Michael Tolliver Lives

  “You’re kidding?”

  “Yes, I am,” I said.

  Jake clapped Ben on the shoulder, brother to brother. “Don’t let him fuck with you. I don’t know who the hell she is, either.”

  “What is happening to queers?” I said.

  Jake chortled and opened the gate for us. “I’ll see you in the morning, boss. You guys take care.” He turned to Ben. “You’re the one doing the driving, aren’t you?”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Ben.

  “Good.”

  They exchanged a knowing look that, more than anything, made me feel loved.

  6

  A Guy Without Trying

  The night I met Jake at the Lone Star the place was almost empty. He was sitting alone at the bar, this sturdy little Shetland-pony-of-a-guy with a Corona in his fist. Every time he took a swig from the bottle, he’d set it down and regard it intently, as if about to say something terribly important to the lime wedge at the bottom. It was quite a brave show of independence, so I was fairly certain he was looking for company.

  I pulled out the stool next him. “You mind?” I would not have asked that in a crowded bar, but it seemed polite under the circumstances.

  “Nah, buddy, it’s cool.”

  So I sat down and ordered a beer. Jake’s little swig-and-stare ritual seemed to intensify, but he didn’t gaze in my direction.

  “Kinda slow tonight, isn’t it?” I said.

  “Yeah, I guess. I’m new to here.”

  “The bar or the town?”

  “The bar,” he replied. “And the town, too, more or less. I moved here from Tulsa a year ago.”

  I asked him if San Francisco agreed with him.

  “It’s okay.” He shrugged.

  “But?”

  “I dunno. The guys are either totally married or ordering each other like pizzas off the Internet. Or both. I’d like more of the stuff in between.”

  “Like?”

  “You know, just hangin’ and talkin’ and…takin’ it from there. I’m into buddy sex, I guess. It doesn’t have to be romantic or anything, just…you know.”

  “Intimate,” I said, providing the dreaded word.

  Those gray eyes were fixed on me now, almost lupine in the darkness. “Yeah.”

  “Nothing wrong with that,” I said. “But you can say all that online, you know. That’s the great thing about the Web. You can ask for exactly what you need.”

  “I know that,” he said, “but I’d rather not ask the whole world if I can help it.”

  I turned and smiled at him. “I know what you mean.”

  At the time, I thought I did.

  Ten minutes later Jake suggested we head out for something to eat. I was ready to take him home by then, having already imagined the feral heat of that furry little body, but I thought it better to let him set the pace. He seemed like a certainty, and buddy sex was sounding pretty good to me, so why the hell not take our time about it?

  I went to pee before we left, and while I was standing at the trough, a guy in tribal tats and a grimy canvas Utilikilt was peeing like a fire hose at the other end. I’d noticed him earlier, watching me from across the room, so I wasn’t surprised when he spoke.

  “Listen,” he said, gazing straight ahead. “It’s none of my business, but…” He shook his dick a few times, then returned it to its Bat Cave under the Utilikilt. “If you’re looking to get fucked tonight, you’re looking in the wrong place.”

  “Excuse me?” I stiffened on the spot—and not in a friendly way, either. The nerve of this asshole, I thought. I had barely even glanced at him.

  “That guy you’re talking to,” he said, “is a transman.”

  I must have taken a little too long to answer.

  “He used to be a girl,” he explained.

  “I know what it means,” I said quietly.

  “No offense, dude. Just thought you should know if you didn’t. I met him once at the Sundance Saloon. There’s nothing down there.”

  He clapped his hand on my shoulder as he left.

  “Just doin’ you a favor,” he said.

  Leaving the toilet, I had a creepy sense of déjà vu. I remembered another guy, another total stranger, who once “did me a favor” by tipping me off that a potential playmate was HIV positive. I should have told him I was positive myself and had no use for his health warning. I should have said I found him ridiculously old-fashioned, since anyone in his right mind these days—especially around here—presumes everyone to be positive, and takes responsibility for his own fucking health, because there is no free ride anymore, you sorry-ass gossipy old leather nancy. I should have said all of that, but I didn’t. I just stood there gaping while he dropped his little stink bomb and sashayed off like a spiteful teenage girl. All he’d wanted, anyway, was to see the look on my face.

