Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (C. AD 2009) in a Large City (11 page)

Instead of going somewhere out of the City, as was the usual practice, John stayed
at home. Kevin took a night off from staying home to come out—he and Fred and John
went to see an orchestra play for free in a park, and this night proved so much fun
that they went to the Phoenix after.

At the bar they got beers, and Fred was flirting with some guy from overseas, and
then Fred came over and whispered in John’s ear: Tyler Flowers is here, with some
guy. So John grabbed Kevin and threw him in the corner, and they started kissing urgently.
I think Tyler saw us, Fred whispered into their joined faces. All night they ignored
Tyler, and later, from home, John sent Tyler a message. Do you wanna get together?
Yeah, that sounds like fun, what day works for you? Tyler asked. And then John realized
he had no money to go out on a date and didn’t even write him back.

In fact, John had run out of money quite completely. But he finally wrote back and
told Tyler he was going to watch a tennis event on TV, at Sally’s, with Rex and maybe
some other people from work. It would be a “Wimbledon party.” It wasn’t so much a
Wimbledon party as just them sitting there watching the Wimbledon men’s finals on
TV. Wimbledon was a prestigious annual tennis tournament held in another country,
in which two very rich players would face off for a trophy and two checks: one big,
for the winner, and one less big, for the loser. The winner got more than a million
dollars. And Tyler said that sounded good. So the night before, Saturday night, John
got a Facebook message from Tyler, and it said, I don’t know if you were pulling my
chain, but I’d really love to see you again and to go to your Wimbledon party. By
then John had forgotten all about it. So John made up some excuse, saying he had to
watch his nephew or something. But he texted Tyler afterward, saying, wow, amazing
match, what did you think? He got no response.

It was thirteen days before payday. “I think I’ll be able to get myself out of the
woods soon,” he told people. The secret? “Not eating, not drinking, smoking less,
not going out and cooking at home. It’s a very miserable life, but I know how to do
it.” That was the plan, but it wasn’t really going to happen. He spent most of the
week with people buying him beers, sinking into a pleasant summery haze, out all night,
a little green in the morning, feeling all thin and empty.

JASON FILLED AN
awkward place in Edward’s absence, and John was studiously pretending Jason hadn’t
made a confession of affection. They’d get over it, right? Time would pass! One night
Jason and Fred and John went out. And Jason was talking to some stranger, and something
about Edward’s boyfriend came up, and John said, oh, wait, you know Aric? And this
guy was like, oh yeah, Aric, he’s doing this and that now.

Aric! That was his name. I had no idea that Edward’s boyfriend was three-dimensional,
John thought. People never brought him up. Edward never talked about him. John had
always thought he was kind of imaginary. He’d seen his Facebook and found him on the
Internet’s burgeoning if simplistic repository of all searchable public images. So
he’d seen the face but nothing else. He’s the enemy of my life and I don’t even know
who he is, he thought.

WHEN NEW BUILDINGS
would create public outdoor seating, or the City itself would put benches in parks,
this furniture would be designed in such a manner that its structural elements would
prevent people from using it for reclining fully. These elements were not such radical
interventions that one couldn’t sit down and rest or eat a lunch! But they would include
crosspieces and armrests or what have you, or even more obvious decorative elements,
regularly repeating, dramatic and intrusive enough. The value then was that it was
more important that benches weren’t taken up with sleeping people than that people
without homes might come across somewhere in public to sleep.

GROWING UP, JOHN
had only really been to one beach. His family never went to the beaches near them
but drove through the City and out to its beaches beyond that, where rich people lived.
That’s when the family was doing very well. They were rich, or close to it, before
his parents died and all the money went with them. They had a beautiful big house.

So his beach experience was specific. You would go there, you read, you relaxed. The
adults would have a few beers.

Then the remaining family didn’t do that anymore.

