The Men from the Boys (13 page)

Thankfully it hasn't snowed in a few days; the roads are clear and dry. We see the giant statue of the Big Boy as we turn into the parking lot. “Once somebody stole the Big Boy from out in front of the restaurant back in Iowa,” Lloyd says. “The whole town was in an uproar. They finally found him, all scarred and cracked, out in the woods. Everybody felt so bad.”

The same elfin fellow greets us here: tall and ceramic, with his big round rosy-cheeked white face and that shock of shiny black hair. Javitz had nothing like this in the Bronx. “Do you know what we would have
done
with that?” he asks as we make our way past the creature into the restaurant.

“Tell us,” Lloyd dares.

Javitz just lets out a long exasperated breath of air.

Inside, they're all waiting for us. Chanel and her new girlfriend. Melissa and Rose. Tommy. And Drake. The last had been at Lloyd's request. “It's
your
birthday,” I'd said, picking up the phone to call the man. I suppose I shouldn't be resentful. After all, Eduardo was at my birthday party last summer. Sometimes there's a twist of guilt in my gut, remembering how I nearly abandoned Lloyd for a summer with Eduardo. Should anything he says now surprise me?

I've arranged for there to be balloons. Blue, red, and green. I think the waitress expected a child's birthday: she's wearing mouse ears when she brings us our menus. When she returns, they're gone, and she looks at us queerly.

But of course.

“You remember Kathryn?” Chanel asks, sitting back so that her girlfriend's plain Waspy face can smile at us. We tell her sure (although we keep wanting to call her Wendy, Chanel's last girlfriend) and reach over the table to bestow the customary kisses.

We're a quirky little group: Chanel, a round-faced Filipina, and her very white girlfriend; Melissa, very femme in long blond curls and dangling earrings, and Rose, very butch in short black hair and tie; Tommy, chubby and nearly bald at thirty; and Javitz, of course, kissing all of them with sloppy wet lips, accepting their homage as the returning prophet who has yet again triumphed over the angel of death.

And yes, did I forget? Drake, off by himself a bit, steely-eyed and fixated on Lloyd.

“Javitz,” Lloyd says, “this is Drake.”

Javitz looks the man up and down with no attempt to conceal his inspection. “Hello, Drake,” he says, in his best Hedy Lamarr voice. “You're
everything
I expected.”

I watch as Drake blushes. He looks handsome, I admit to myself, with his red face and thick gray hair, thicker than either Lloyd's or mine, I note. I smile and say hello, settling down next to Tommy.

“Haven't seen you for a while,” I say to my old friend.

Tommy smiles. We've had our issues, Tommy and I. Once, Tommy was my compatriot both in ACT UP and in the bars of Provincetown. He led the demos, bullhorn in hand—but on Commercial Street in July he was the one who tagged along behind, watching while the rest of us tricked. Every season his hair receded farther back on his head, much sooner than the same curse began inflicting the rest of us. Still, his eyes are more beautiful than any other man's I have ever seen: silvery blue like a Siberian husky's.

I've known him longer than I've known anyone else here but Javitz. I'm not sure why we're friends: he's edgy, moody. But like
I'm
anyone to call someone else moody. I guess it boils down to a shared history—of friends lost, battles won. We don't have a lot in common, especially since the activism has died down, except for our memories: taking over the T one day in 1990, chanting until our lungs were hoarse; visiting the bedside of yet another fallen comrade, grateful for the shoulder of the other after we left; sitting on the steps of Spiritus at four a.m., calling ourselves vampires—that is, until I found a suitable victim and left Tommy sitting there alone.

I wasn't always the kindest friend to Tommy, and I wish there was a way of undoing that. Tommy was the best friend to go tricking with, because he was always there. Javitz would head off to the dunes, other guys would try to compete with me, but not Tommy. “Go ahead,” he'd urge, pushing me to talk with some cute guy across the bar. “If he turns you down, come back and we'll have another beer.” Once, when I'd spiraled down into a K hole, it was Tommy who made sure I got outside, got some air, got home without getting into trouble. He was
devoted
to me. Looking back, I realize that now, and although we've distanced some in the last few years, I remember how delightful his devotion was, and how undeserving I was of it.

True, he'd get resentful now and then. Last spring, there was a guy he really liked—Douglas, I think his name was, or maybe Donald—who turned out to be interested in me. It wasn't the first time such a thing had happened. This Donald or Douglas kept asking Tommy for my phone number. Finally Tommy told me about the situation, all tight lips and furrowed forehead. I told him not to worry, that I wasn't interested—but then one night at the bar, this Donald or Douglas introduced himself to me, and he was pretty cute. So I went home with him. Tommy found out, and he was furious with me. For
three whole weeks
he wouldn't speak to me. Finally I apologized profusely, told him I was a real shit, and promised never to do it again. He grudgingly forgave me, even if he's kept his distance ever since.

“I've been seeing a guy,” Tommy says now.

“Really? Who is he?”

“I'll bring him by,” he says—and there's something in his voice—“so you can meet him.”

Chanel throws a straw wrapper at me. “So are you all set on a place for Provincetown?”

I'm not sure which of the three of us will answer. Finally I realize they're leaving it up to me. “We're still negotiating,” I say.

Javitz doesn't look at me. I know him well enough to know he's angry, but not
really
angry, more disappointed that I've threatened tradition. But I just can't bear the thought of it all again, not after last year.

Now the waitress is asking if she can take our orders.

