I’d heard from various people how I could find sex anywhere in New York. Great, I thought, but I also remembered something Christopher Ortega had said months earlier, when I’d detailed my plans to relocate. “Don’t have sex up there,” he’d told me, as if I were spaceshipping to some distant and ominous planet. “Dangerous.”
I figured sex couldn’t be as dangerous as the street where Wendy—and now, where I, too—lived. The apartment sat on the fifth floor of a grungy building on Avenue B. As soon as the sun rose, unemployed women and men perched on the sidewalk and sipped from beer cans in brown paper sacks. Kids chased one another, dodging traffic, screaming sentences in Spanish. The neighborhood drug dealer prowled around, chanting his code words “bodybag, bodybag” to anyone who approached. Try as I might to sleep late, I couldn’t, tossing and turning in the makeshift bed Wendy had set up in one of the three rooms, the street’s seismic chatter squeezing into my ears until I woke.
On the evening after I knew the crabs had gone, I wandered through the West Village. New York’s streets made it seem I’d been dropped into some tricky labyrinth. Corner groceries sold autumn flowers in bundles, a concept completely unfathomable in Kansas. Men traipsed outside clothing stores and drugstores, thrusting flyers into the faces of passersby: “Big sale tonight,” “Ten percent off everything.” I felt the hollow throb of hunger in my stomach, so I stopped at a streetside fruit stand and plunked down three quarters for a carton of shriveled, overripe strawberries.
On West Tenth, I saw the sign for an obviously gay bar called Ninth Circle. Three rough-looking boys gathered in front, lingering under a streetlight as if it were warming them, and they glanced up when I passed. I downed more strawberries and pretended not to notice. Their crotch-forward stances and their sneers made me think, Hustlers, no doubt. They were dressed alike—simple white T-shirts, jeans—and I was dressed like them.
A homeless man, one eye as inert as a dead flounder’s, stopped me and asked if he could “have one or two cherries.” I felt the group of boys staring. I handed the berries to the homeless man, which gave me a strange sort of martyrdom high.
Then I discovered I was being watched by someone else. A fortyish guy approached, the kind with a three-piece suit and briefcase, the kind that blends into whatever crowd he happens to be hurrying through. “Hi,” he said when our eyes met. I said “Hi” back. Three minutes later, I was following him home, eager to smash the glass window of my recent celibacy.
The guy was a lawyer, and he’d piled his apartment’s bookshelves with dictionary-size books on law. An American flag covered an entire bedroom wall. I saluted it. He took my hand away from my forehead and pulled me toward him. His eyes flashed in the darkness. I tossed my clothes into a corner; he folded and stacked his. His dopey basset hound padded in to sit beside the bed, attempting to lick my toes whenever my foot dangled over the edge.
The lawyer talked a lot during sex—standard, impersonal porno chatter I still loved. He unrolled a condom onto my dick, then maneuvered his body into a hands-and-knees position. He looked over his shoulder, and I slipped myself into him. For fun, I imagined what he might be thinking: It’s sheer ecstasy having a teenager inside me; If only I were twenty years younger, I could be this boy’s lover and not some freak fuck.
He came, I came, the regular shtick. His face got frantic. “You will stay, won’t you?” He pushed himself from the bed, calmed his fanatical dog, started searching his pants pockets. I began to explain how I couldn’t stay unless I called my roommate first. Then I stopped. The guy had turned around, was holding out a few bills.
Those had been hustlers on West Tenth. And the lawyer assumed me one of them. I took his money. “Sure, I’ll stay,” I said.
I thought: If this isn’t fate, what is?
After the autumn equinox, New York grew dark faster. Around eight o’clock, the streets would curd with a cool and smoky air. The city smelled like fire, like an odor from some voodoo ritual. Machinelike people scurried here and there, no one looking at anyone else.
If my first New York sexual encounter had earned me fifty dollars, then perhaps the job search I’d been dreading could temporarily wait. Besides, I told myself, I’ve got to know this place first. I continued walking the streets. I sometimes returned to West Tenth, where the same cluster of boys stared without speaking. But no more men picked me up. Evenings, I’d arrive home before Wendy, usually with a moronic gift (old “Witching Hour” comic books; more earrings for her collection; roasted cashews from a street vendor) to tranquilize the guilt I felt for shacking up without paying. “I’m becoming a true New Yorker,” I told her. “I don’t miss Kansas one teeny weeny bit.”
