You Can Say You Knew Me When (15 page)

“
I’m sorry officer, he told me he was eighteen.”

“See how he kind of walks on his toes? God that gets me hard.” The boy was nervously checking us out behind our rock-and-driftwood wall. When Ian called out to him, he sped away without another glance. Ian was newly inspired. “Jamie, you should be on newsgroups, in chatrooms. That’s where the kids today are creating interesting space. Learning from the past is overrated.”

“I’m just trying to learn from my own past.” I squashed what was left of my cigarette in the sand. “I think I miss my ideals.”

“Ideals? Jesus. You know there are plenty of people living according to their ideals. In Berkeley. In Santa Cruz. In Eugene, Oregon.” He paused for effect. “They dress in hempwear and they’re self-righteous about recycling and they talk in paranoid generalizations—and you don’t even like them, Jamie! If Jack Kerouac were alive today you’d think he was an asshole.”

“Okay, you win!” I threw up my hands and cheered, “Fuck Kerouac!”

Ian went walking in one direction, hoping to catch up with the skinny jailbait boy, and I went in the other. My stoned brain fixated on the ocean, waves breaking foamy white upon jutting rocks. The rumbling majesty of the Pacific, the colorful dots of wildflowers on the cliffs above, the craggy saddles running down from the ridge to the waves. I got caught up in the wonderment of living in a city that, for all my complaints, still contained this breathtaking vista within its borders. Then I snapped back to that other vista: the naked and the half naked, all stares and no smiles. Men on the prowl take their burning desire so seriously.

In my bare feet I hiked until the high tide, meeting the cliff side, blocked my passage. I climbed up to a ledge, mostly shielded from view on either side, and shut my eyes, listening to the crashing water and reveling in the salty mist settling on my skin. When I opened them again, a guy in red surf trunks was climbing up the rocks to take his place on the ledge.

He looked at me and then looked away. I did the same: toward him and away. My cock started to get hard, knowing what he was there for, knowing I was being desired. He had broad shoulders and a soft belly—the same early-thirties body as mine, but tanner and hairier. He rubbed his crotch, then moved his hand away to reveal the outline of his dickhead straining against the damp red cloth.

I stood paralyzed, heartbeat quickening, unsure of what to do. I told myself,
Think of Woody,
and flashed back to sucking him off the night before, which had the wrong effect: it amplified the sex-buzz in the air. Red Shorts moved closer, nodded confidently, kept his eyes locked on mine. Oh, how I wanted to pull out my cock, to have this guy show me his, to jack off together in the sun and the spray, let it feel natural. That’s what this beach was for, that’s why guys went wandering into the cracks and crevices, as I’d done.

Red Shorts is waiting. It’s my move. I haven’t stepped closer, but I haven’t turned away. A vague image of a confession—of me confessing to Woody—forms and dissolves, replaced by an image of me lying to Woody, telling him about my day and leaving out the part about this guy on the rocks, furthering a pattern of deceit that I’d propagated so many times before, with Nathan, Stu, David, others who didn’t last long, men I’d always put second to myself. I’m losing my hard-on. There’s my salvation: mind over matter. I’ve been tricked into not doing this by my own better half. I press my lips together, a message of regret for my would-be fuckbuddy, and then I lower my head and walk past him without further eye contact. It’s hell not to look back; I want to see him still looking at me, want to be sure I
could have
, even though I didn’t. I had probably seemed like a sure bet to him. Now I am just another perplexing homo, transmitting mixed signals. I make a secret wish that he’ll find someone else to get him off with a screaming blast, someone without a boyfriend, without
guilt issues
—and I shuffle back to my little fortress, slowly feeling relief wash over me, glad to have outsmarted my own messy desires.

Actually, that’s not what happened.

I didn’t lose my hard-on, and I didn’t walk away. I moved closer to Red Shorts and grabbed a fistful of his package and nodded. I muttered, “Yeah,” and he repeated “Yeah,” both of us in pornspeak, and we got into it right there on the rocks, bathing suits tugged down, cocks exposed, faces together, tongues finding each other. The kissing was magnetic, not something you could count on with a stranger. Our breathing grew short and heavy; our hands crawled all over and then we spit into our palms and grabbed each other down below. The intensity built, fast and easy, and then we were coming, one after the other, shooting onto the rocks, watching it blend into the sea spray.
That’s
what happened. It didn’t take long.

