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Authors: William J. Mann

BOOK: Where The Boys Are
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Lloyd
I find myself standing in the line snaking out of the men’s room, my arms folded across my chest and a black cloud hanging over my head. Why the fuck isn’t the line moving? All these vapid boys doing their fucking drugs in the fucking toilet stalls and none of the rest of us able to take a pee.
Then I laugh. I let out a long breath and realize I don’t really have to pee, that heading here had been merely an excuse, a place to go after walking away from Jeff.
I shake my head. I had behaved exactly the way Jeff used to. And
he’d
acted like me, standing there all calm and psychoanalytic. He had learned the game all too well.
I turn around to find him. I’ll apologize. I’ll admit that maybe there was some truth to the questions he raised, and ask if he’ll help me look at them. You see, I
want
Jeff to be a part of this.
That’s
how I should’ve presented it.
That’s
how I should have led off.
I’d like you to help me with a project . . .
But Jeff isn’t where I’d left him. He’s slipped back into the writhing mass of bodies.
I sigh, not wanting to wade out there again. Suddenly behind me I feel hot breath and a pair of hands. “Hey, sexy,” someone whispers in my ear.
Some drunk guy is grabbing my ass. I can smell the alcohol and cigarettes even without looking around at him. God, how I hate these places. I shake the guy off and take a deep breath. I fight my way back onto the dance floor to find Jeff.
It doesn’t take me long. He’s looking for me, too.
“Jeff, I’m sorry,” I say.
He smiles. “Me, too.”
I put my arms around his neck and kiss him. The dance floor must be 110 degrees. Steam rises between us.
“I guess I was just feeling a little sensitive,” I say. “Jeff, I want you to be a part of this. I really want your support.”
He’s nodding. “I know you’ve been wanting to find something new, Lloyd. I was just a little surprised, that’s all.” He gives me a smile. “I’ll support you in whatever you choose.”
“That means so much for me to hear.”
I kiss his neck. I can feel my dick getting harder, even without any X to goad me on. I run my hands down Jeff’s arms, felling their hardness, the curve of his biceps, the solid horseshoe of his tris. I want to make love to Jeff tonight. I want to consummate this moment, ensure that our reconciliation is real.
“How much longer do you want to stay?” I whisper in Jeff’s ear.
“A while,” he says, and immediately I pick up on the distance.
I pull closer. “I was hoping now that the clock had struck, we could go celebrate on our own....”
Jeff smiles tightly. “Well, I’m having fun here.”
I move my head back so that I can look at him. “Jeff, you know I came here just to see you. You know I don’t like hanging out in these places very long.”
“Maybe if you just gave it a chance, Lloyd.”
“I don’t like being mauled by strangers. I don’t like the drugs.”
“Why is that all you see?”
“Jeff, I only came here to be with you.”
“I understand that, Lloyd.” He gives me a smile that seems sincere, but I’ve known him long enough to recognize it’s anything but. “And I’m appreciative you came so we could be together at midnight. But if you want to go, I understand.”
I try to keep contact with him, but Jeff closes his eyes, leaning back and moving to the music. I know what he’s doing. He might not throw fits anymore, but he’s still pissed. He’s learned how to say he’s sorry but not how to
live
it.
Damn him. Maybe I
had
brought it up wrong, but that was no reason to wash four months of progress down the drain. Well, I know one thing: I’m not going to stick around and play that game. I’m not going to
beg
him to come back to Eva’s with me. I’m also not going to stay in this stink-hole much longer.
“Then I’m going to go, Jeff,” I tell him.
Jeff opens his eyes and smiles. “Okay.”
I glare at him. “I’ll see you later, then.”
“Yeah,” Jeff says. “Happy New Year, Lloyd.”
Our eyes hold a moment.
“Happy New Year, Jeff.”
I turn to leave. I look back once. Jeff’s looking at me. I see his struggle, but he’s not going to back down. I don’t fully understand why, but, as stubborn as I know he can be, I’m not going to stay here and try to find out. I just mouth the words: “I love you.”
He pretends he doesn’t see me.
Then I turn and force my way out, headfirst.
