dan. I have told everything here, so now I will tell you about Dan. A beautiful boy, born in Honduras, raised here since he was two, wearing a ring he reluctantly admitted was an engagement ring; "She'd kill me if she knew I was here without her. But she's on vacation until September in Costa Rica." At first he said the ring was nothing, that he got it at Harvard Square for no particular reason. It was on his left ring finger.
"What's it signify?" I asked, inspired by a couple Summer Ales.
"What do you mean, 'what's it signify'?" He mocked my question, like it was stupid to ask. "It's just a ring." It's just the disavowal of his engagement. I was onto something.
"Usually rings have some spiritual significance," I said as he surrendered his hand into my hands, ostensibly to permit examination of the not-an-engagement ring, but Dan is yet too young to lie with skill, and there seemed to be more purpose to our touch; he had been touching my friend John and I in every heterosexually permissible way since he entered the bar and made us a trio. He was constantly shoulder clapping, back slapping, hand shaking, and putting his arm around either John or I as he confided some forgotten-by-morning barroom secret. Straight men trying to satisfy their need to touch other men are sometimes so sweet... Dan was stilled by my touch as I held his hand in both of mine, and gently rotated the ring around his finger. It was a silver band, engraved around it's full circumference with a single repeating pattern. And he gave in.
"Actually, I bought it to replace the engagement ring I lost."
"Well, see, now there you go! That's very spiritually significant. Congratulations!" The boy beamed. That is how one lies with skill. My honest sentiment was, "Oh. Engaged? That's too bad." But all Dan seemed to want was some older male to be sensitive and to recognize the things of importance to him; and affirm him, just the way he is. How? how could I not be that for him?
But I was hopeful; the engagement ring he LOST? And replaced? And didn't want to tell me about in the first place? These developments were pregnant with meaning for a manipulating mind, and my brain began to whir and click with furious precision. Tick-tock, tick-tock, his-cock, my-cock, tick-tock... A mere matter of time, I speculated, and our curiosities would be sated, our desires explored and our hopes summitted. It would be tonight if not for my status as John's guest, not that he would protest if I went off with Dan; John would deny offense, and say he was glad for me. It would be tonight if not for the extreme expense of rooms in Boston; the one I'd want to bring Dan to would be a hundred fifty bucks at least. And it would be tonight if not for my immobility; I arrived via public transportation which was going to stop shortly, at 12:30 AM.
But I was hopeful. Maybe Dan would accompany us to John's, and sneak over to the guest room from the living room couch, and I could still be a good guest and have my diversion, too. Or maybe Dan would take me to his apartment in Sommerville (I'd deal with the offense to John later), or even just to the back-seat of his car (did he say he had a car? and afterward where would I go?). And the remotest of hopes; he would take me back to Worcester in his car (if he has one), and stay.
sometimes I think I am too smart for my own good. Usually, I dumb myself down because it is hard to hide from life like I do, and be fully aware. But when the inhibitions wash away with a beer or... six, well, I guess you could say I stop hiding. As the night progressed, it became apparent that the beverage has the same effect on Dan. Revealing his engagement was the first evidence of letting down his guard. Eventually he would be embracing me.
These encounters always happen when one is not looking. I went to Hennesy's, a straight bar in Boston near Fanueil Hall, only because my friend John wanted to win tickets to see Stone Temple Pilots, and he wanted me to improve his chances by having me also try to win. (Forgive my un-hipness, but I really didn't care about the tickets.) Until Dan walked up and said hello. Black hair, dark eyes, light skin, and aquiline features, all on a medium frame, about 5' 7" or 5' 8", and overall meticulously groomed. He was friendly but a little timid, like a gentle person. He said he was 23, but only a sophomore at Wentworth, and I began to suspect (or hope) that he was a young man seeking a detour from his rigidly heterosexual role as a Latin male.
"If I win a pair, you can have one of 'em, and John can have the other," I told Dan, once my benign disinterest in the band had been revealed. He spilled-over with gratitude, reaching around John with a vigorous handshake saying, "Wow, that's so cool. Thanks." I swear he would have hugged me if John weren't in between us. All that for a promise. How can old queens, who see only sex in handsome young men, discount the beauty and the goodness which surrounds and suffuses the flesh, trampling the many delicate expressions of need and gift such as were evidenced by Dan last night? Such a pursuit can yield only a fresh and fine-complexioned cadaver, and perhaps that's all they want.