I wish I could say I listened to my better judgment, that after the torment I’d been putting myself through I’d learned a lesson. But I didn’t. Maybe it was the pot. Maybe it was all the sex talk with Ian, and Ian’s vibe in general, his do-what-you-want attitude. Maybe it was the force of history, my history, all the times over the years I didn’t resist, didn’t walk away, didn’t even consider it. What I’m saying is, maybe I didn’t know how to be monogamous, not in the long term. A yearning inside of me, a need to escape, a kind of wanderlust that didn’t require a cross-country highway. Sizzling inside my skull like a fuse.

I
finally found the courage to contact my list of Dean Fosters. For weeks I’d stared at the names, pinned to a corkboard above my desk, putting off the task, fearful that sending my letters would yield nothing more than silence, a deafening nonresponse. What if, having shuffled through the box, talked to Anton, tracked down Ray, what if after all this contemplation, what if there was nothing more? In the end, sending the letters was less a matter of courage than of disgust: I looked at the list one morning and saw a fine film of dust gathered along the black pushpin holding it to the wall, and in that dust I saw time passing, and in that passage the general state of neglect into which my life itself seemed to be settling.

I fired off e-mails or printed my request on paper, whichever was quickest; I sent the formal version of my original letter, not the casual or obnoxious ones. Several replies came back right away:
You’ve got the wrong guy. Not me, but good luck. Sorry to read of your father’s death.

One man I sent a letter to in North Hollywood actually phoned, leaving a cantankerous voice mail: “I never authorized the Internet to give out my information! I will sue you for invasion of privacy! I suggest you take this very seriously!” A dog was barking ferociously in the background, as if at that very moment the caller was provoking it with a stick, the better to stir fear in me. The paranoia evident in his response was so absurd I transcribed the entire message word for word, bark for bark, and stowed it in a file I had created, growing thicker all the time. I typed a label for the file:
QUEST FOR FATHER
.

Mostly, I lost track of time. My datebook from those days is mostly empty. I even blew off my volunteer shift for the radio station’s pledge drive. Listeners hate pledge drives, though for us behind the scenes, it’s like summer camp, with everyone pitching in for the cause. But I couldn’t face my old co-workers asking me what I had done lately, what I was working on.

Since my beach tryst, I’d been dissolving. I wanted to understand what I had done, and how I’d let myself do it again, but found no answer that didn’t lead back to some essential weakness in my character.
Get motivated!
I wrote in my journal one Tuesday in February, when, most likely, I had stayed on the couch all day flipping channels. Afternoons disappeared in a haze of pot smoke and television, where Jerry and Ricki and Sally Jesse grilled ordinary citizens about their monstrous defects. Talk shows, once topical and serious, had become screaming matches, and I watched them religiously, feeling a spiritual kinship with anyone booed by a studio audience.

Out of this pit erupted an argument. Late on a Thursday night, waiting for Woody’s phone call. I had no food in the fridge, hadn’t actually prepared to cook, but I felt put on hold, unable to proceed until I’d heard from him about dinner. He finally called from a noisy South of Market club, shouting above the din, “Come hang out, I think you’ll be into this.” I protested; he insisted; I got on my bike.

The place turned out to be a so-called lounge with the baffling name N Is a Number. A burly guy in a black jacket and a knit cap pulled below his eyebrows demanded eight dollars from me at the door. I found Woody inside under a whir of kaleidoscopic lighting, nestled deep in a plush purple booth, wearing a tight, shiny shirt I’d never seen on him before. He was surrounded by people I didn’t know, all of them shouting to be heard. It took him a moment to notice me, but finally he waved and pushed his way out of the booth to plant a kiss on my lips.

“You didn’t say there’d be a cover,” I said.

“Shit—there wasn’t one before ten. I’ll buy you a drink. They’re very potent.”

“What kind of bar charges eight bucks to get in?”

“It’s for the DJ. He’s good. A total performer.” He made a motion with his hands,
scratching
, and a glint of silver flashed between his fingers. His phone.

“It sounds like someone hiccuping on speed.”

“Could be, in this place.”

“What? Speed?”

“Roger has some. He’s looking for someone to do it with.”

“Who’s Roger? Have you been—?”