Jeff
I watch as Lloyd leaves the club. I can’t literally see him, of course, but I can imagine him clearly enough: putting his shirt back on, reclaiming his coat, tying his scarf, pulling on his gloves, heading outside, hailing a cab, ringing the doorbell at Eva’s—no, I figure, she gave him a key. She’ll greet him with a cup of hot cocoa, and they’ll curl up on her Upper West Side couch and talk the rest of the night. What kind of drapes they’ll buy for their new home. What kind of china. Whether they’ll replace the carpet. How soon in the spring they can plant geraniums in the window boxes.
“Sup.”
I turn. It’s the R. C. boy again, still barely dancing, still looking incredibly lickable.
I feel a smile stretch across my face despite myself. “Sup with you?”
“Not too much.”
Bad answer,
I think. Guy’s not quick on his feet, literally or figuratively. A good answer would have been “Interest rates” or “The spaceship Mir, at least for now” or, best of all, “My dick.” But all R. C. manages is: “Not too much.”
Still, he has incredible abs. I reach out and slide my palm down his stomach. Yep,
just
like speed bumps. Hard and round. “What’s your name?” I ask.
“Anthony.”
“Anthony.” I’ve learned the key to remembering tricks’ names is to repeat them as soon as they’re first said. Even a couple of times for good measure. “Well, Anthony,” I say, “I’m Jeff.”
“Hey, Jeff.”
Anthony reaches out to shake my hand.
Such a straight boy,
I think. I take his hand and pump it heartily, like a straight boy’s supposed to do.
I spy Henry and Shane dancing nearby. “You know Henry and the Windex queen here?” I ask, elbowing toward them.
“Good to meet you,” Anthony says.
“It’s
true,”
Shane says. “You boys are drawn together like magnets. Like the swallows to Capristrano or something.” He stands back to appraise Anthony, feeling his shoulders. He looks back at me, shuddering dramatically.
I laugh. I skillfully bring Anthony back from Shane’s clutches, moving in close to him. “You from New York?” I ask.
“For the time being,” Anthony says. “I’m looking for a job.”
I eye him. “You rolling?”
“What’s that? A kind of dance?”
“Hoo boy,” I sigh. “I know. How about if you just kiss me and we can stop talking?”
Anthony beams. “Sure.”
He’s a little awkward with the tongue, but I can overlook that. Anthony tastes yummy, and his shoulders and his back and his butt are certainly worth exploring.
So let Lloyd have his cocoa and his guest house and his little past-life bride. It’s a new millennium. I can find my own way.
Henry
The night ends for all of us soon after that.
“Just for the hell of it,” I ask, as Shane hails a cab. It’s cold,
very
cold, and I zip my leather jacket all the way up to my throat, watching the steam escape from my mouth. “What
would
you have paid me?”
Shane laughs as the cab pulls up to us. “How much are you worth?”
“I’m not sure.”
We slide into the backseat of the cab. The warmth is enveloping. We push down close together into the hard naugahyde of the seat. Shane gives the driver the address of his hotel. I figure it’s safer to go back there; Jeff has disappeared with that hunky Anthony guy and I don’t want to walk in on them going at it.
“If you were
really
escorting, honey,” Shane’s telling me, “you could get two hundred fifty easily here in New York. In Boston maybe two hundred.”
“A night?”
“Sweetie, an
hour!”
“Two hundred dollars an hour!
How do
you
know?”
Shane scrunches up his face. “Don’t tell me you’ve never looked in that back section of
Next
before. No, wait. Of
course
you haven’t. Why
would
you, with
that
face and
that
body?”
“Shane, I have the same insecurities as anybody—”
But he’s not listening. “I admit it,” he’s saying. “I’ve hired escorts. I’ve paid two hundred dollars to lay beside an Adonis for an hour.
You,
however, are the first one who’s ever come willingly.”
Adonis.
By implication, he just called me an Adonis. Such talk can still rattle my brain. I look up at Shane, realizing he’s totally serious.
He would’ve paid two hundred dollars just to suck my dick.
I think about my credit card balances. About my student loans. My car payments. That Prada suit in Neiman-Marcus.
“Here we are,” Shane barks. The driver pulls over to the curb. I reach into my jacket to pull out some cash, but Shane holds up his hand. “Allow
me,
gorgeous. Believe me, it’s an honor.”
