I don’t know which of us had decided we were taking a break, or if it had been mutually decided. A break from seeing each other, and from drinking, due in part to the frightful behavior we’d allowed when drinking with each other. Something in our selves became incompatible following the bowls of bourbon we downed in each other’s company (Nathan was partial to Manhattans, neat; so was I). I became needy and he became cruel and there were miscommunications and bruised feelings, sulking in taxis and alternately making out with or screaming at one another on street corners. Nathan was the King of Irish Goodbyes, and there was a place we reached, quickly, where I was too eager with a hello and he had no problem leaving without a farewell. So we weren’t speaking. Or texting. Or emailing.

I broke the communication blackout first. Drunk at a dismal comedy club that night with some female friends. I had fulfilled the two-drink minimum with the house white and then we trundled toward another bar that someone Alicia knew was tending, ending up in the bowels of the East Village at a tiki-themed dive discussing the best place to get a new tattoo, and I excused myself to use the toilet and tapped out a distress signal, and then I was air-kissing the women and hailing a cab uptown to Nathan’s place. U cumming over, he’d last written, he was also somewhere below his own barstool he confessed—even our lapses in sobriety synced up—the double entendre a solicitation or merely a grammatical mistake, who could tell.

I paid the driver and buzzed his apartment. No answer but there was a young Dominican couple in the process of moving out of the building (everyone moves out at odd hours above 110th Street it seems), boxes piled in the hallway, and stepping over a lone dresser drawer I climbed the three flights of stairs to his door. I rang. No answer. I texted. I called. I placed my ear to the grimy brown door. I went backstairs and buzzed the intercom again. I made the pilgrimage up and down twice, like some sort of devotee, before my desire soured. I rode the subway home.

My phone chirped (very early) the next morning.

<Sorry. Drunk. Passed out cold last nite.>

<Ok> I replied. Frowny face emoticon appended. <Free ltr?>

<Going to Fire Island!!! Last min invite. Back late Monday nite, mebbe Tues.>

His college roommate’s friend, he wrote. A spare bed and a weekend away and so great I responded and have fun, punctuated with three exclamation points of my own echoing his exuberance, because what claim have I, and it is summer, so sure go, do, be.

I hadn’t counted on Nate to become anything. I knew it was more than a one night stand, but it seemed to be going the way of the seventy-two-hour fizzle. No fuck-and-dash, longer than a one-night stand, yes, the fizzle begins on a Friday or thereabouts with the usual come-ons and come homes and a sexy tussle between the sheets but then, sometime the next day, there follows something more than the courtesy text because of course you’ve exchanged numbers that morning and then you’re back for round two, but that’s when the cracks in the facade start to show and you find out he is a Log Cabin Republican or favors Whitney’s “I Will Always Love You” over Dolly’s version. There’s another go round Sunday afternoon or early evening but work in the AM precludes more and by then you’re tired of each other’s company, though not necessarily each other’s bodies. Nathan didn’t fizzle. It stretched into a week, then two, then six, and now it was mid-August. The counter guy at his deli had begun to recognize me from the times we’d stumble in together for a six pack at 3 AM. Of course it being summer it wouldn’t work, I knew down deep, it never does. One manages to fuck things up in the most desultory ways. All the summer lovers prior—the Apostles of Summer as they’d shared names with that cohort … Matthew, Simon, John, Luke—stretching over the decade I’d lived in the city. Matthew had gone home to Orlando to be a singing waiter and Simon married a banker, John plain disappeared, and Luke, well, the less said about his recommitting to heterosexuality (and pleated Dockers) the better.

Nathan held my interest despite (or because of?) his erratic behavior and dark moods. He worked as an admin for a pharmaceutical company and loved opera and British mystery series and coffee ice cream and one night drunk we painted each other’s toenails and he could hold forth on both French cinema and Shelly Long’s 1980s film catalogue, especially Outrageous Fortune, and I didn’t feel so self-conscious naked next to him like I had with others before him and that alone felt nearly like love.

I lay in my bed in a hot, sweaty tangle of sheets, rereading his texts, picturing him lounging on the beach, dipping into the surf, the shivering cold spray tempered by sunbaked towel time, cocktails on a weathered deck and tea dances. Sea and Tea, girl! I could hear him saying in his endearing-slash-irritating Midwestern bray.

Friday afternoon.

The Piers.

I wasn’t working and instead trundled downtown to sun on the revamped Christopher Street Pier and played the mental game of which do you prefer, as you do with old or new Times Square: old pier or new pier. Safe and clean now, yes, but oh so sanitized. Then there was the danger of tetanus with your dick out sunning on a rotting plank of wood. All this reforming and reclaiming of space, though (cf. the High Line), from whom and for whom? Reclamation doesn’t always ensure betterment and as to quality of life, well, whose life and what quality, precisely?

Blanket spread next to a young mother tickling a gurgling infant and a barrel-chested bike messenger, I wondered if Nate would bump into Darren, or even recognize him, since I’d only introduced them once. Darren was bit by the Fire Island Bug (or fairy or deer tick?) hard about four years ago, and this summer instead of just one-off weekending he had gone in on a share, forgoing cigarettes and Comme des Garcons splurges to cover the cost. Darren was living a kind of gay existence that was maybe going the way of, well … they say hook-up apps are killing the social life on Fire Island and in bars, one reads these trend pieces, but then it isn’t technology is it? It’s a certain unwillingness to be a certain kind of faggot, nowadays.