But I did miss it; no denying that. After my trick with the lawyer, I’d stretched back on his bed’s doughy pillow as he curled his arm around me, my mind drifting. Before I fell asleep I remembered how Kansas had appeared from the airplane. As the 747 lifted from the Wichita Airport’s runway, I’d leaned back in seat 17A, a slumbering woman and her young daughter beside me, and peeked out the window. Thousands of feet below, the earth became a patchwork of greens and yellows and browns, marked here and there with shiny barn roofs and silos, rivers that twisted like sapphire arteries, and yes, an uncountable number of baseball diamonds. On one kelly-colored outfield, antlike players jogged toward their dugout as the inning ended. An urge crept up on me, and I softly announced, “End of inning. Coming to bat in the top of the fifth….” I imagined how Sun Center would look from the sky. That made me remember Eric, and I visualized my friend and my mom as I’d last seen them, standing at the boarding gate, hands waving in synch. The airplane entered a fluffy cumulus, and Kansas disappeared.
One day, after my legs grew weary, I walked back to Avenue B. Two queens bickered outside the corner deli. “I want names,” one hissed at the other, and I swallowed away a laugh. Beside them, pumpkins were stacked into a pyramid, anticipating Halloween. They looked foolish in the middle of the city: pathetic, nothing like midwestern pumpkins, each no bigger than a dimwit’s brain. They wouldn’t do justice to the upcoming holiday. I scrutinized them, tried to decide which would look best in our apartment window, bought the fattest.
“Jackpot,” I said to the mailbox: a letter from Eric and a postcard from Mom. The latter showed a cyclone demolishing a town. KANSAS TORNADO, the caption said. I read the opposite side as I climbed the stairs to the fifth floor. Mom had scribbled some quick lines about the freezers conking out at the grocery, the weather turning cooler, the house not being the same without me. “I miss you. Hourly.”
I sat on the apartment floor and tore open Eric’s letter. It was dated three weeks back; he’d only recently sent it. The letter consisted of eight handwritten notebook pages, which I recognized as torn from the half-poetry journal, half-secret diary I’d sometimes spied him carrying. Pages one and two rattled on about his grandparents and echoed Mom’s Kansas weather report. Then, somewhere around page three, things got interesting:
Here’s the main reason for this letter. Four days ago I met this guy. It’s weird but I’ve spent tons of time with him ever since, all four days as a matter of fact. No, it’s not what you think, we’re not fucking. I don’t even think he’s queer. I can’t see him ever having sex with anyone, actually. Anyway, he’s just started school at the stupid college. He’s from this totally tiny nearby town called Little River, and I went there yesterday and it looks artificial, like it’s only a dream of a town, its buildings and churches and trees like a movie set’s cardboard cutouts, ready to topple at the slightest kick. That sounds stupid but it’s true. His name’s Brian. He’s blond, awkward-looking, glasses, zits, etc. So here’s the story: he’s obsessed with you. No, I’m not kidding. I caught him hanging out in front of your house, a while after you’d left. When I spied him, he asked, “Are you N. McCormick?” I freaked. I told him no. Turns out he used to play on your Little League team—well, he only played for a couple of games or whatever. He was squad’s worst player, etc. Now ta
ke a deep breath, make sure you’re sitting down for this, all that. Yesterday, after hem-hawing and beating around the bush, he basically told me that although he’s not exactly sure, he thinks that when you and he were kids, you were abducted by a UFO and examined by space aliens. He was completely serious, and believe me I could tell from the look in his eyes. He blabbed on and on, sort of baring his soul about this woman friend of his who’s been abducted, been on nationwide TV, etc., and telling me about these dreams he’s had where you and he are inside a blue room and these extraterrestrials are reaching out to you, touching you all over, communicating with you in this weird sort of ESP way (and of course that last little detail really drew me in, considering my interest in ESP stuff). Anyway when he’d finished telling me all this he just looked me straight in the eye and said, “But actually I’m beginning to realize something else really happened, and all this is crap.” (When he said “something else,” it was as if the words were italicized, and when he said “crap” it was like he’d never sworn before.) So what’s the story on this? Do you remember Brian or what? And WERE YOU ABDUCTED BY A UFO? If so, why haven’t you told me about it etc? Weird.
