My mind always goes back to that first time I came to your place in Oakland, our second time hanging out together. It was something like 85 degrees out—a freaky hot day—and it was a Saturday in late July. I’m lying face up on your stained plaid couch, picking at the foam spilling out of one of the cushions, while looking at the barely swaying fronds on the palm tree in front of your house. It’s dusk and the sky is a fading pink. You’re in the kitchen in your cheap Hanes boxers, cooking some murky vegetarian slop that ultimately needed more salt. My eyes go to you and roam over your body—your neck, reddened by days spent in the sun rebuilding a motorcycle, your thick, hairy legs—scabby and a bit wrecked from a bike wipe-out, your arms and chest—solid from your former job doing heavy lifting in a warehouse, not fancy curls and presses in a gym. And your tattoos—all those multicolored tattoos of skulls and knives and roses that seemed to run and weave together. There’s a poster of Darby Crash shrieking into a microphone on the wall in front of me, and COPS is on the television and that fucking “Bad Boys” theme song gets stuck in my head. We eat in the kitchen on wooden chairs with no table between us—you don’t own one. You’re in one corner and I’m in another, there’s a barely cranking ceiling fan swirling above us, and the pit bull tied up in your neighbor’s yard barks forever. We struggle to find things to say, and in my head I’m thinking well, the silverware is doing a lot of clanging and scraping. This can be a substitute for conversation. Every time I look your way and compliment you on the food you look away, shyly or maybe angrily or maybe a mix of both (enough with the fucking thank yous, I imagine you to be thinking). I never understood how you could possibly be shy. That bruising face of yours—the angular cheekbones, the well-groomed ginger beard, the beaten-in lines and crows feet that only made you hotter, the brooding blue eyes that made my brain swim and trip. Your eyes. You could have fixed those eyes straight on mine and suggested knocking off a bank and running away to South America and I probably would have gone along with no more than a nod of my head (can’t believe I just wrote that; soooo cheesy). Out of nowhere you leap up and throw your plate into the sink and it breaks and you come to me with that insane look of yours and you push me and the chair I’m in up against the sink. You move me with the ease of a pro hockey player swatting at a puck, radiating your Charles Manson-meets-Al Pacino like intensity as you breathe hot breath on to my face. You lay me down and straddle me and restrain my hands at my side and begin grinding your sweaty crotch into mine and you’re kissing me roughly on my forehead and cheeks and your arm pits smell like a locker room and then you rip my undershirt off me at the neck and I think to myself for a split second I’m either going to have a heart attack or a geyser-of-an-orgasm in about two seconds and it feels like someone just took a pin out of me and now all the air is seeping out.

We kiss for the first time without being bombed. Our hairy chests rub together and your tongue in my mouth is so forceful that it feels as if you’ve got my head secured to the floor with it. I work my hand underneath your shorts and begin running it over your rock-hard ass. You roll me over so I’m on top and I begin wiggling you out of your underwear and I’m totally fixated on the indentations left on your pale hipbones by the elastic waistband. Saliva is pooling behind my teeth and I open my mouth and let my spit splat down on your left nipple and I feel like an animal (once again, cheesy—I know this. RAWR!). I’m grunting, but I don’t blow you yet. I go to town kissing you on your ears and lips and face and you’re in ecstasy because you told me you hadn’t had sex in months when we set up this hangout session on the phone the other night. I run my tongue down to your belly button and wiggle it inside. Groans all around. I go down further to your cock and marvel at it in my dizzy state—it’s smooth and perfect and veiny in all the right places, it’s like the cock Mattel would give an anatomically correct life-size Ken doll. Your cock looks like it’s been preserved in plastic for the majority of your life. Right then there’s a knock at your front door, followed by a couple of rings on your buzzer in fast succession. We bring everything to a halt and I see a bead of sweat roll of your forehead and I think well of course we’re going to ignore it, right? No. You pull yourself up while muttering curse words and put on the cut-off jogging pants you took off hours ago and go see who it is. It’s a woman peddling religious literature; there’s talk of Jesus in a honeyed voice. I lay there waiting for you to come back, running my fingers around my balls with my head tilted to the side, zoning out at the specks of meals past embedded in your carpet. You come back in five minutes and exhaled loudly and flop down in the rickety rocking chair in front of me. You take a cigarette out of your pack resting on the coffee table and light up. “I’ve lost it,” you tell me, patting your crotch as gray-blue smoke wraps itself around your face. “And once I’ve lost it, it’s over. You should probably be going now anyway—I have to be somewhere at around 10.”

