You Can Say You Knew Me When (17 page)

I was deeply sympathetic with the writer of these letters—his romantic longing, his solo drinking, his empty pockets—but my sympathy confused me. Here was young Teddy, angry with God for making his friend gay, up against the memory of my father as I knew him, angry with me for thrusting my gayness in his face. Telling Don,
You’re all right by me.
Telling me,
Keep your private life private.
Why had his mind, slowly opening up to new ideas under the influence of all that San Francisco had to offer, clamped shut again, so that by the time I came queerly along he could only avert his eyes, plug his ears and scold?

I found myself tumbling into my own past, the year of my life, 1988 to ’89, when, fresh out of college, I lived through similarly wide-eyed days in New York City. I fell in with a group of people I’d met while busing tables at a restaurant near NYU. Like Chick and Mary, these folks claimed to already have seen the best of it, making me jealous with stories of the early eighties, before the East Village art scene had been co-opted by money, when St. Mark’s Place was dotted with
FOR RENT
signs, Nan Goldin was exhibiting her frankly sexual slide show in church basements, and you might, at any time, stumble across a public surface tagged by the hand of Basquiat or Haring. I’d sat through a Christmas dinner much like the one Teddy described, where I was presented with gifts both practical and decadent by older friends all too happy to mold the mind of the new kid. Where were they all now? At least two of the gay guys and one of the women I knew had died of AIDS, another woman had last been seen checking into rehab and one guy I’d had a weekend affair with had reportedly moved to Berlin, where he was raising children with his lesbian best friend. The only person I still knew from that first year in New York was Colleen, the other impressionable newcomer to the crowd.

When I lived in New York I used to take the bus to Greenlawn—piercings in both my ears, hair slashed asymmetrically, doing my best to swagger in a black leather jacket—and when I got there, I’d inevitably argue with my father, sometimes because, jobless, I would ask him for money, sometimes because I reported holding jobs he didn’t approve of, like a brief stint as a receptionist at a gay and lesbian legal aid group. There was never any glint of recognition in the stories I’d tell him of my East Village antics, no “I know what you’re going through, son, because I’ve been there myself.” Why hadn’t he and I ever reached an
understanding
of our own? Yeah, Dad, I feel it too:
the big bafflement of it all.

T
hat night, and for several nights after, Woody and I spent hours picking over these letters, filling in the gaps of Teddy and Ray’s affair as we imagined it. He was as excited as I was, fashioning us as Special Agent James Garner (“Rockford” once again) and Master Sleuth Woodrow Nelson, crouched together over a newfound pile of clues. I would read something aloud and pause to ask a question: “I wonder what Ray said to him after he apologized for shoving her?”

“Write it down, and we can ask her about it,” Woody would instruct, and I would, studiously logging my question in the
QUEST FOR FATHER
file.

My sleuthing partner would call me up in the middle of the day to report some finding of his own, like the fact that the building that once housed Don’s grill was now a café called Java Beach. Our conversations glistened with our favorite Teddy-speak. Me: “Why, you’ve got possibly the largest chest muscles outside of Jack LaLanne!” Woody: “Stop showering me with your womanly fussing and flirtation.” We spent consecutive nights cross-legged on my bed, in boxers and T-shirts, sharing foil-wrapped burritos or pad Thai from take-out containers, throwing around hepcat lingo—
Frisco
this,
Frisco
that. Miraculously, we were back in tandem, as if once again in the light-headed bubble of new love, that time when whatever one of you most cares about is top of the other’s list, too.

The first time I saw Woody I thought he was straight. I was at the Stud with Colleen for Trannyshack, the best night for fun in San Francisco, with drag artists of every gender pulling out all the stops on a dollar-bin budget. The theme that night had been “The Edge of Aquarius,” and the show had ended with the entire lineup of performers drinking “poisoned” Kool-Aid and dying on stage while a Jim Jones look-alike lip-synched to a David Bowie song—the kind of twisted genius that made me proud to be a San Franciscan.

After the performance, Colleen dragged me to the dance floor for “Ray of Light,” the first decent Madonna song in years, and I soon noticed a head of blonde curly hair bouncing erratically, high above the crowd. This tall guy was dancing with a girl, or rather, was shaking his shoulders and arms and especially his head—though not his feet, which were glued in place—in the vicinity of a female of the species. I soaked up his gawky ease with his dancing partner, his frequent smiles as she shouted above the music to him, all the lovely ways his skin revealed itself to my spying eyes, in particular the palm-size patch of gold fur on his belly as he stretched his arms high. They looked like one of the many hip straight couples who show up every week at Trannyshack, the girl just wanting to have some trashy fun in a place where she wouldn’t get pawed on the way to the ladies’ room, the guy being a good sport despite the fact that he might get pawed on the way to the men’s. But then it occurred to me that someone might conceivably make a similar misjudgment about Colleen and me—I’m not much of a dancer myself—so I asked Colleen to appraise the situation. Together we spun a new story: This guy wasn’t sure where he fell on the Kinsey Scale of human sexuality, and though he was curious enough to venture out to a gay club, he was still so inexperienced and/or freaked by his attraction to men that he’d brought along the protective beard of a female companion. We dubbed him “Triple B”: Bi-curious Blonde Boy.

