Souvenirs - Chapter One
In which, upon being dumped, our hero examines the jigsaw puzzle of his soul; where missing pieces are both a presence and a promise.
His toothbrush and toothpaste stood in a souvenir mug from the 2011 revival of FOLLIES in which Jan Maxwell as Phyllis Rogers Stone had delivered the ultimate rendition of COULD I LEAVE YOU — although some days he believed that honor belonged to Donna Murphy’s eviscerating yet hilarious yet heartbreaking delivery at the Sondheim 80th Birthday Concert in 2010 (it does) — but he’d seen Ms. Maxwell do it twice, once in D.C. when Linda Lavin was still playing Hattie Walker, the BROADWAY BABY role, and then again on Broadway, by which time Jayne Houdyshell had taken over as Hattie and she and Ms. Maxwell were both nominated for Tony Awards, which the badly miscast Bernadette Peters as Sally Durant Plummer was not, and the mug was a test: he didn’t want to hook up with anyone to whom the cup had any meaning, no one who knew what FOLLIES was, no one to whom the names Bernadette or Sondheim meant anything, because that would be a string attached and he had a hard and fast rule about no strings when it came to tricks.
Although, he thought, his tricks trended more toward hard and slow, at which indecorous quip he chortled to himself, before wondering if his fondness for doltish grunters who didn’t know the difference between their theres and they’res was a preference or a personality disorder, which nagging qualm he always quickly muffled because at his age, what, really, was the point of self-remonstrances and/or regrets? After all, he thought to himself, unlike much of my cohort, I’M STILL HERE, which was sung in that same 2011 revival by Elaine Paige.
He was sure Jack would have had no idea of the provenance of the mug’s logo had Jack lasted long enough to visit the bathroom in which that mug resided, which, Jack had not.
Jack had very quickly exited stage left using the “I’m sorry, I’ve started seeing someone” ploy. In the repertoire of rejections he’d experienced, “seeing someone” was one of the less gutting; he’d once been told by an extremely attractive and endowed fellow that should he see him in public at any time, don’t speak, because he had a twin brother who didn’t know he was gay, which was a poorly designed lie since there were no twins in the many family photos in the fellow’s apartment to which he’d often been summoned when the fellow was too tired to masturbate, or just needed buttressing of his certainty that he was prettier than most of the men in the world.
Then there was always the cell phone ruse; when a liaison wasn’t going well, going on too long, requiring a reciprocation one wasn’t feeling, or even in the case of finding upon arrival that 995 of the thousand words the picture painted were lies, one simply said, “Hold on my cell just vibrated” while pulling it out and then the wife had called, or work, or whatever, it mattered not, the other always knew it was bullshit anyway.
He’d been on the receiving end of those and quite a few others. It wasn’t easy being a 49 year old gay man, even for an expert such as himself, he who’d been a 49 year old gay man for going on 12 years. And mostly, after a brief period of “ouch”, he got to “oh well” without much trouble. He’d never been attractive, so it wasn’t the faded beauty, Blanche DuBois syndrome, rather, it was the “which of my many flaws was it?”
Jack had hit him differently though. When Jack answered his text with the “sorry, I’ve started seeing someone”, he’d added an else; “I’ve started seeing someone else.” That else changed everything. The usual “I’ve started seeing someone” was about them having made the choice to date rather than trick, and he didn’t want to date, so, no harm, no foul. But the, “I’ve started seeing someone else” from Jack carried the freight of Jack having thought there might be something between them of an ongoing nature.
He’d thought so, too. Although he’d not admitted it to himself until the possibility of it had been dashed by the someone else excuse.
Jack had pursued him with some vigor, having first approached him on Grindr, then quickly graduating to Snapchat, where the courting went on for weeks. When Jack said, “We can meet up tomorrow night” and his schedule was free as well, he at first lied and said he was busy. Jack was too beautiful. Jack was too all the things he’d lusted after forever and almost never touched except in his fantasies. He suspected he would not be any of the qualities Jack had assigned him from just exchanging pictures and messaging. He was good at messaging. Very good. His messaging was the equivalent of a ten inch dick and eight-pack abs.
In person, he was not so much ten inch or eight-pack; the highest number he could truthfully claim for himself was probably 5, maybe on a very good day he could be a 5.5, but that was about it.
But Jack had asked and asked again all through the week until he’d told a second lie to undo the first, saying he’d canceled the plans so he could meet up with Jack. In his world, that meant they were as good as going steady.