“No, no, of course not. Roger’s the new gay at work.” He nodded to the guy he’d been sitting beside: thick lips suckling a martini glass, a protrusion of cheekbones beneath a glossy broom of dark bangs. “I told you about him, remember? He’s only been at Digitent a few weeks and he’s already
reading
everyone within an inch of their life. He’s a little heartbreaker.”

He stared toward Roger with obvious admiration, which alarmed me. Woody never expressed his attraction for anyone but me. “He looks like a whiny British pop star,” I growled.

He cocked his head. “Okay, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” Pause. “You didn’t call.”

“Sorry.” Pause. “You didn’t call me either.”

“I was going to make us dinner. I left you messages.”

“You did?” With one swift motion he raised his palm, flipped open his phone and squinted at the display, like a mechanic checking under the hood of a toy car.

“On your work phone,” I said.

“Oh, I never check that anymore. It gets so backed up. You should have called the mobile unit.”

“I’m not encouraging the mobile unit.”

“It’s the best way to get in touch with me right now.”

“It’s obnoxious. It’s a social ill.”

“I think they used to say that about the telegraph. Like, a hundred years ago.”

Even in this pulsating room, the tension between us roared like an engine. I looked away from his eyes, down to his snugly draped torso.

“Where’d you get that shirt?” I asked. “You look sexy.”

“Some underwear store in the Castro.” He smiled, disarmed by the compliment. “Look, I’m sorry. I should have called. But we can have fun, right?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“So let’s get you a drink. “

“Okay, but you’re buying.”

As promised, the drinks were strong, the DJ was talented and the crowd was into it. But I hardly had fun. Squeezed into the booth next to Woody, I listened to him and Roger and their acolytes magnify the absurdities of their workplace. The girl to my left, a glittery, dewdroppy wisp in a child’s ski jacket, was already wasted, and she kept bobbling my drink with the back of her hand, which Roger, similarly inebriated, found hilarious. The two of them got up to do a bump in the bathroom, then returned to pull Woody onto the dance floor. As he started to rise, I announced I was leaving. Woody chased me outside, and we were instantly hurling our frustration back and forth—one of those fights that ends with someone shouting “Be that way! Fine!” when nothing’s fine at all. I went home without waiting for him.

The fight shook me out of my comfy-couch numbness into an angrier state. Sure, I’d cheated on him—twice—but wasn’t he working long hours all the time? Wasn’t I always at the mercy of his schedule? Wasn’t his job the only thing he could talk about anymore? And since when did he trade in his thrift-store flannels for formfitting clubwear and start hanging out with twenty-five-year-old tweakers?

Woody called in the morning from the sidewalk outside his office. “I don’t want to hold onto bad emotions,” he said, hollering to be heard above the whooshing commuter traffic on Bryant Street. I imagined the Digitent kids striding past him on their way into the building—them eavesdropping, him exposed—and I felt protectiveness well up. I invited him over for dinner.

I dragged Colleen out of Café Frida that day and had her take me grocery shopping. Off we went to Whole Foods in her late-seventies Plymouth, a splashy boat of a car that she looked perfect driving. Shopping for food usually elevates my spirits, but as I loaded up on organic greens, free-range chicken, Yukon Gold potatoes and fancy cheese, my glum mood alerted Colleen that something was wrong.

“I just need to get some work,” I told her, “so I can justify spending all this money on groceries.”

“I heard you didn’t show up for your pledge-drive shift,” she said.

This stopped me in my tracks, mid-aisle. “Brady told you?”

“He said it would have been a good chance to network, get yourself back out there.” A gentle but unmistakable reprimand.

“Brady hasn’t made any effort to help me lately,” I complained. “Now he knows what’s best?”

“He said he invited you to dinner and you never responded.”

Oh, yeah, that.

I was running out of defensive postures. When she probed a bit more, I crumbled. “Colleen,” I told her. “I’ve been fucking up.” Standing in front of the meat counter, across a shopping cart full of pricey, fancy food meant to impress my boyfriend, I confessed about Rick and Red Shorts. In a torrent of detail.

Colleen did what friends are supposed to do in situations like this, she loyally made excuses for me: “You’re under a lot of stress. Your father just died. You haven’t been able to find work.” When I offered a “Yeah, but,” she trotted out the catch-all, the umbrella under which every other rationalization takes shelter: “Don’t be so hard on yourself.” (Ian had offered his own metaphor: “There’s no use crying over spilled seed.”)