Toward the end of his vacation week, John was invited out to a beach house by some
older friends—guys who were coupled up, who didn’t go out to the bars much. The house
was on a long skinny sand bar, basically, that ran much of the length of the seaside
of a larger island, which itself jutted out into the ocean from the City. Sally was
coming too. John left the train station on Friday at nine a.m., and he got in a little
bus shuttle from the train station to the ferry. All of the passengers were men. He
thought they were mostly old, and not attractive.

Then he got to the boat to the island—actually, two boats, for two separate towns.
One line was for slick-haired young people, mostly men, and the other was for older
people and women. The other ferry full of pretty guys was not going where he was going,
and he was with the older people who were not wearing nice clothes. And so he got
on his boat and was a little sad. The boats left right next to each other from a little
harbor, and as they went out in the bay on their twenty-minute voyage, they got farther
and farther apart. John was calculating the walking time between the boat’s destinations
in his head. He pegged it at about thirty minutes. He sat in the back of the boat,
out in the air, as they skimmed out over the shallow blue bay.

His hosts, the couple, greeted him at the dock. It was just a little walk to their
house. There were no cars on the island; it was too small. The house was a two-story
wood shingle thing, little, with lots of glass, set down in a little forest. It cost
twenty-six thousand dollars to rent for the season, which was fairly cheap for the
island. In the house they were fussing, cleaning the pool, weeding around the tomatoes
in the backyard, talking about the brunch menu for the next day. John had a few beers.
One of the hosts, David, took John on a bike ride, down the barrier island but away
from the town with all the nicely dressed men, on a hilly, twisty little wooden boardwalk
through a dark and green and gray forest, and John fell off his bike and David kept
riding, off into the curvy woods. They were barefoot, and John was a little bloody
when he got back to the house.

They decided to take naps and then go over to the town where the rich and pretty people
lived. At five thirty, John woke up his hosts; they were snoring on the couches.

They set out and walked and walked; the roads were thin at first, maybe four or five
feet wide, and made of brown wood. Then they stopped, suddenly, in a little field
of tall grass, phragmites. In some parts of the world, the tall thin reed was used
for roofing. Here it just blew in the wind and at the top it gave off seeds, like
a wheaty flower, and its rhizomes branched and crawled down to the bay and drowned.
Beyond the reeds, there was a holly forest and some scrubby pines—originally from
all the way around the world—and bramble and impassable areas, hiding stomped-down
hutches where deer slept in the day.

John saw some good-looking guys, and he said hey, and they said hey.

They twisted and turned through the forest in the sand, and they came to the next
town, where the houses were bigger and the people were younger. It was well still
light when they showed up at the center of town, which was built around a little harbor.
There was a bar there called the Blue Whale, and John thought everyone there was very
old. He had a gimlet. And then he thought maybe the guys weren’t so bad. Maybe, he
thought, he would have sex with an old guy, something he never did.

“Never talk to anyone with a backpack,” David said. “A person with a backpack is a
loser.” The presence of luggage meant, he explained, that they didn’t have a house
on the island and were merely passing through. There were all these rules that his
hosts imparted to him, about who to talk to and who not to talk to and why. There
were more gimlets. And then younger guys showed up. But the long summer day had ended
and it was almost dark, and then they all went to the grocery store and got steaks
and shrimp, and then it was dark and they were walking, stumbling really, all the
way back through the winding woods. It was ten at night and darker than it ever was
in the City, and everyone was starving but the dinner was fantastic.

So what am I going to do tonight? John asked. One of his hosts threw a copy of a glossy
little magazine at him. It had event listings. The DJ for the party at the club in
town that night was Daniel, of DList infamy, who threw parties in the City that John
went to all the time. It was to be an “underwear party.”

David gave John some advice. Look, John, here’s the deal, he said. Everyone comes
here every weekend, starting in May. Now we’re a few months in. Everyone from the
rich town is going to come over here; this is the night they decide, hey, let’s go
over to the poor dumpy town for once.