  Not unlike the queen in the kilt.

  Jake hopped off the stool as soon as he saw me returning from the rest room. He was about five-six or thereabouts, somewhere in the Tom Cruise range.

  “What’ll it be, buddy? Burritos or burgers?”

  “Either’s fine,” I said.

  As we left the Lone Star together, the kilt queen turned and watched us in undisguised horror.

  I gave him a thumbs-up, just for the hell of it.

  I won’t pretend I wasn’t walloped by the news. Jake’s masculinity was the very thing that had drawn me to him in the first place. It wasn’t some phony butch overlay; it came from deep inside, and it was totally devoid of irony. He didn’t even seem queer to me; he was more like some easygoing straight guy, a guy without trying.

  Except.

  I stole quick glimpses of him as we sauntered toward the taqueria. Under the streetlight his jaw looked just as strong and square as it had in the dark. I tried like hell to see a woman there, but couldn’t. His gait was a little studied, I guess, like a boy rehearsing his swagger on the first day of camp, and I towered over him considerably, but all of that just added to the charm.

  I wondered if his chest was bound or if he’d had surgery. I wondered if his nipples were funny-looking. I wondered if he’d had a penis made out of whatever the fuck they make penises out of. I wondered how often he picked up gay men and if he’d always preferred them to women and if he was scared shitless right now, wondering if I’d already guessed, wondering what I’d do when the other shoe dropped.

  At the taqueria we talked about gardening and the war in Iraq and the nifty new copper-clad museum rising in the park. He tried to talk about the Forty-niners, poor thing, but gave up the effort when it became clear that sports banter was not in my manly repertoire. When our talk turned to where we lived, I knew where we were heading.

  “I’m in the Dubose Triangle,” he said, “but I have roommates.”

  “Ah,” I said, realizing exactly what that “but” meant.

  “How ’bout you?” he asked.

  “I’m up on Noe Hill.”

  “No partner or anything?”

  “Nope.” I smiled at him. “Not for a few years now. I’m just out for fun these days.”

  He nodded solemnly for a moment. “I’m really into giving head,” he said.

  “Is that so?” I gave him a crooked smile.

  “I’m pretty good at it, too. You could just kick back.”

  There was no easy response to this, nothing glib that could rescue me. I liked Jake well enough, and he was still a hot little bear cub in my mind’s eye, but what would happen once we got down to business? Would the illusion still hold? Would I embarrass myself completely, or, worse, hurt his feelings? I bought time by asking a question I’d rarely asked before in my fifty-five years of existence: “Aren’t I a little old for you?”

  Jake just shrugged. “Age is no biggie, if I like the guy.”

  “And there’s something else,” I said, reminding myself of Jack Lemmon in the last scene of Some Like It Hot, when he’s up against the wall and desperately searching for all the reasons he can’t marry Joe E. Brown. “I?
??m HIV positive.”

  That just made him shrug again. “Then I won’t floss,” he said.

  When I laughed at that, Jake laughed, too, almost in relief, realizing that he’d won that round out of sheer audacity. It was a moment of brotherly bonding, so the pressure was off for a full five seconds before he turned serious again.

  “There’s something I have to tell you,” he said.

  I’d been ready for this, so I looked him squarely in the eye. “No, you don’t,” I said. “You really don’t.”

  He gazed at me solemnly for a moment. “You’re cool with it, then?”

  “I’m new to it,” I said. “Let’s put it that way.”

  “We could talk about it, if you want.”

  I shook my head. “I’ll spare you the after-school special. I’m sure that gets old.”

  “Oh, man,” said Jake.

  “The thing is,” I offered, “I’m sort of an old dog. And you’re sort of a new trick.”

  Jake smiled at my inadvertent pun. “Do you mind if I ask how you knew?”

  I decided to banish the kilt queen once and for all. “It doesn’t matter,” I told him. “It had nothing to do with how you look, if that’s what you mean.”

