Taking Chances (21 page)

I told her what I wanted and settled into silence as she put the smock over my chest. She began telling me all about the parties that were going on tonight, but my mind was nowhere near this room. Was I that obvious? Was I that predictable? Patricia here knew my whole life story without us ever speaking a word, which was as depressing as it was alarming. I had never thought of myself as a confused, gay-guy stereotype, but hearing the words coming out of her mouth, it was hard to deny it.

And then it hit me.

“You were the same way,” I said out loud, interrupting her. She stopped cutting and looked at me in the mirror. “You know all that because you were like me once.”

She smiled at me. “Honey, in one way or another, everyone is like that at least once.” She saw the look of determination in my face and nodded. “Yeah, I spent high school and a tour in the Marines trying my best to be the Bounty lumberjack guy they have on the paper towels. All big and strong, plaid-wearing alpha male, the last person in the world people would think liked dick.”

“What happened?” I asked her, genuinely curious.

“I was miserable,” she said with a little scoff. “The real me was dying inside and if I didn’t change, I was going to die. Maybe not physically and maybe not all at once, but in more ways than one, I was going to die. So I gave it all up. I just walked away from my life and tried to find the me I wanted to be.”

“And that you dresses up as a woman?”

Her voice got harsh. “I’m not dressed this way because I suffer from a rare form of gay Tourette’s that causes me to break out in Celine Dion and want to be dressed right just in case. This is what makes me happy, way more happy than I was pretending to be like you.”

“I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to imply anything,” I said quickly.

“Yes, you were,” she said pushing my chin at my chest. “And it’s okay. Most people assume I’m dressed as a woman, you know, like I’m in drag. I am not a female impersonator and this is not drag. This is who I am. There is a difference. We are all somebody inside, and most of the time we are too chickenshit to stare that person in the face. I stared into the abyss and when it stared back, it was wearing Revlon photo-ready concealer and cherry blossom lipstick.”

It made me wonder who I was inside and if I could stare him in the face.

“And presto,” she said, turning me back toward the mirror. “One well-groomed, yet still masculine, trim with no frills.” I looked in the mirror and was impressed. She did great work. “You sure I can’t talk you into frosted tips? You’d be beating them off with a stick.”

I laughed nervously and shook my head. “I think I’m good.”

She laughed with me. “I know you’re good. I was just trying to help you out.”

I got up and made my way to the register and pulled out my wallet. “You do good work,” I told her, handing her way too much money. When she took it, I held on to it and she made eye contact. “And the haircut was good too.”

“You’re welcome,” she said, smiling. She rang up the cut. “You need a cab? Because trust me, if you keep walking around here looking like that, someone is going to cruise you. Hard.”

I looked outside and thought about it. “You know what?” I said, grinning. “I think that’s okay.”

“A
RE
you serious?”

Forcing back a sigh, I leaned my head into my shoulder to hold the phone in place while I pulled off my pants. “You were the one who wanted to meet him.”

Sophia’s laugh was not pleasant. “Yeah, I wanted to meet him so I could kick him in the balls for treating you like shit. Not to waste my New Year’s Eve with him.”

“He didn’t treat me like shit. He just freaked out because I had a particularly bad case of verbal diarrhea,” I reminded her as I sat down on my bed and started to pull my socks off. “He flew thousands of miles to make it up to me.”

“Oh God! Are you really going to sit there and make excuses for him? You sound like a battered housewife. ‘He only hits me when I make him mad.’ Come on, Matt!”

There was no way to prevent the sigh escaping my mouth this time.

“And don’t give me that sigh. That is your ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about, Sophia’ sigh and in this case, I do know what I’m talking about. You dating another asshole.”

“We aren’t dating and he isn’t an asshole,” I protested, but it was a mistake.

“You can’t be this desperate, Matt. Honestly, you can’t just settle for the first guy who wanders along and….”

That was a step too far.

“Okay, look. I am not desperate and this is not a battered-wife thing. He asked me out and that’s that. If you can’t go and be civil, then tell me now and I’ll tell him it’s just the two of us.”