A little after midnight, John set out alone for the club. It was very near the house.
This bar was sort of perched on stilts and up a steep wooden stair. There was a line
outside, and at the front of the line, each person was stripping and throwing his
clothes in garbage bags.

When you stripped down to your underwear, you didn’t have any pockets. So John took
six cigarettes, some cash and a lighter and stuffed them in his underwear and entered
the bar.

That was when he realized that he thought every party should be an underwear party.
It gave him this feeling of: This is who I am. But also: This is what I’ve got. He
felt like the bodies were a kind of currency, which heightened tension between people,
but at the same time it fostered a sense of relaxation, with all that mystery eliminated.

Nearly everyone there also lived in the City. And yet John recognized nobody. He felt
anonymous, like they were all in a place none of them would ever come to again, and
none of them would ever see each other again.

There was some other dark hidden room in the bar. From its entrance, people would
emerge looking all insane and disordered. He went to look. It was dark. There were
like two or three dozen people in there. And so John went in and then someone was
touching him, but John couldn’t really tell who it was. And then, after a while, John
said to this fellow, do you want to go out for a cigarette? The guy was a flight attendant
who lived in a trashy city down in the south of the country. That reminded John of
a famous character from when he was young who was called Patient Zero. Just as a woman
popularly called Typhoid Mary once was said to have spread typhus while being healthy
herself, there was also a man named Gaëtan Dugas some eighty years later. He was a
flight attendant who, some said, spread the most recent contagion between men in different
cities on his travels, and so he was called Patient Zero: He was, supposedly, mythically,
the patient before all the other patients.

Anyway, this flight attendant was not attractive to him at all, out in the mild light
of the balconies on the edge of the bar, so John decided to shake him off. This was
a party where the cutest ones were at the fringes, laughing with their friends.

But then, peeking into the back room, he saw this one cute guy who was getting a blow
job. He and John made eye contact.

The guy ditched who he was with and came over to John.

After their brief and rote exchange, the guy popped up and said, I’m Taylor. Do you
want to go to the bathroom and wash up?

And John said, so you’re Taylor?

And Taylor was like, yeah, like Taylor Swift—which was the name of a singer.

And John was like, so I would totally take down your number but obviously I don’t
have my phone on me, since it’s an underwear party.

Wait, you’re leaving? Taylor said.

And John said, uh, well yeah, what else is there to do?

So you came, you saw and you conquered and now you just take off, Taylor said.

Well, I feel like my work here is done, John said.

Whatever, Taylor said.

Well, I would take down your number, you’re cute and all, John said.

That’s cool, Taylor said. I’ll see you on the beach.

What an idiot, John thought.

The next morning, Sally arrived in town, in time for brunch. Some muscly guys came
over too. John found one annoying, the other less annoying. Also he was overtired
and hungover, and he thought he was going to throw up the whole time.

They went to the beach. David made John take a walk with him toward the rich town.
There they were all arrayed in Speedos. John was wearing a tiny black swimsuit and
felt uncomfortable. Not that he would swim, because he didn’t know how. There was
a nude guy on the beach. “David, don’t look,” John said. It was Taylor.

“There’s no way he saw us,” John said.

“Yes, he did,” David said. “And tonight he’s going to yell at you and call you a bitch
for not waving.”

They went home. They took naps. It was so calm.

The only problem, John thought, was that the taste for adventure, or chaos, or something
worse was in his mouth now.

That night they all went to the rich town again. John was trying to focus on the path,
to learn it. But he was more lost than ever and felt so blind.

The dance club was having an electrical fire, so they went next door to the little
club where ordinarily no one would be. John went to get a drink—he went to get everyone
a drink—and there was a good-looking guy on the way to the bar, one that he’d seen
the night before. “Yo, what’s up,” the hot guy said.

“Nothing, what’s going on?” John said.

“You’re hot,” the guy said. They chatted for a minute and then they started kissing
at the bar for like five minutes. So John came back without drinks.