  “For real?”

  I nodded. “You’re a handsome guy from where I sit.”

  Jake was blushing furiously now, a tide of scarlet surging beneath his five-o’clock shadow. He plunged a fork into his burrito. “Can we go to your place, then?”

  I nodded. “As long as you understand—”

  “You won’t have to do anything to me, all right?”

  “That wasn’t what I—”

  “And don’t worry,” he added. “I’ll keep my jeans on. I don’t like that thing any more than you do.”

  Jake followed me back to Noe Hill in his car. Once inside the house—and the proper lighting was established—I retrieved my hammered-copper pot tray from the drawer by the sofa. As I rolled a joint, Jake just stood there, bouncing on his heels and socking his fist into his palm like an anxious delinquent. He reminded me of myself, over thirty years earlier, all bluster and bluff, when I first went home with a stranger.

  “Sit down,” I said, patting the sofa.

  Jake sat next to me, but not especially close.

  I lit the joint and held it out. He took it and toked expertly.

  “Did you get stoned in Tulsa?” I asked.

  “Are you kidding? I worked at Wal-Mart.”

  “Does that mean yes or no?”

  “It means what the fuck else is there to do.”

  He passed the joint back to me, and I dragged on it fiercely, hoping it would give me the nerve to face the uncharted territory ahead. I took courage from the memory of a hot night in Chicago when I smoked a doobie on Navy Pier, then came back to the Drake and whacked off to straight porn on Spectravision and got off on it fine, especially with poppers, because sex, I was learning, is a place where all of us go, regardless of gender or sexuality. No matter where we begin, it’s just one big steamy locker room in the end.

  Which is the scary part, of course.

  “You wanna take off your boots?” I asked.

  “That’s okay, buddy, I’m cool.” Jake was sitting forward, elbows on his knees, rocking a little as he gazed at me sideways. “You wanna kick back?” he asked.

  I took a last drag on the joint, then stubbed it out in my little Roycroft ashtray. I scooched back into the nubby cotton bolster as Jake knelt between my legs and got to work with quiet efficiency, still wearing his jeans and a loose gray T-shirt. He popped the top button of my 501s, mercifully liberating my belly, but didn’t pull my jeans off right away, just fingered me studiously through the denim as if fitting my dick for a custom suit. When I started to get hard, he looked up. “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “What does it look like?” I said.

  He grinned and popped the other five buttons.

  I said the first thing that came to mind: “You remind me a lot of a scoutmaster I used to have.”

  “Oh, yeah? Did you guys do stuff like this?”

  “Oh, hell, no,” I said. “He was straight as they come. He took us to the Everglades once, and I saw him in his boxer shorts. I never got over it.”

  I felt the brush of Jake’s beard against my thigh as his tongue swabbed its way along my dick. This is not his first time, I thought. When he was finally free to speak, he gazed up at me intently.

  “You got any?” he asked.

  I wasn’t sure what he meant.

  “Boxer shorts,” he explained.

  I smiled. “Yeah.”

  “Want me to wear ’em?”

  “Sure.”

  He hopped to his feet. “Where?”

  “Straight back and to the left,” I said. “Second drawer from the top.”

  He was gone less than a minute. When he returned he stood in the doorway for a moment, legs apart, to give me the full scoutmaster effect.

  “Very nice,” I said.

  It wasn’t a faithful reproduction of Mr. Ragsdale, but it was close enough.

  The sex was pretty much as advertised. Mostly he went down on me, and that was nice, I have to say. He was a good kisser, too, though he seemed less interested in that. I felt kind of selfish, to tell you the truth, just lying back like a sultan, so I moved my leg up into those boxer shorts, thinking that a little pressure there might be appreciated. My leg was promptly redirected, so I returned to my passive state and took the rest of my cues from Jake. He wanted to see me come, he said, so I jerked off while he worked my nips with the efficiency of a seasoned safecracker. I left my load, as directed, on the front of his Nature Conservancy T-shirt. “All riiiight,” he growled. “Good one, buddy.”