I open the door and push myself back out into the cold night. I feel a little numb, not quite able to imagine myself in this particular situation. I watch in silence as Shane slams the door of the cab and the cabby pulls off down the street.
“Now,” Shane says, staring down at me, “it’s just you and me.”
“Yeah,” I reply, and my voice sounds thick and unfamiliar to my ears. “Just you and me.”
Shane shivers dramatically. “You’re even more spectacular away from all that smoke and fog.”
All at once I kiss him. Just push myself up on my toes and kiss him hard, taking Shane by surprise. After a couple of seconds, he responds wholeheartedly, kissing me back with lots of tongue and moans and interjections of just how lucky he is to have found someone as stunning as me.
It turns out to be the very best sex I’ve ever had.
Somewhere in the Night
Lloyd
S
o what’s your impression of all of us so far? Think we’re pretty fucked up? Or just like everybody else, trying to untangle all the karmas and dramas and unexpected twists of our lives?
Let me tell you a little story. I talked to my parents earlier tonight. I called them on my cell phone when I first got into the city, wanting to wish them a happy New Year. And my mother says, two minutes into the conversation, “Lloyd, you’re thirty-five years old. It’s time you
settled down.”
I hadn’t yet told her about the guest house, and now there was
no way
I was bringing it up. She and my father had finally accepted that I was gay and making a life with Jeff when I suddenly up and left him—a move they’re still puzzling over. Telling them about the guest house would only further muddy the waters. I just said, like I always say, “I don’t believe in settling down.”
Parents are always telling their kids to “settle down,” no matter how old we are. They start when we’re just three or four, whenever we laugh too hard or get a little too rough with our toys. “Settle down,” they scold. Then we’re fifteen and we bring home a few Cs on our report cards and they say, “You need to
settle down
and get to work.” They’ve got us scared to
move.
Jeff used to be big into “settling down.” He was the one who got all cozy and domestic when we lived together. It was perhaps inevitable that I left, because we had gotten too “settled down”—too exactly what my parents had always told me to be.
Now I find our positions switched. I’m talking with Eva about the colors we’ll paint the living room and picking out matching wallpaper while Jeff is out there, still exploring, still partying, still as far from settled down as one can be. I’m certain that it took no more than forty-five seconds,
tops,
for Jeff to set his sights on somebody else after I left the bar. I know him so well.
There’s not much I
don’t
know about Jeff O’Brien. He can be the most self-absorbed asshole and the most compassionate friend you’ll ever meet. He can spend all day rolling around in the mud with his five-year-old nephew, not caring who sees, but he also has the inseam of every pair of jeans specially tailored to make his butt look more perky. I mean, can you think of anything more self-indulgent? Yet when I’m feeling sick, it’s Jeff I want to take care of me. There’s nobody better at bringing in soup, tucking in blankets, changing cold cloths, and just generally being warm and nurturing and comforting than Jeff.
But Jeff’s changed. I know deep down he’s still the same guy I fell in love with over a decade ago, but our old friends don’t seem to recognize him anymore. He heads off to Seattle and Cincinnati and Toronto and even Sydney, Australia, for every party, every dance, every whitewater rafting trip, and every gay ski weekend he can find. He doesn’t see much of these old friends anymore, the ones who were with us through the whole long process of Javitz’s dying. Instead, he’s surrounded himself with new friends, most of whom I don’t care for. I like Henry, but the others seem merely accessories, pretty boys with designer drugs and designer muscles who don’t challenge, don’t provoke, don’t confront.
And Jeff is
not
going to admit
why
he prefers them. He’s
not
going to talk about Javitz, no matter how hard you push, so I guess it’s up to me yet again. You
do
need to know about Javitz to understand everything else. So ... where do I start?
We once had a friend named David Mark Javitz. Everybody always called him by his last name. He died of AIDS. Do you remember AIDS? It’s really not such an outrageous question. Javitz would be so pissed off to see how everyone seems to have forgotten about AIDS these days. It hasn’t been four years since he died, yet already the world seems so different. To those boys on the dance floor tonight, the world of AIDS seems as foreign and unfamiliar as Zaire or Antarctica or the surface of Mars. Or maybe it’s not so unfamiliar. Maybe they just like to pretend it is. The way Jeff does.