I was feeling the lethargy and dismal spirits of residing too long in the city, that sense of dislocation that always arrives with a brutal stretch of summer. Darren it seemed remained a true believer, possessing an unwavering faith that I wished I could manifest but was no longer sure I cottoned to. I’ve seen too many come and go—”another hundred people just got off of the train,” thank you Mr. Sondheim—and who cares when you leave or how it makes you feel, don’t bother, Joan Didion already wrote the definitive essay. When a mood like this descends I’m often left wishing for that brief beautiful blip of time I was never a part of, before the disease and decimation, when St. Sebastian was every man’s beefcake pin-up and Atlantis was our psychic homeland (or was it Alexandria?) and we screamed our feelings in a locked room. But then, even EST got a corporate makeover and who has time for lost cities and erotic martyrs anymore? At least David Wojnawrowicz is back in favor again. In certain circles, anyway.

Friday night.

The Bar.

I located myself at a newish lounge decorated like a window-dresser’s LSD nightmare vision of a stage set for A Midsummer Night’s Dream: gaudy centaur tables with mannequin torsos in glittery wigs, stag horns brightly painted and artificial ivy vines creeping up the wall, a squat box of sequins and tat. A rough magic here in this plastic queer Athenian Wood, or perhaps Prospero’s Island. Sprites and monsters with appetites and agendas. “Set me free why don’t you babe” was the lyric to the blaring song the drag queen DJ spun as the go-go boy on the bar nearly twerked something free from his 2xist underpants. Twinks stood around the fringes tapping, mesmerized by glowing screens, trying to summon forth the ideal lover … at least for the night … a spell of conjuration, a violet magic. A base, incantory spell, cast to call forth a lover from a glimpse of abs or ass. I was about to settle my tab, but the boy in glasses and a Yankees cap said no, don’t, you’re too cute—which I later learned meant normal, like not overly muscled nor emaciated or dancery but maybe five pounds overweight and not bothered about it, and so he bought us a round and another and then we were on our way to his apartment. “I don’t take boys home and I don’t sleep with them,” Tim said but then what are we doing, I thought. We showered together, and as he led me to his bedroom and its blessed air conditioning I took stock of the two things he had in ample supply: shoes, so many pairs in all manners of form and function, and—after he’d stopped to pour us both glasses of water—it would seem an unbelievable invention, a fabrication too on the nose if it were not true, but his refrigerator contained only condiments and poppers. Cases of poppers. At some point, if left unchecked, do we just become calcified, a collection of fetishes?

Small talk, pillow talk the morning following. I liked the way my hand looked resting on Tim’s chest as I gazed at him with sleep in my eyes and the light filtered in, liked being not alone and the AC blasting and crisp white sheets, and how we took turns spooning each other, at one point in the middle of the night how we had leaned out his fire escape to share a cigarette, my naked body over his, how I fitted into the curve of the small of his back while a taxi disgorged a cluster of drunk girls below us. I overstayed my welcome the next morning, but his apartment was a cocoon of cool air—how many love affairs are born and die during the summer simply for the sake of AC?—and he was a gracious host, until the signals were too apparent that I was impeding on the rest of his day. I jogged down the four flights down of his 10th Avenue apartment.

Sunday.

Jacob Riis Beach.

The People’s Beach. Abandoned buildings, graffitied edifices, like sunbathing at some post-Soviet eastern bloc seaside community. Bottle caps and glassine bags littering the sand. Bears and beautiful black boys piled atop beach blankets, drinking cocktails carried in water bottles and thermoses. The smell of marijuana wafting down the shore. I’d flopped my orange and maroon printed blanket on a free patch of sand. A thick man in white pants roamed the beach with a menu, and to my left the boy with hairy shoulders was drolly sharing his hummus recipe with a dozy, Casper-white companion with a lazy eye. I’d sat across from them on the crowded MTA bus, distracted by his left nipple poking out of his white crocheted tanktop. A man with a longing look and pronounced gut was fluffing himself delicately under his star-spangled thong, which made his crotch look like the bill of a patriotic Toucan. I took out my book but couldn’t focus—who brings Renata Adler to the beach?—and I would rather let the sun burn down on me, burn me clean, shuffling from Callas singing “Casta Diva” to Kylie on my iPod. I stayed until the hazy end of the day, when the cruisy games begin after the lifeguard blows the last whistle—even the New York Times knows now, ugh, whoever tipped them off?—but I couldn’t, though I wrapped my swim trunks around my wrist and bobbed nude in the surf. Nathan had told me about his visit to this beach, earlier in the summer, surrounded by boys like a slippery, horny school of fish, eager to envelop him. At the fringes of this innocent frenzy, I floated, trying to prolong a feeling I could not name.

Sunday night.

Home.

I thought that night about texting Nathan, but decided to wait. To see if he would reach out first. A test. Sometimes silence does not mean disinterest. Sometimes. One can read meaning into the lacunae of digital missives. I thought, then—unknowing was better than the knowing, and summer was coming to an end in a few short weeks, and I felt pliant enough, resilient enough, that it didn’t much hurt. If I ended up once again alone, if past was prologue.