  We lay there side by side, limbs overlapping, until my breathing had subsided and I felt called upon to break the silence.

  “Do people always ask you—?”

  “—what my name used to be?”

  I laughed. “Guess they do.”

  “I never tell them,” he said.

  “Why? Was it Myrtle or something?”

  It was a calculated risk, but he did crack a smile. “It’s nothing to do with the name.”

  “You just don’t know that person anymore.”

  “Right,” he said. “Close enough.”

  “I hear you,” I said.

  “You ever need a hand, by the way?”

  I wasn’t sure what he meant by this.

  “You said you were a gardener, right?”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  “Well, if you need help…I’m really into horticulture.”

  “Great.”

  “I grew up on a farm. I don’t mind a little work.”

  “I’ll remember that,” I told him. My usual practice was to hire one or more of the Mexican guys hustling for day labor down on Cesar Chavez, but it was like buying a pig in a poke, as my mother used to say. Lots of the guys are incredibly hardworking and sweet, but others can be falling-down drunk or homophobic or both. I don’t speak a bit of Spanish, but the word maricón has a way of leaping out at you, believe me. I’ve heard it so often on the job, you’d think it was a species of plant. Who the hell needs that?

  Jake reached into his jeans and handed me a crumpled card with his cell-phone number. The card was khaki-colored and JAKE GREENLEAF was written in dark-green letters intertwined with ivy. Below, in smaller letters, it said: New Man.

  I thought that was cool and told him so.

  By mutual choice, Jake and I never played again, but several weeks later I asked him to help me with a job near Buena Vista Park. He was all I’d hoped he’d be: dependable, cheerful, and not too chatty on the job. Best of all, he seemed to enjoy tackling the tougher stuff—digging out roots, say, or hauling flagstones, or working in the rain. Heavy labor was apparently a kind of fulfillment to Jake, a necessary stop on his path to completion—if not completion itself. I could hand him the nastiest job in the world and feel almost noble about it. Ours was a match m
ade in gardening heaven.

  One day at lunch, when we were both eating yogurt in a client’s backyard, I noticed how the hair on my arms had grown and realized in a moment of shivery solidarity that Jake and I were probably both shooting testosterone. We’d never really talked about his pharmaceutical requirements, but this seemed like a logical opening, so I showed him my lushly foliated forearms and told him what had caused them.

  “Yeah,” he said, smiling. “It’ll do that.”

  “It’s amazing stuff,” I said. “It really boosted my spirits…and my energy.”

  He nodded. “Same here.”

  “I worry sometimes about prostate cancer, but…” I didn’t pursue this thought since it wasn’t an issue for him, I presumed, and I was wary of destroying our cozy commonality. “Everything’s got its risks, I guess.”

  Another nod. “That’s why I’m against surgery.”

  I thought he meant surgery in general, which puzzled me.

  “You know,” he said. “The operation. The addadictomy.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Is that what it’s called?”

  He grinned. “That’s what I call it, anyway.”

  It took me a few more seconds to get it. “Oh, fuck,” I said, laughing. “Addadictomy.”

  Jake looked pleased with himself. “A little tranny humor,” he said.

  I’d never heard him use that term to describe himself, so I was emboldened to press further. “Have you always felt like a gay man?”

  He thought for a moment, then shrugged. “I’ve always felt male. And I’ve always wanted to be with men.”

  “Isn’t that the same thing?” I asked.

  Jake lobbed his yogurt can into a trash barrel like a kid shooting hoops. “I don’t feel very gay most of the time.”

  It wasn’t hard to grasp the alienation of a guy who wants to chase dick without having one himself. Jake had spent most of his life feeling betrayed by his anatomy, but even now that he’d relocated to Queersville he was still too queer for the queers. He just needs a nice girl, I thought, reminding myself of my mother when she learned I was gay. But it was true. Men are hung up on visuals, as Shawna had recently observed, but women give weight to the heart and the mind when measuring attraction. If Jake identified as a butch lesbian—or even as a straight man—some woman would find reason to love him.