Javitz died just as most people were starting to live, just as the new drugs came in, just as a powerful hurricane was rushing up the arm of Cape Cod. It sent winds so fierce along the finger of Provincetown that the old oak on Commercial Street that had been growing since 1875 was finally felled. In the morning, the town awoke bewildered and bewailing, and Javitz’s body was taken out of his house on a stretcher by the coroner in the middle of a driving rain.
Yes, Javitz would be pissed to see how people have forgotten about AIDS.
And is pissed, I’m sure, because I believe he’s still here, just in a different form. Before he died, he promised he’d come back to me, and he
has.
Okay, so it’s been in dreams, but maybe that’s the best he can do. Jeff says he doesn’t even dream of Javitz. I feel sorry for him. I would go crazy without my dreams.
Although we weren’t sexual with Javitz, in every other way we were, in fact, lovers. Sure, it was Jeff and I who lived together with our cat and celebrated our anniversaries and hung our Christmas stockings side by side on the mantle. But Javitz was, from the start, an integral part of our union. Straight people just never got it, and a lot of gay folk had trouble with it, too. The three of us were fused together, a family—but, as we always added, even more than what family usually means for straights.
How do I explain who Javitz was to us? He was teacher, he was mentor. He got us angry, got us inspired, got us out onto the streets shouting about how the government had blood on its hands. Oh, we were such earnest young boys then, so ready to fight. Our anger was righteous and indignant, and Javitz had been proud of us. Javitz taught us that gayness meant opportunity, that it was a gift which allowed us to rethink the old paradigms that had proved so unsuccessful for straights—like marriage and monogamy. He infused in us the radical notion that queers weren’t just
equal
to heteros but, in a way, actually
superior:
at least we had a leg up over easy, conventional definitions. We could forge something
new,
something that worked better—more honestly—than what straight culture had created.
Javitz had been one prickly, political queen, but he’d also represented the one solid thing in my life, the one person who was always there, one hundred percent. Unconditional love he’d promised, and Javitz had delivered. The most important thing he taught Jeff and me was that friendships and relationships didn’t need labels or definitions or limitations; what mattered was the love, and how unconditionally it was shared.
Every summer for six years we rented a place in Provincetown. We became a familiar sight walking together down Commercial Street, shoulder to shoulder to shoulder, Javitz always in the middle, slightly taller than Jeff and me. The gossips wagged their tongues over our three-way friendship, our age difference (Javitz was more than ten years older than Jeff and I), and the nonmonogamy we all so prized. Many were known to wonder: “What do the three of them do together in that house? Are the two younger ones his boy-slaves? Or is he just their sugar daddy?”
Sitting on our summer deck, Javitz had sighed dramatically. “How to disentangle the myths of age?” he asked, waving his cigarette in the night air.
Jeff had responded in kind: “How to explain to a world fixated on the paradigm of two the power of
three?”
Those were the discussions we had, late into the night. I laugh now at our pomposity. How we enjoyed hearing the sound of our voices in the stillness of a Provincetown night. But that’s who we were. A family—audacious, maybe, but constant, a fact that nourished me.
The images are there, at the flick of a switch in my mind. Javitz on the back of a motorcycle, riding sidesaddle, being dropped off at seven
A.M.
by a trick on his way to work. “Who do you think you are,” I had scolded him only half-mockingly, “worrying us all night?”
Javitz simply shook his long black hair, his curly ringlets still wet from a shower at the biker’s house. “I’ve never ridden on the back of a motorcycle before,” he gushed. “I felt like Nancy Sinatra in
The Wild Angels.
”
“Who is this man?” more than one trick asked both Jeff and me, as they woke up to be greeted by a thin, long-haired older man with a platter of raspberry croissants and coffee. We didn’t even try to explain. How could we try? There were no words. No way to adequately describe who Javitz was to us. Friend, lover, family. We broke the rules, the three of us.
And then there were two.
He died just as the hurricane roared up Cape Cod. I was with him. Jeff wasn’t. See, that’s a large part of the reason why he can’t talk about Javitz. He carries some guilt about that, I know. I’d called him around ten o’clock the night before to say that I thought he ought come to Provincetown, that Javitz was fading fast. But the weather forecast was ominous; we were all bracing for the strongest hurricane to hit the Cape in years. Jeff considered it and told me he’d leave first thing in the morning—but by morning, of course, Javitz was dead.