Or all I want. In my sober angst, a bright and engaging young man like Dan is terrifying. How do I act? What do I say? Who should I be? But there is a lot I can overlook with a glow on. Like terror. That, however, is not a plan. The small window through my fear, opened by a drink or two, soon closes as my old body collapses under the toxic insult of the alcohol, and eventually, if I repeat those nights enough, that window will stop opening altogether no matter what I drink or snort or shoot. Because my climbing through this metaphoric window—or falling through it—is really just an affirmation of the lie that my fear is a wall, and once affirmed, it will have no windows.
there is a bartender at Hennesy's who is one of the most beautiful men I have ever seen. Size is reported to be unimportant, but this young man's eyes were big and perfect, with a crystal blue sparkle and fabulously long eyelashes. At one point as he was leaning over the bar toward John and I with the lights directly over his head, his eyelashes extended from shadow into light, imparting an ephemeral glow to the moment. I don't know why eyelashes have that effect, especially on a man, but as I remember now that cute bartender's face, his long lashes gently stroke a tiny node deep within my brain that says, 'surrender, surrender, let go, and to him, surrender.'
Once the farce of the concert ticket contest was over, and none of us won, we were approached—not across the bar, but on the drinkers side of the bar—by the angelic bartender. He stood among us, like a god upon the earth. I could have touched him, and yet I couldn't. He had two tickets for us. "I got these, and I can't go, and I know how much you guys are into that band, so I thought you might want them." I wanted now to kiss god on the lips. "...for sixty each." Ugh! Why does God allow such pedestrian souls to masquerade as Him? I contributed a twenty, and John and Dan each had the ticket they came to get.
we're gonna go to the One Nineteen," I told Dan after the frenzy over the STP tickets had died down. It's another bar near Hennesy's and when he asked why John and I were going there, I said, "Um, ...cuz the beer's cheaper." In fact the One Nineteen is a gay bar, and I knew I would have to explain some things to Dan before we brought him with us there. If Dan did not want to continue our triad into the night, then nothing need be revealed, but I would not bring Dan, uninformed, into the dark cruise bar that is the One Nineteen. I wanted to show this curious straight boy what such a bar was like, promising to protect him while there and presenting myself as an altruistic counter to the horny slobs hovering in the shadows. What a deluded idiot I am! The only difference between me and them is my perception. I wanted to play the coy and demure innocent, winning Dan's trust as his protector, and coaxing him into making the first move, at which time I would graciously acquiesce. What a creep. But my creepiness is not what I most lament; it is the fact that my sleasy plan was well on its way to succeeding until John grabbed Dan's ass.
John wanted him in the crassest way possible; John is like that. He was whispering crude comments to me at Hennesy's, right in front of Dan, concerning his cock, and the foreskin which John concluded in ecstatic certainty, was intact. It is not a rare phenomenon among gay men, the rudification of sex, divorcing it from its place as an integral part of love, reducing human emotion to a managable and discardable thing, like a pleasure-appliance taken from hiding only when it feels good. Indeed, the abuse of sex is not rare among humans generally. Many of us use it to feel some sense of control over the pain within, as a bouyant upon the tides of saddness that often flood our hearts. And it works. The only problem is that it's not true. We can hide from each storm as it comes, retreat from each flood, and pretend the weather is never bad. But we know it is sometimes. And somewhere deep down we don't want to run from it, or keep living in make-believe, or keep hiding, hiding, hiding. The best that is within us wants to stand, face into the blast; our better self wants to endure—nay, participate—in the thrilling, turbulent fray; the god that is in each of us wants simply to emerge, but can't while we stay hiding.
I was standing beside Dan as he was finishing the last of his beer, and I took hold of his chair and turned it so he had to face me. "Dan, I want to tell you something first, before you decide to come with us to the One Nineteen, and it's perfectly OK if you decide not to come, but it's really not fair to bring you there without telling you. We're not going there just because the beer is cheaper. John and I were planning to go there when we left here. We've been there before. It's a gay bar." He quickly put together that this meant John and I were gay, and he acted appropriately surprised, though I think he kinda knew it anyway from some of John's comments. Then again, we're talking about a young man in a straight bar—they can be remarkably oblivious. In either case, Dan was flawless in his transition from, "<gasp> No! You?" to, "Well, what the fuck! I don't give a shit, let's go." We went.
between the two bars is the Boston Holocaust Memorial. But for my brief redirection, our trio would have swept past the monument as if it were nothing—or as if it were just another of the many local importances which we neglect. John was tolerant of us crossing the street to touch the glass, all the while his attention focused on Dan. However, Dan was attentive and responding with interest to my interpretations of the memorial, a row of six glass towers, five feet square and sixty feet high. He and I both touched the glass, as I explained that each of those tiny seven-digit numbers etched there in eternal rows represented a human life dispassionately extinguished. Dan understood, and we paused though not long enough.