Eric’s letter continued, but at that point I stopped reading. At first I answered no, I couldn’t remember anyone named Brian from my past; I couldn’t even recall a Brian from my Hutchinson junior high days. The part about the UFOs twisted my face into a foolish smile, the kind that forms whenever I hear something astounding and irresistible. I felt as though someone had whispered the world’s juiciest gossip, tickling me all the while.
Then I stopped smiling and really considered Eric’s words. The kid named Brian, my Little League team, the part about “something else” actually happening—it seemed both familiar and unpleasantly intimate, so much so I felt embarrassed. Brian? I shut my eyes, thinking. Brian.
Instead of the boy, my closed eyes and concentration gave me a substitute image. Coach. The glitter in his eyes, the rough sand-colored mustache, his muscles’ ripples and curves—all there, crystallized within a precious cranny of my brain. He was still part of me.
It was love, I told myself. Coach had loved me. But there had been others, boys whose faces I’d seen smiling from his photo albums. And I could remember three separate times when he’d brought other boys home to join in, to add fuel to the forbidden. Had one of the three been Brian? These boys’ faces stayed vague, beyond surfacing. Perhaps Coach’s emotions for them had caused me to feel jealous, inadequate, or damaged; whatever the reason, I had dislocated my memories of them. And their names were as incapable of being conjured as the names of men I’d tricked with from Carey Park, from Rudy’s, from anywhere. When it came to names, I remembered Coach and nothing more.
“I’m beginning to realize something else really happened.” I could hear Brian, whoever he was, saying that to Eric. Perhaps the UFO story amounted to nothing but bullshit. Perhaps he’d already told Eric about Coach, and they’d agreed to pull my leg all the way from Kansas, to see what I’d say. Perhaps, and perhaps not. I didn’t want to think about it.
I considered telephoning Eric, but I couldn’t. Only one other person knew about Coach—Wendy—and even she didn’t fully understand the story. She couldn’t know the privacy and the bliss I felt when he held me, and yes, the love. Coach existed in my past, my most special and unblemished memory. Eric could never know about him; Mom could never know. Whatever recollections Eric’s new friend held, I couldn’t allow them to interfere with mine.
But even as I thought this—as I fell back on the floor and tossed aside Eric’s letter—I had the weird idea that I knew Brian, or at least understood him, as if I’d been burdened with the sort of ESP that Eric could only fantasize having. It was a confident knowledge, and it scared me.
Money dwindled fast. There one day, gone the next. Evenings, I wasted time with Wendy and her friends, drinking in smoky East Village bars. We alternated between straight and queer hangouts. I slept around; sex was nothing spectacular, nothing too different from what I’d had in Kansas. I wanted something more.
One night, in a place with the ingenious name of The Bar, a bartender asked where I hailed from. I told him; he smiled, thought a minute, and said, “You’re not in Kansas anymore.” He hadn’t been the first to say that. Everyone thought the Oz references hilarious—bartenders, Wendy’s pals, and an old dude whose eyes flashed with the leery optimism that yes, I was his for the night.
After the bartender said the line, I turned to Wendy, my face blazing with drunkenness and anger. “I hate Dorothy and Toto,” I said. We ferreted our way around the place and sat on a bench beside the pool table. White ball collided with blue, knocking it into a corner pocket.
Wendy removed the rubber band from the ponytail that trailed in a long strip down her head’s median. Her dyed-scarlet hair tumbled everywhere, so gorgeous I had to plunge my face and hands into it. It smelled like flowers—honeysuckle, I guessed. “Braid it,” Wendy said.
I didn’t know how. She shrugged and combed her hand through her hair. “It’s like tying knots in rope, only with three ropes instead of two.” I started tying, making a mess of it, until finished.
When Wendy got up to check her hair in the bathroom mirror, I headed over for another beer. The bartender was engaged in a hushed conversation with a friend, and he wiggled one finger to signal he’d be right with me. I heard the words “hustler bar.” What? I leaned forward, inconspicuously trying to catch as much as possible about Ninth Circle. But the bartender and his friend weren’t discussing the West Village. They whispered about a place on the Upper East Side, a bar called Rounds (What a stupid fucking name, I remember thinking). I couldn’t hear everything—something about how the bartender and another friend had gone “as a joke” to Rounds, how the friend had caught a recent ex hustling there.