That was the only time I ever got that close to you physically. Things got blurry after that.

When I met you for the first time that Friday I was really fucked up. Not drunk yet (on my way, though—I’d laid to rest a bottle of Merlot while dancing around my room) but unstable, my head and body all scattery and shaky from the prescription sleep medication I’d been taking. What was happening was I’d be a groggy zombie for half the day at work from having taken the drugs the night before (type-type-type, press “Enter,” repeat ad nauseam), and then by around five at night I’d come to, and I’d have that flowy, weird, bubbling energy a person has after their Saturday night hit of ecstasy kicks in. I’d have no idea what to do with myself—I’d totter around my apartment wiping dust off furniture and bookshelves with sweeps of my hand while humming TV theme songs, all the while trying to think of something better to do with my time—watch a movie masturbate tackle one of the classics (Anna Karenina) go for a walk make a long distance call lay down and listen to the hum of car traffic clip my toe nails TRY TO WRITE SOMETHING. But that night I was thirsty and revved up, and I’ve never believed one should stay in and read a book on a Friday night, so I hopped on my ten-speed and whizzed down to the Hole. The cool lean-bodied boys and their faux-vintage ironic tee shirts had fallen out of love with the Hole by this time—it’s the year 2000, and the anti-smoking ordinance had gone into effect two years prior. Now only rambling old professional drunks and toothless speed freaks went there, if anyone went there at all. It became for me a great place to go to when I needed to feel good, strangely enough. There was always some homely deranged hunchback there to make you look like a pin-up boy, to make you look like the picture of good health, both mentally and physically. Whenever I went there I would always get these grainy images in my head of life in the 70s—mustachioed men with naturally beautiful bodies out cruising in tight Levi’s and cut-off plaid shirts, back before men got fussy and began shaving and clipping their pubes into perfect little triangles. I’ve always wanted to live my life during that time; my godfather told me men smiled more then. This night was really no different than any other. I’m flying down Eighth Street with my mind stuck in the 1978 of my imagination and the breeze feels good on my bald head and South of Market is covered in shattered glass and crumpled DJ flyers and the rags of the homeless. I lock up and pull back that thick black leather curtain and walk in, and the weird thing about walking into the Hole is that not only do all the patrons turn on their seats to give you the ole’ head-to-toe, but you’ve got all the rock and roll posters on the walls and ceiling looking at you; you’d walk in and PJ Harvey and Roky Erickson and Anthony Kiedis and his meaty penis in a tube sock would be scoping you out from their immortalized resting places. It could be nerve-wracking, all those additional sets of celebrity eyes. I lay down a five-dollar bill that a previous owner scribbled a phone number on to pay for my rum and Coke, and I can feel you next to me out of my peripheral vision. It’s strange how you can feel someone looking at you, examining you, from out of the corners of your eyes. I prop myself up against the Addams Family Values pinball machine and begin sipping on my straw. I’m staring at your shredded Vans, trying to work up the courage to allow my eyes to climb you. You’re slumped against the bar on a stool, your head resting on your right arm, your eyes straining backwards in my direction. When we connect nothing changes on your part—your eyes don’t get slitty on account of a smile, there’s no winking or anything. Your eyes looked like steady black shark eyes in that bar light.

You wobble over to me, slurping Michelob from a pitcher, wearing a wife beater that has so many rips in the chest that it looks as if you’d tossed it to piranhas before putting it on. I sit down on the bench by us and you do too, the hair on your forearm brushing against mine (erotic). You smell like you haven’t showered in ages, and almost immediately I get a boner. My back stiffens as you palm my knee. “How’s it going,” I croak out. You say nothing in return. I feel like shitting my pants. You’re content just drilling holes into me with your eyes. I don’t know what to do except smile smile smile so I begin kicking my feet out in front of me. I try to untie the barely tied shoelace on my left Converse with my right Converse. “You’re fucking handsome,” you tell me in a gravelly, serious voice. You grab my arm and grip it tight and turn me around and tell me again, “You’re fucking handsome,” and right then at that moment, I’d never felt smaller.

All the times I shook my head in superior, motherly disapproval at friends who fell for the wrong person (dummy, dummy, dummy, I’d think, while half-listening to their S.O.B. stories). I saw a lame gay indie film opening up in front of me when we’d hang out—Ewan McGregor could nail playing you; I don’t know who would play me. I’d always be thinking in terms of movies and cameras when I was with you because everything was so unreal. I’d have these demented flash forwards with you and I as some old, weathered, bitter couple—I’m decorated in your bruises and you come home from a shitty day and demand dinner and proceed to smack me silly when I tell you to go microwave your own damn Swanson’s dinner. There were always Jerry Springer Show throw-downs and Lifetime Network-goes-gay-type cautionary tales starring you and me exploding in my head in spiraling, fucked up ways.