The silence between us was deafening because neither one of us even breathed.

“I’m just trying to help you, Matt. Of course I’ll go tonight,” she said after what seemed like a year of not talking.

The problem was, I knew she was lying. I knew she was just waiting to get Tyler in a room so she could give him a piece of her mind. And even though I knew what she was planning, I said nothing because I suppose part of me wanted her to do it as well. The part of me that liked Tyler too much, the part of me from high school that still thought he walked on water, the part that refused, even now, to believe he was gay. The part of me that had always been content to just sit in the corner and let other people do the dirty work made me say, “Okay, I’ll give you a call once I know what’s going on.”

I hung up the phone knowing I had just made a huge mistake.

What does it say about me that I knew exactly what I had done wrong, but instead of fixing it, I just sat there and waited for time to pass? Worse, how many other times had I done this and never noticed? My dad’s words came echoing back that if I’d moved from Foster to be happy but was still miserable, then maybe Foster was never the problem. I did want to be happy, I really did.

After a while, I wasn’t sure if I was saying it because it was true or because I wanted it to be true.

I got into the shower and began to get ready, knowing it would distract my thoughts long enough for them to grow quiet again. Drying my hair, I walked out, saw the suit I had lain out on the bed, and froze. It looked like one of my father’s suits to me, and that was distressing for some reason. I did the math and realized that by my age, my dad had served in the military, married my mom, and had two kids with a third on the way. His life was well into the middle part and mine was nowhere. Was this how I was going to be? Endlessly stuck in neutral until my life started? What was I waiting for? What exactly did I think the starting pistol sounded like?

A knocking at my door broke me out of my stupor.

Without thinking, I opened the door and found Tyler holding a bouquet of flowers in his hands. From the look of shock on his face, I had missed something. Like getting dressed. “Um, come in,” I said, retreating to my room, hoping the towel around my waist covered enough.

He closed the door and called after me, “Don’t hurry on my account.” I could hear the smile in his voice from my room.

I pulled my clothes on in a rush, frustrated with myself that I had lost so much time in the mental masturbation that was my life. I checked myself in the mirror, hated what I saw, and walked out of my room. I hated the way my breath paused a second as I saw him looking through my bookshelf while he waited. He turned and smiled at me, and I felt everything inside me go to mush.

Forcing the feeling away, I asked him, “So do I get to know what our plans are yet, or is it still a surprise?”

“Still a surprise,” he said, picking the flowers off the coffee table. Walking over, he handed me the flowers. “These are for you.”

Refusing to let my emotions get the better of me, I took them and headed to the kitchen to put them in water. “Thanks” was my only reply.

“You know, we don’t have to do this,” he said as I filled a vase up with water. “I can just go if you aren’t interested in the date.”

Lack of interest wasn’t the problem at all—in fact, just the opposite. It was the knee-jerk feeling that this man was perfect that had led me to this point in the first place. My attraction was as persistent as a dog that keeps trying to jump on someone even though its owner is screaming at it to get down. “I’m fine,” I said neutrally. “I’m up for it if you are.”

He cocked his head and paused, as if he could read the feelings behind my words. For a moment, I thought he was going to call me out on my bullshit, but instead he just shrugged and asked, “Okay. Are we waiting for your friend or we picking her up?”

As if on cue, my door burst open and Sophia spilled into my apartment. “I’ll get you, my pretty…,” she screeched and then stopped when she saw I wasn’t alone. “Oh” was all she said, mentally and physically checking herself. Whatshisname walked in behind her. I could see in the way she lost her momentum that Sophia thought Tyler was hot but there was no way she was going to admit it. “You must be the boy who broke Matt’s heart,” she said, walking across the room to him, her hand extended as if she expected him to kiss her ring.

She stopped in midstep when he smiled at her and said, “You must be the fag hag.”

I thought she was going to explode as she glared at him in silence. Instead, she moved past him and hugged me. “Happy New Year, Matty!” As she squeezed me, she whispered. “I hate him.”