I couldn’t have cared less about this melodrama; I just wanted to know where, when, and how. I shuffled over and ordered a beer, giving the bartender my best crooked smile. “Oh yeah, I’ve been to that place,” I said. He appeared miffed that I’d heard his supposed secret, but I continued. “What street is that again?”
Before Wendy returned, the bartender had told me all I needed to know, vindicating himself of his earlier Oz remark. I learned that Rounds was located on East Fifty-third off Second Avenue, stayed open seven nights a week, sometimes enforced a vague dress code—no hats or tennis shoes, the bartender explained.
Wendy and I returned to our bench. She had brushed a wet hand over her knotted strip of hair, and water beads gleamed red on the closely cropped bristles at the sides of her head. She jerked her thumb to the right to indicate the bar. “More Kansas jokes?”
“No,” I said. “He was just getting friendly.” I handed her the beer. She tipped it, swallowing in heavy gulps until it was gone.
That following Friday, 8 P.M., Wendy hurried out to meet her friends for a speed-metal concert. I parted my hair on the side, combed back my bangs, replaced my shirt with a white button-down, and slipped on the ten-dollar pair of wing tips I’d bargained from a First Avenue thrift store. I snuffed the candle from the hollowed carcass of Wendy’s jack-o’-lantern. “Here I go,” I said, and stuck my tongue into its toothless grin. On the way to the subway, I checked my reflection in nearly every window I passed.
As I strode the avenues toward Rounds, I contemplated Eric’s letter. The UFO bunk still confused me, but by now I’d cemented my certainty that this “Brian” was another kid from Coach’s history, a boy he’d selected from the Little League lineup. If that were indeed true, then I’d had some form of prepubescent sex with him—a tidbit he’d either (a) disremembered, or (b) hadn’t chosen to tell Eric. The three separate occasions when Coach suckered another kid into our afternoons still floated around in my head somewhere. I could remember Coach’s voice, hissing instructions. “Suck his dick, Neil.” “Put your hand farther inside me.” I tried to imagine Coach saying something to the effect of “Let him fuck you, Brian.” His voice remained, as lucid
as crystal, as crisp as the five-dollar bills he’d hand to me and anyone else after we’d satiated him. In my head I envisioned a Forty-second Street marquee, strobes pulsing with NEIL AND BRIAN MEET THE LITTLE LEAGUE COACH. Yes, it was entirely possible.
I reached the doorway to Rounds, and I tucked these thoughts away. After all, how could I successfully hustle wearing a face distorted with complicated memory? “I’ll think about it later.”
Chilly, carpeted, low-lit: the place’s appearance seemed as far from the East Village bars as, say, a funeral parlor from an amusement park. Piano music tinkled through the air; an octogenarian blond woman sat before the keys, crooning a song called “Love for Sale.” Fat queens huddled beside her, some mouthing the lyrics, periodically dropping bills into a glass vase on the piano. I stared at the singer, then looked around me. The distinctions between hustlers and johns were embarrassingly obvious. Everyone stood around, watching one another. The hustlers sipped at mugs of beer; the johns, fruity drinks with floating wedges of lime, lemon, or toothpick-speared olives. I took my place against the wall, one in a line of other teenaged or early-twentyish guys, most of whom didn’t seem all that attractive. I stuffed thumbs in pockets and tried to force my features into whatever innocent expression it kept among its ranks.
The johns stared, stared, stared. Their eyes were the beady, slothful eyes of anteaters or vultures. Neil McCormick, the new commodity. I thought: I have them all in my grubby little hands, and I’m going to pierce them with pins, like butterflies.
After a five-dollar beer and some horrendous, nonprofit small talk with two johns, a guy approached who didn’t look half-bad. “What’s your name?” he asked, his tongue pink in the gap between his teeth. I told him, and he repeated it. “You’re kidding, because my name’s Neil, too.” I mocked astonishment. The singer broke into “Just a Gigolo,” her head bobbing, her eye winking lewdly at the surrounding johns.