While he looked ten years older in person, Jack turned out to look ten years younger. Taking Jack’s clothes off felt to him like Christmas morning before he found out Santa was a lie; every new thing he opened was better than the last. It was the kind of sex he could never describe to anyone because it was specific to just he and Jack, and talking about it would be like showing someone a dick pic, or giving them his ATM card and password; the account was his, he didn’t want it spent by anyone else.
And then, after, they’d lain together, talked. Stories. Showered together. Until it was time to go.
Later, he realized, he had told Jack his name. Jack had asked. And he’d not lied. And that had been the first time in a very long time anyone had asked. Too, Jack was the first for literal decades with whom he’d stayed after the act. He came away from Jack with things he didn’t usually keep.
He wasn’t a person who wanted to take anything away from the liaisons. He didn’t expect anything to come from his hookups. Blow and go was a popular request on the apps, and it was his thing, no strings, kind of like dine and dash; satisfy your appetite and get away without paying.
And he’d gotten good at it. Though the journey had been a long one.
He’d ended up back in his home town after having tried to escape it again and again — looking for his life, the one he was meant to have, in New Haven, San Francisco, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Philadelphia — but he’d always come back to the town of his birth, until, somewhere in his mid-thirties, he’d faced the fact he was less the miracle of talent, wit, and intellect his aunt had tried to convince him he was, and more the lucky to live in a small town with a limited talent pool, few people who gave a damn about wit and so were starved for even a hint of it, and people who were afraid to call him out on his routine as cultivated highbrow culturalist poseur.
He was, maybe, he finally faced, just a titch (as the folks said in the hometown in which he’d spent so many years trying to convince himself he didn’t belong) short of achieving average. He wasn’t going to be a Broadway star; nor published — let alone bestselling — author; nor the love of anyone’s life. He wasn’t going to be wealthy nor be the kind of community icon whose funeral was attended by all the many people whose lives he’d influenced.
And so there he found himself, there he was, not going anywhere in particular. And life was dull. And often sad. He’d failed in more ways than he’d succeeded, and he’d lost far more than he had won. He was, mostly, waiting to die.
And then an acquaintance started sharing rapturously libidinous stories about hook-ups with Craigslist strangers. It turned out there was a microcosmic shadowland of erotic adventurers stealthily getting off in hugger-mugger explosions of zipless fucks (Thank you, Erica Jong).
At first he rejected the idea for himself. He thought it was great. For others. But not for him. Who was going to say yes to him? And how would he ask.
Then again, he had, since having read John Rechy’s NUMBERS when he was a chronically hormonal teen, dreamt of the world of cruising and tricks and johns. He’d learned of bathhouses from articles about Better Midler and INTERVIEW magazine. He’d gotten his hands on gay porn mags and vhs tapes, too. All portals to the possibility that beyond being fag-sissy-fruit and the endless other labels he’d worn there in that small town, beyond being like Paul Lynde and Charles Nelson Reilly, beyond being a punchline and punching bag, beyond the back of some closeted-self-hating high school soccer player’s van and the inevitable “I was drunk you sucked my cock I didn’t want you to” bullshit and threats of what would happen to him if he ever told, there was a way to have sex with men that was celebratory and liberated from the hangups and strictures straight sex seemed to require.
A world he’d barely visited in his early decades. Decades when he’d been preoccupied with believing in happily ever after, failing at that, failing at find a place where he felt he belonged.
Now, past 50, someone thought he ought to jump into that game? After a life during which his tricking track record had been spotty to abysmal? From a past marked by what he thought was a broken heart thanks to a straight man who wanted to love him but couldn’t? To yearnings for all the wrong people, yearnings never spoken out loud. With that sort of history?
And he thought, fuck it, so many years missed. Why not. There was at first, a period of a few months of looking at Craigslist but never daring to answer the ads. And then there were his early attempts at answering in a way he thought he’d like to be answered; a brief life history and he was new to this and lots of blah de blah blah that was neither requested nor attractive. Soon enough he got it; dick size, age, were there pics, what were you into, discreet, clean, now.
There were some awkward adventures early on, before he learned to recognize those avoiders of specifics, the players reticent with age weight height data, cagey responses with sort of vague, wouldn’t hold up in a court of law kind of answers. And he was too polite to say upon arrival and discovering the person was not the beauty he’d been led to believe, “Oh, thanks but I’ve started seeing someone in the thirty minutes since we talked and the five miles I drove here to meet you.”
And then there was his first hotel hook-up.