And the night had just begun.

I
HONESTLY
had been on some bad dates before but so far, this one was taking the cake.

Sophia stopped attacking me directly, instead opting for the always fun passive-aggressive approach. When we got to my rental car, she made some underhanded comment about it. I didn’t catch the exact sentence, but I heard the word “cheap” and that was enough. Her boyfriend creeped me out because he kept staring at me like I was a piece of prime rib and he was a starving wolf. If he wasn’t gay, then he was living in a walk-in closet that had to have its own en suite.

Matt looked more and more miserable the longer we drove through the crowded San Francisco streets. I would have never guessed the city would be this claustrophobic from what I had seen from TV and the movies, but trying to drive made me feel like Godzilla. We got stuck at an intersection, which gave Sophia the opportunity to pounce. “So where exactly are we going?” she asked, leaning forward from the back seat.

“It’s kind of a surprise,” I told her, trying to find a way to shove her back in the backseat without being rude.

“Well, I hate surprises,” she said, not moving an inch.

I mentally tried to will the light to change as I forced myself to stay calm. “Well, the surprise isn’t for you, so I think you’re safe.” She refused to budge and glared at me in the rearview mirror. She was so busy giving me the stink eye she didn’t see the light change. I did, and I shoved the accelerator down in an attempt to get through the intersection before the light changed again.

Sophia gave a small yelp as she tumbled back into her seat. I saw Matt cover his mouth to hide his laughter while we followed the flow of traffic. Sophia went back to silent seething that lasted all the way to the theater. We pulled into the parking lot, and I heard her go off again. “Really? A couple of movies that we could have watched on Netflix?
This
is your big surprise?”

I found us a parking space and began counting to myself in my head as a way of ignoring her diatribe. After, I turned off the car I turned to Matt. “Do you remember when the Vine had these playing, and Eli Cole and his friends ended up setting that smoke bomb off and everyone ran out?” Matt nodded with a small grin on his face. “Well, I never told anyone this, but I was with them that night, so it was kind of my fault too. So I thought I owed you a repeat showing.”

His face lit up and his grin turned into a huge smile. I thought for a second we were going to kiss, but Sophia ruined that as she burst out from the backseat. “Oh, nice. You were a douche in high school and it’s taken you this long to make up for it?”

“I think it’s romantic,” her date said to me. He sounded again like he was hitting on me.

“Shut up!” she said, jamming her arm into his side. “I hope they serve drinks,” she added, getting out of the car. The guy with her slowly followed her, his eyes still on me, his lips still turned up in that creepy smile.

“So he is…?” I started to ask Matt about Sophia’s date.

He nodded. “Oh yeah, completely.” He took my hand and squeezed it. “This is an awesome idea! I’m glad I came.”

“So am I.” I began to lean forward. I saw him move toward me before I closed my eyes.

“
Come on
!” Sophia roared, banging on Matt’s window. “It’s freezing out here.”

The moment was sufficiently ruined, so we got out of the car and raced into the theater. Once inside, we were seated at a table and a waiter took our drink orders while we looked over the menu. I wasn’t sure if alcohol was going to help or hinder the night, but by the time the first drinks arrived, I knew it couldn’t get much worse.

Halfway through her second margarita, Sophia stared intensely at me from across the table. “So you were what? A total closet case in high school and college?”

She of course had asked in the middle of me taking a drink, so it was all I could do to not sputter out an answer. Before I could speak, Matt chimed in with, “I never said that, and you know as well as I do that I was in the closet for high school and most of college too.”

The facts rolled off Sophia’s back like water off a duck. “Sweetie, you’re still in the closet,” she said, looking back to me. “You were, right?”

Putting my drink down, I said, “There are a lot of people who are confused about their sexuality at all ages.” I looked over to her “boyfriend” and then back at her. “We all get there in our own time.”

Obviously not the answer she had been looking for. “Right, but you dated girls? And never told them you liked dick.”

“Um, I dated girls too,” Matt added, but she ignored him altogether, instead focusing on me.