“Just don’t do it again,” were Colleen’s final words, delivered with a theatrical slap on my wrist that couldn’t hide the disapproval in her eyes.

I prepped for dinner with the newly sharpened knives. The afternoon flew by as vegetable peels and plastic wrap and chicken fat took over my counter and the oven steamed up my windows. This meal had to be as perfect as the last one I cooked for Woody—it had to be
more perfect
. Poached pears and toasted walnuts for the salad! Fresh-cut flowers for the table! A cheese course! I moved in a frenzy, once again the Red Tornado. And then, at a critical juncture—the potato casserole needed to come out, the chicken needed to go in, the salad was behind schedule—my heedless pace split open: I slipped with the chef’s knife while slicing an onion. I watched the blade’s sleek silver edge—
Ow—
slide slow and deep—
Holy shit
—into the pad of my—
Fucking hell—
thumb. I watched the skin bubble crimson.

The blood or the food or the stove or the pain—which to deal with first? I roared self-accusations—
Goddamn klutz, why can’t you ever learn?—
that morphed into the voice of Ray Gladwell disparaging women who control their loved ones with food. I wrapped a dish towel around my finger and turned off everything, and after I got the wound dressed, wondering if I might need stitches, wondering if there’d be nerve damage, I went out to the sidewalk and stood smoking in front of my building. Across the street a construction crew poured concrete for a new foundation. Far down the block I could see the familiar silhouette of Anton, seated in front of his easel, his arm moving languidly. Though I knew I was too far away to be heard, I called out, waving my bloody bandage. “Excellent work, Anton! Sharper than ever!”

Woody finished cooking for me, salvaging most of the meal while I sat at the table high on wine and painkillers (he’d brought the remnants of a bottle of Vicodin from his medicine cabinet). He had on a wide-collared, button-up shirt that I’d once talked him into buying at a vintage store, a shirt he rarely wore because he’d decided its slim cut and vertical stripes made him look
freakishly tall.
(No matter how dashingly he dressed, how handsome I told him he was, he always saw himself as a beanpole, the guy they called Scarecrow in middle school.) As he worked at the counter, he said, “I think we need a relationship session. We haven’t been looking at our process lately, and it’s starting to show.”

“We had one fight,” I said. I didn’t want a relationship session, whatever that was. I wanted to put my cheating behind me, not work it through.

“We’re not relating,” he said. “Don’t you feel it? I’m not saying it’s all you; it’s me, too. There’s something going on under the surface.”

“Right now, it’s the Vicodin.”

“That’s funny, Jamie.”

I waved my bloodied, bandaged thumb in surrender. “Let’s go to a hot spring in the country. We can loll about with the naked middle-aged hippies, away from work, away from the city.”
Away from faggot temptation.

“A long weekend will be hard to swing,” he said. “Everyone’s super tense at work since the fourth-quarter reports. We are totally hemorrhaging money.”

“Everything gets planned around your job.”

He shook his head, frustrated. “I’m just saying a weekend is more than I can do. But we can still make time to work on our stuff.”

He carried the salad to the table. I grabbed him by the wrist, pulled him down to my lap, turned his face to mine and kissed him. I concentrated all my effort into my lips, and finally he melted.

“The food’s ready,” he said.

“Fuck it,” I responded. “Actually, fuck me.”

I maneuvered him to my bed, and that’s just what we did: He fucked me, tentatively at first, tenderly, and then, at my urging, harder, with as much force as he could muster. I took it like punishment I knew I had coming, and afterwards I think we both felt better.

But I wasn’t cured. Yielding to desire had given it the upper hand, and everywhere I went it flaunted its authority.
I want you,
I’d think, the words a growl caught in my throat, as some oblivious guy went about his life in my general vicinity. In one afternoon alone: an hour spent trying to catch a gaze across a row of café tables, imagining this hunk’s big hands gripping the sides of my head as I serviced his equally large need; then a stroll along several out-of-the-way blocks, following a boy who’d been in front of me at the post office, watching the sway of his ass inside cargo pants; then an extended chat about the Giants’ spring training, all bullshit on my part, with a delivery guy wheeling a dolly into my corner market—beer belly, furry forearms, wedding ring—all the while trying to seduce him telepathically:
Hey man, letting a guy suck your dick doesn’t make you gay.