I may be wrong, but I doubt the lash-laden pretty bartender who sold us the tickets, who works less than a hundred yards from here, knows anything about it. I doubt he has ever stood atop the ever-expiring breath which rises through the steel grate beneath each tower, or traced with his fingertips the perfectly etched serial numbers and felt anything. Dan did. With his head back, his mouth agape, and his one hand covering forty lives upon the glass, Dan looked up the side of one tower and began to grasp the loss.
John was impatient to move on, and so we continued. Another hundred yards and we were at a windowless wall and the battered, subtley marked door into the One Nineteen. I dated the doorman once. We said hello, and kissed. He didn't card Dan, which I expected; a courtesy perhaps. I'd told Dan that I would not let him out of my sight here at the One Nineteen, and that I would stay right beside him constantly. Not because he had expressed any concern, I knew he wouldn't; a young macho male would never acknowledge any fear of queens, but neither did he protest my role as his protector. I liked that.
I saw Beau, the charming and attentive bartender in back, and his big, bad, new sideburns. Ick. Despite them, Beau is still desperately attractive in my opinion; longish blond hair, always a big, broad smile, with a trim body smaller than mine and hairy only on his chest. Fantasies with Beau are spontaneous. John seperated from us on a quick cruise of the bar patrons, and Dan wanted to go to the men's room, which is beside the back bar.
Another guy was in the men's room when we entered, and he became very interested in Dan. He whipped it out after he'd already zipped-up, and began a thinly veiled feign of urination while gawking at Dan. "Dan, I don't think I've pissed this much in a whole month," I said. "Me neither," replied Dan, and the lonely lingerer tucked it in and left. These restrooms are not spacious, nor 'richly appointed' to say the least. Shabby but clean is the style, graffitti the decor, and occasionally a beautiful youth the occupant. Dan stood pissing into the commode, and I stood shoulder to shoulder with him pissing into the uninal mounted on the wall beside the commode. He wasn't trying to hide it from me, but I was paralyzed from even the slightest glance to my left to check him out. It was an internal battle between two camps; one camp sought to reveal to him my sexual interest in him, and was just plain curious, the other camp sought to maintain the role of virtuous mentor. But whenever we New Englanders hope for gratification, as in the case of the Red Sox, we are faithfully disappointed.
but that is not to say Dan failed to appreciate my feeling for him. We crossed the establishment to seats at the front bar from which we had a good view of the One Nineteen in its entirety. John could not stay put at the front bar, but when he was with us, he would unfailingly make a crass remark to Dan. Or he would try to convince Dan to accompany us back to John's house, and would promise unconvincingly things like, "You don't have to sleep with me. You can sleep in my bed, I'll sleep on one couch and Joe can sleep on the other couch." Whatever restraint John had exercized at Hennesey's, was abolished at the One Nineteen. Dan appeared revolted, and I expected him to leave. But he stayed. And during episodes of John's absence, when John was busy cruising, Dan became more fervent in his appreciation of me, saying things like, "I like you because you respect me," and "you listen to me when I say what I want." He punctuated that last with a hateful glance toward John, who was elsewhere in the bar persuing other prospects.
the boy spoke to me in Spanish. He was quite surprized to discover that I don't speak Spanish, and whatever he said, he did not say it again in English because, just then, John returned. Dan who was becoming affectionate as he got drunk, was moved by something as I professed my real disinterest in the extortion of sex. "I mean, what's the point if the person you're having sex with isn't happy?" He stood up (I was already standing) and he took my beer from my hand and set it on the bar. Then he put his arms around me, put his head on my shoulder, and he hugged me. It was real gratitude, I think, for letting him be just a 23 year old boy when he knew, I think, how much I could have wanted him just for sex.
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