We spent most of our time together that summer in bars. Once you had a few—or three-dozen—you’d open up, just a bit, about how miserable your thirty-four years had been so far. The backwards racist parents who booted you out of the house at 15 for being gay. No love and support from your older brother and sister, both of whom were trash as well. You hopped a train hobo-style in rural Oregon when they locked you out; all you brought with you was the wad of bills from under your mattress and a backpack full of clothes. You spent a year sleeping in front of the Warfield at night in a giant Magnavox television box. You wore the same pair of jeans day in and day out for that same year without ever once washing them, simply to test yourself to see if you could do something that disgusting. You showed me the scar on the top of your head that was the result of when you called a black woman a nigger after she called you a honky. Bam! An empty whisky bottle cracked over your noggin, and you’re left bleeding and reeling in the streets. I’d just sit there and nod my head intently at everything you told me, like I was bopping along to the beat of a song. I’d pretend to understand the world you came from, I’d pretend to be as hardened as you were, I’d throw around my sailor mouth and nihilistic attitude while we curled up with shots of bargain basement tequila and a block of X on the jukebox. But do you want to know what I was? I was a soft, undeveloped wuss from a god-fearing, meat-eating middle class Catholic family, me with my bad posture and chicken shit death wish. Ha! Anyway, your Irish emotions always got the best of you by last call. You’d loop your pinky around the handle of your beer mug and suspend it over all the crushed peanut shells on the bar floor, then slowly turn to me and bury your head in my chest. Bye-Bye tough guy. You didn’t cry—you never let me see tears—you’d just need something flat and dark and human to press your face into, something to block everything else out. I’d sit there and stroke your head, me and my blue balls.

There were uncanny resemblances. We both had the same freckly skin, we both had pale blue eyes, we were both the same height. And the facial hair—nearly identical, although my beard was always a bit unkempt. We detested a lot of the same things—high fashion and all its pretension, cell phones, gray weather, multiplexes, Meg Ryan’s face. We were born three days apart (Scorpios forever!), although I popped out screaming when you were already four and walking. People would tell us we looked like we were related, that we looked like brothers. We got that comment a couple of times from horny, ancient boozehounds who obviously found it arousing. Remember the time at Aunt Charlie’s with that queen from Spain with drawn-on eyebrows? He thought we were cousins. You told him we were brothers and former altar boys on vacation from our jobs as ranch hands in Montana. He swirled his tongue around his lips and bought us a round of grasshoppers, then 10 minutes later you rammed me up against the mirrored wall and began licking my neck for show.

The only other time I came to your house was that Tuesday in mid-August when we laid out on your roof and listened to The Residents’ Commercial Album after doing bong hits. We were crashed out in the moonlight and you were holding my hand; you were running your middle finger all over my palm and I kept getting these little surges of tingling energy and I remember seeing the San Francisco skyline in the distance and thinking how would I feel if an atom bomb fell on the city right now? The exploding mushroom cloud would be amazing, but then… You were rambling on and on about all the things you wanted to do—start a zine called Throat Culture that would only feature close-up pictures of guys with hot facial hair French kissing; begin a speed metal band with your friend whose name I can’t recall but who looks like Angela Bassett with dreadlocks; launch a vinyl-only record label called Feel-Bad Entertainment; enroll in one of the technical schools that airs commercials on weekday mornings and finally learn how to become a mechanic. Then you did another bong hit, and I remember the exhale—it came out in the form of this melancholy, defeated sigh. You never had money for any of these dreams, you were always paying off dentists on installment plans for all the work done to your rotting teeth; you were always on the IRS’ shit list. You and your endless bullshit. You worked in a video store and barely made enough to cover rent.

You never really asked much about me. You knew I came from just outside Philadelphia, a city you were completely fascinated by even though you’d never set foot in it (it’s a scary city that no one loves, that was your take). You knew I worked a soulless dead-end job at a dot.com, you knew I liked vodka and Vietnamese food and Dario Argento movies and cocaine that wasn’t laced with baby laxative. Any time you asked me something about my life it was due to formality, probably. Oh, I’ve been acting like a bastard for ages. I should let him tell me something. I bet you rarely heard what seeped out; the music was always too loud, and you were just beginning to get Tinnitus. You were always looking around the bar to try to ignite some sexual spark in another guy’s eyes. At the time things weren’t going well for me either. I was barely eating and laying in bed paralyzed at night with the lights on staring at my doorknob while listening to music tailor-made for stepping off the Golden Gate Bridge while thinking who’s to say things might not be better on the other side? I might be able to finally fall asleep. I’ve always had a hard time figuring out whether I was depressed for a reason or depressed for no reason at all. In the end it was always about you. I think I was your freebie shrink, and drinks were the couch.