Thereafter I spotted Triple B everywhere, sightings that were dutifully reported back to Colleen, and I quickly installed him high on my List of Favorites
.
They are always out there, the Favorites, desirable guys floating along the periphery of your world. Though you never actually meet them, your paths continue to cross—on a crowded sidewalk or a city bus, in theater lobbies or at your favorite record store scouring the CD bins. Each passing glimpse inflates the mystique. (Is this just an urban phenomenon? I imagine in small towns you’d soon discover this person was the cousin of your co-worker’s husband.) To actually meet and be introduced to a Favorite wasn’t the goal. Only the rarest fantasy survived its expectations.

Flash-forward a year and a couple of months, to a sunny Sunday in Dolores Park. In a place where people go to get away from work, I was halfheartedly attempting to get some done, shuffling through the pages of a transcript I was editing, gnawing on the cap of a red pen. I was also, no doubt, peering above my papers at the male bodies laid out on display—the boys in Speedos and designer underwear, their shaved pecs and legs gleaming, as Ian once described it, like sealskin. This part of the park, unofficially known as Dolores Beach, crested high above a playground surrounded by palm trees and picnic tables. Down below, families gathered around coolers, dogs chased chew toys and
cholos
clustered tightly together, staring outward as a unit. The view up here took in all of downtown, and on clear days you could see far across the Bay, past Oakland to the peak of Mount Diablo. I lived two blocks from the park, so I often wound up there, though rarely with my shirt off. I had a love-hate reaction to the scene. Who were they, these seals, and how was it they had the time to sculpt all that muscle to classical perfection? They hid their eyes behind dark glasses and under the brims of baseball caps, asking to be looked at, giving nothing back.

That Sunday, I was hit by the smell of dog before I noticed a shiny, black, floppy-eared canine traipsing across my towel, sniffing its way toward my backpack, using my paperwork as a paw path, leaving muddy prints and puncture holes in the transcript. I’m not much of a dog person. I don’t like the wet-fur smell or the drool or, least of all, the fecal matter that gets left behind in park grass where humans are meant to stretch out on towels. Now this dog had sent me bumbling between the islands of muscle in order to collect my mangled, scattered papers. When I looked up, the pup was being collared by a very tall guy: Triple B.

He was wearing a faded black T-shirt that hung casually off his broomstick shoulders and blue pants that looked like they’d once been part of a deliveryman’s uniform. He was chastising the dog and apologizing to me at the same time. My speculation went into overdrive:
He’s at Dolores Beach—he’s gay…He’s fully clothed and walking a dog—he’s straight…He’s controlling the dog with a strong hand—he’s no sissy…He’s looking me in the eyes, telling me he’s soooooo sorry—he’s gay.
Alongside this ran another current, an attempt to call up a single, perfect sentence, the one pithy line that would keep Triple B from slipping away—

I said, “I thought you’d never get here.”

He made no response
(he’s not responding—he’s straight)
as he leashed up his charge, delivering it the kind of reprimand meant for the benefit of the humans around him, and then he was moving away.

I called out, “Hey!”

“Yes?”

He locked eyes with me, and based on the spark of interest I thought I saw there, I summoned the nerve to ask, “Got a name?”

“Woody.”

I laughed, thinking he’d given me the dog’s name. “No, your name.”

“Woody,” he repeated, and then flashed me one of those big grins that I’d first seen from across the dance floor. He pointed to my papers. “Sorry about—”

“No biggie.”

“It’s not even my dog,” he said. “I’m just trying to keep him out of trouble while his mommy’s reading on her blankie.” He nuzzled its neck, his long fingers kneading its coat. “Aren’t you a bad dog?”

“I suppose I am,” I said.

Woody smiled again, blinked flirtatiously and replied, “I’m not surprised.”

I watched him walk away, toward the far end of the slope, where he parked himself down on a blanket with the woman I’d seen him with at the Stud. They turned together to look toward me. I imagined calling Colleen, the scolding she’d give me for letting Triple B slip through my hands, so when I packed up my papers a short while later, I walked out of my way in order to pass by his blanket.

“Woody?”

“Oh. Hello again.”

“You know, you never asked for
my
name.”

His mouth opened in surprise, but no words came forth.

The girl spoke up at his side, shielding her brow with her hand. “Now why do you think that is?” I couldn’t tell if she was being seriously bitchy—as she would have the right to be, were she his girlfriend—or if she was just toying with me, forcing me to work for my pickup.

“I don’t know,” I said to her, playing along. “Maybe he’s not interested.”

“You never know ’til you try.”

So she wasn’t his girlfriend. “I guess that’s what I’m doing. Trying.”

Woody spoke up, at last. “I’m sorry. It’s just that I’m kinda seeing someone.”

“Is it
kinda
enough to keep you from taking my number?”