In truth, it wasn’t Javitz’s literal death that was the hardest thing to deal with. You see, Javitz had died with dementia, and in some ways, I had as little opportunity as Jeff to say good-bye. Dementia had been Javitz’s worst nightmare, the one thing he prayed he’d never get. “Give me pneumocystis; make me go blind; cover me with lesions; just don’t give me dementia.” His intellect had been his most treasured attribute. People sought Javitz out for his wisdom. They came to him when their lives were a mess or they stood at some crossroads, unsure of which way to go. Javitz always knew what to advise. He could see through bullshit. And he died unable to counsel, unable to impart any last words or offer any insight into what was happening, to him or to us. He was just a docile little boy confined to his bed, eating his chocolate bars, smudging them all over his face and hands.
It was only after his death that I realized why, on a karmic level, Javitz had died with dementia. Javitz, who’d spent his life taking care of others, who’d grown up with a cold, distant mother, was at long last the child surrounded by love. Finally it was our turn to give back as unconditionally to him as he’d given to us.
And his intellect, his mind—it was the one thing he had to learn to surrender, the last attachment to this life that he had to give up, just as he had given up his faith in the old ways and gone on to chart a whole new course. By letting go of his mind, which had held him so firmly rooted to this plane of existence, he could at last take that one final leap into the unknown.
I like to believe that Javitz died with all of his karma fulfilled. It’s selfish of me to wish he were still here, to help me through mine.
But I do.
Jeff
Okay, so I suppose Lloyd has told you some stuff about Javitz. That should do you for a while. Don’t expect me to follow suit, getting all introspective and touchy-feely, with all that talk about karma and the wounds of the despised gay tribe. I’ve got other things to attend to. Chief among them is what’s-his-name, R. C. Boy, and his skin is just about the sweetest thing I’ve tasted in ages.
Still, I’m fuming. Like I should have expected anything
different
from Lloyd, Mr. I-can-talk-a-good-game-but-I-won’t-walk-the-walk. He’s still the same commitmentphobe he’s always been. Isn’t he the same guy who walked out on me, the one who
left
me—who even in our six years of cohabitation always held back the promise of forever. The whole time, I lived on tiptoes, waiting for the curtain to be rung down. What a fool I was to have even
considered
trusting him again.
So stop thinking about it!
“Come here, Anthony.” I lift his shirt, exposing his abs. I run my tongue from his navel down the wispy happy trail of blond hair that leads to his dick.
But I can’t stop thinking. What
really
gets me is that I was falling
right back
into the same old pattern. I really was. I was going right back to the place where I used to be, which is,
waiting for Lloyd to walk out on me.
I’d vowed never to go back there. But I did. Did I
ever.
Six years. That’s how long Lloyd and I were together. Actually, we lasted a year more after that, but we lived apart, and then finally it just flickered out, like a flame at the end of a wick, struggling against the wax. Neither of us made any kind of an announcement. We just wandered off our separate ways, and that’s how it’s been these last three years. Then suddenly last September, Lloyd called out of the blue, saying he was in Boston and asking if he could stop by to see our cat, Mr. Tompkins. I said sure. He showed up, we had sex, and that just started the whole ball rolling again. So to speak.
Okay, so I jumped to conclusions when Lloyd said he wanted to talk about something, but it wasn’t all that illogical a leap. I know the house he’s renting in Provincetown has been sold, that he has to move out by spring. I’m well aware that his attempts at starting a new career on the Cape have yielded only mixed results. Add those two facts to the reality that, since that September day, things have been going really fabulously between us, and see what you get. We laugh like old times. We cook meals together like old times. We watch old movies like old times and visit my sister and my nephew like—well, not like old times, because my nephew hadn’t been born back then. But little Jeffy, who’s kind of like my unofficial kid because his dad’s a no-good bum in jail, took to Lloyd really fast. So it’s actually pretty logical that I’d assume Lloyd wanted to take that next step: move back in together and pick up where we’d left off.
What a joke. I can hear Javitz laughing at me from wherever he is.
And no, I’m not going to talk about him. I have abs to lick.

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