The last time I saw you you looked like hell. You looked like Dennis Quaid towards the end of that movie Enemy-Mine, like you’d been living on an alien planet for months without soap or a nearby barber. You hid behind a pole to avoid me—you were pretending not to see me, hopefully ashamed of the fact that you severed our bizarre connection for no reason at all a year earlier. Or no, that’s right—I ran away from you with my bottomed-out stomach when I came to meet you that last night and found you getting fondled and pawed in some daddy’s lap. You ended it because I walked away crushed when I found you with someone else—I guess no one is allowed to walk away from you.

So you’re looking at me with your punk rock puppy dog face, the one that says I’m guilty, I know, and then what do you know—we’re chitchatting like nothing’s happened. Yeah, that movie was good. When’s it come out on video? It’s like we were just on the phone yesterday, and I can feel myself beginning to shiver. We were both lit, taking full advantage of the all-you-can-drink beer bust. You start talking close in my ear, telling me things are bad. You got fired from your job and evicted from your house and now you’re stuck out in Santa Rosa, living with some crusty, rotten slob from your homeless days in a crumbling 50s-style apartment building, working only part-time at a car wash. I let you wrap your arm around my waist and my god, your eyes. They’re bloodshot, they’re watery, they’re gone. You got yanked away from me by some pockmarked guy in a black overcoat and I lost track of you momentarily. When I moved past everyone and found you again you were being hauled out the fire exit by two skinheads built like brick shithouses, your feet flailing behind you. The alarm went off. I followed you out and watched you hurl your cup of beer (you managed to hold on to your beer—that’s my boy!) against a passing SUV and then you started screaming gibberish profanity at the top of your lungs as the driver came to a halt. I ran away. I ran to the next bar, and it was pretty empty.

I sometimes still to this day have these ridiculous candy-coated fantasies about you. We’re entwined in a ballroom, looking like million dollar bills in our immaculately tailored tuxes, dancing to Scott Walker’s greatest hits. I know we both hate getting dressed up but just go with it. I know you have that paradoxical gentlemanly side—you use ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ incessantly; you like holding doors open for frail old women. So disco lights spin around us and I’m looking into your crushing eyes and then of course you scrunch your face up into that surrendering that’s life what are you gonna do? expression, the one you used to silently explain all of your hang-ups about intimacy. It’s the look you always trotted out when a queer silence worked its way between us; it’s the look you trotted out whenever we came close to some kind of tender moment. You can’t deny this. If you’re to somehow end up reading the first two sentences in this paragraph, you’ll probably hunt me down and put your fist through my face for writing something so sweet and mushy and gay.

You work your way into my dreams a lot. I had this one where you were trapped in an abandoned industrial building and I had to cut through all these multi-colored computer wires to get to you. Seriously, I had this gigantic pair of leftie scissors to use in rescuing you. When I find you you’re a mess, you’re shaking like a leaf and the mascara you have on for some unknown reason is streaming down your cheeks. Where did this dream come from? Other times I just have these rattling, filthy sex dreams about you that feel real.

What are you doing now? It’s 3:14 in the morning. My body is still misshapen, shoulders that look like a crooked coat hanger. You never were really all that attracted to me, I know that. It’s okay. I’m currently growing my beard out long—ZZ Top-long. I got this satin eye mask that has the word REST stitched across it for my birthday this year, but it doesn’t fit my face well—it’s always slipping off the minute I roll over. Remember the time we watched all the Dirty Harry movies in chronological order? We turned my dinky living room into our own private movie palace by closing all the curtains and taping them to the windowsills to make sure no light peeked in. It was one of those days where I didn’t want to be outside, I was hung over and exhausted and didn’t want to watch you unload your swaggering ugliness on to the general public. I didn’t want to watch you start shit with strangers for no reason at all. That was the only time you came to my apartment. Maybe we’ll see each other again some day in an after life, and we’ll have more than three months time. We’ll be reincarnated as god-knows-what, and your demons will be buried. I saw a lot of my own blinding, pointless anger in you. Sometimes I still pretend the pillow next to me is you.

© 2007 Rob McLaughlin - Contributor's Bio