“It’s just that—”

The girl let out an exasperated sigh. “Woody, just take his number.” She stretched forward to hand me a pad and pen.

Below my number I wrote:
Jamie. Dolores Park. Bad dog
. I handed the message back to her. “I can leave a résumé too, if you want.”

She tore the page from her pad and passed it to Woody. “Here. Now say, ‘Nice to meet you, Jamie.’”

He stuck out his hand. “Nice to meet you, Jamie.”

I held his hand, and his stare, for as long as I could bear. We were both blushing. As I backed away, I mouthed, “Call me.” I turned around and saw the two of them doubled over in a fit of giggles.

“He sleeps with men, but he’s shy,” Colleen proclaimed the next Friday at Café Frida. “That’s why his friend stepped in. He’s the kind of guy who complains about never meeting anyone, and here he was screwing up a perfect opportunity.”

Brady, when I told him, was more forceful. “You should be at that park all the time, dude. If he was there once, he’ll be there again, right? You’ve got to make it happen.” Brady had recently told me about his new girlfriend, Annie, a visual artist whom he’d pursued with a diligence that negated any outcome other than her saying yes to a date. He’d
made it happen.
I hadn’t met Annie yet—Brady had been keeping her away from his friends, sure that the exposure would jinx it—but right around this time he was turning thirty and throwing himself a party, which would also be their public debut as a couple. The party would be held at the warehouse he shared with three other guys near the freeway, a place crammed full of electronic equipment, computers, unidentifiable large metal objects, panels of sheet metal and recycled furniture. Colleen and I showed up early to help Brady decorate. His roommates were handling the audiovisual wiring of the party, but he was counting on us for decorative input
.
This was meant to impress Annie, who’d reportedly commented that Brady’s loft looked like the inner chamber of a video game and smelled like a men’s room.

We transformed a curtained-off corner into a comfy, candlelit chill space, then moved up to the roof to add some touches there, too. We hauled strings of Christmas lights up a harrowing steel ladder attached to the outside of the building, and we outlined the edge of the roof to keep carefree partiers from tumbling to the concrete below. In the midst of this work I heard Brady call my name.

“This is Annie,” he was saying as I turned around, and my eyes landed on the woman from the blanket in Dolores Park. Not two feet behind her stood Triple B himself.

A gasp of intrigue ricocheted between all of us, except Brady, who had no idea what was going on. Lit from below by Christmas light, Woody’s surprised expression bore a schoolboy’s guilt; having failed to use my number, he’d have some explaining to do. Annie finally broke the ice, extending her hand to me, beaming at this collision of worlds. “So it looks like you didn’t get away after all,” she said.

Looking back, I realize what an astonishing moment it was. There I stood with two of my best friends, one of whom was newly dating this woman who was best friends with the guy I’d soon wind up seeing. (San Francisco is, in the end, just a small town.) When Brady was finally brought up to speed on the tangled web of relationships, he just shook his head and marveled, “Serious synchronicity.” Colleen and Annie hit it off right away, conferring for a solid hour, like matchmaking aunties, about whether or not Woody and I would
make a love connection.

Meanwhile, we had parked ourselves on the roof among the twisted vines of pinpoint lights, refilling our glasses from the makeshift bar we’d constructed to save ourselves trips up and down the precarious ladder. Music thumped up through our feet, but we stayed away from the dance floor. “I’m not much of a dancer,” he told me, and it took all my restraint not to say, “I know.” I got an earful about Mark, the
someone
Woody had been seeing, a
great guy
who nonetheless suffered from a long list of
intimacy issues,
and how things between them were over, though not officially. “It’s a tricky situation,” he kept saying. But as is usually the case, other people’s breakups never seem particularly complicated from the outside. I figured that I’d get to sleep with Woody that night, or soon after, and then leave him alone to work out his relationship woes. But when I tried to propose this plan of action—we were huddled together under a blanket, insulating ourselves from a sudden onslaught of night fog and engaging in an adorable, tentative round of footsie—he told me that to sleep with anyone now, before giving Mark the heave-ho, would only create
bad karma
. Karma wasn’t something that particularly swayed me, but I could tell that he would stick to his principles, so in the end I planted a kiss on him and said, “Call me when the dust settles.” Then I went off to share a birthday joint with Brady.

Disentangling from Mark took Woody another month—at least, it was that long before he called me with an invitation to dinner. At a romantically lit restaurant we shared laughter and easy conversation and a bit of anticipatory knee knocking under the table, but again this dovetailed into a list of reasons why he wasn’t yet ready to get involved with me. He delivered a speech, clearly prepared ahead of time, about how he was hurt because Mark had cheated on him, and needed to take things slowly, etc., etc., etc., at which point I blurted out, “Look, I’ve been clocking you for a year, I don’t know how much more slowly I can go.” I told him how I’d first noticed him at Trannyshack. I listed the various locations where I’d spotted him in the months since. I told him he was Favorite Number One. He kept saying, “That’s amazing,” a dazed cast to his eyes.