We all laugh. “Any specials tonight?” Melissa giggles. They're indulging us by coming here. But they all have a little trash in their backgrounds; they understand. We order, and then we eat: fried chicken and onion cheeseburgers, heaps of french fries and cole slaw. We toast Lloyd with plastic mugs of root beer and Sprite. “May you live to be as old as Javitz,” Chanel says. He behaves himself and refrains from a retort. He's busy impressing Drake with his knowledge of Jung.

Of course, there are gifts. Javitz gives Lloyd tit clamps. “Who am I supposed to use them on?” Lloyd asks, dangling them across the table, shocking the waitress as she cleans away our green plastic plates. Javitz takes them and holds them across Drake's chest. Drake blushes, again. Chanel gives Lloyd a T-shirt with her picture on it, jagged because she had to cut Wendy out of the photo when she dropped it off at the novelty shop. Tommy's gift is a postcard book filled with sexy men. “Not a baldy in the bunch,” he chirps. From Melissa and Rose, Lloyd unwraps a “grass man”: a round stocking head filled with grass seed. “Pour water on him and he'll grow hair,” ever-practical Rose instructs. “Wish it'd work on me,” Tommy quips. Everybody laughs.

From Drake there's something different: a crystal in a little white box lined with purple velvet. Everyone oohs. Drake blushes for a third time.

“Thanks,” Lloyd says meaningfully, and they share a moment across the table.

“Okay, everybody, cake time!” I barge in, and the waitress brings over a huge hot fudge cake with vanilla ice cream. We sing, and after we're done, the whole restaurant applauds. Rose hands the waitress her camera and we all huddle close together, making silly faces into the bright pop of the flash. Lloyd turns to me with his little-boy look. “Oh, Cat,” he says.

“You're catching up with me,” I tell him.

“Not quite,” he says.

Everyone's talking among themselves now: Javitz and Drake, Chanel and what's-her-name, Melissa and Rose and Tommy. I take Lloyd's hand under the table.

“I love you,” I tell him.

He smiles. “I love you, too.”

“Guess that's why we're lovers, huh?”

We're quiet for a minute, each thinking his own thoughts. Or maybe they're the same, I don't know. I'm thinking about friends, how they're different from lovers, how they're the same. I'm thinking about passion, of course, how to define it so that it's real, so that it works, for Lloyd and me most of all, but for the others sitting around this table, too. How long before we all drift apart, this little party just a vague memory, memorialized only by a goofy photo in Rose's photo album? “Who are those people?” someone will ask her, years from now. “Old friends,” she'll say, but she'll be damned if she can remember every name.

Provincetown, July 1994

Of course, I never expected to write or take a nap.

Once Eduardo is gone, I shower and shave: my face
and
my chest. Haven't shaved my chest yet all season. Too much work these days, and the stubble the next day is infuriating. But tonight I go for it: I want the line from my throat down to my navel sharply defined, dividing my pectorals, delineating my abs. I pull the razor up against my skin, white foam amassing, sprinkled with tiny black hairs like chocolate shots on whipped cream. I nick myself between my pecs.
Damn.
A prime spot. I hope the blood doesn't congeal into a scab. I let the warm shower beat against my chafed torso, soothing my hide.

I worked out at the gym this afternoon in anticipation of this. Eduardo had watched from the sidelines, idly picking up free weights, oblivious to the stares of the thirtysomethings around him. Everybody seems to want what they think they don't have—youth and big muscles most of all. One man stared at himself in the mirror that covered the wall and pouted. “There's no gain, no gain,” he grumbled. Yet he was a muscle queen of the first order: bigger tits than most women have, biceps for days. Why don't mirrors tell the truth?

I step out of the shower and towel myself dry. I'm satisfied—if no longer impressed—by the sculpture in the mirror. I run my hand down the smoothness of my torso. Javitz isn't home tonight; he'd give me hell if he were here. “I don't understand why everyone shaves their body,” he says. “Everyone wants to look
eighteen.”

Outside the air is thick and damp. I can taste the sea on my tongue. The fog is rolling in off the bay, so dense that when the headlights of cars hit it, I see my shadow moving across the vapor. I see lots of shadows, in fact: queers on parade. Commercial Street at eleven o'clock is a colorful bazaar. Men in leather, women in rubber, girls who look like boys, boys who look like girls, glamorous drag queens in full-length sequined gowns, boys in tiny lycra shorts. These nightly hordes replace the heterosexual throngs of the daylight hours, who push their strollers in and out of the souvenir shops and gawk at the queers. We joke that at 8:45 every night a siren goes off announcing: “Attention all heterosexuals. Provincetown will be closing in fifteen minutes. Please bring your purchases to the register. Thank you for shopping in P'town. Now get the hell out.”

Now I'm surrounded mostly by boys. The boys from Montreal wear light-colored blue jeans and tight white T-shirts, big black belts and boots. The boys from New York wear ripped black shorts and white tank tops, their heads always buzzed. The boys from Boston wear cut-off denims and colorful form-fitting tops. This season it's rainbow stripes. I'm a hybrid: tonight I wear baggy blue jeans and a sleeveless flannel shirt, unbuttoned.

The bar is packed, as ever. I worry for a minute that I'll see Eduardo. Then I catch the eye of a boy across the room. He's dark, possibly Asian, a Keanu Reeves type. He seems to consider me, then averts his eyes. I feel a momentary twinge of rejection. I lose him in the crowd on the dance floor.

The smoke is heavy, as thick as the fog outside. I buy a beer and hold it, cold and wet in my hand. I will nurse this one bottle the entire night. Gone are the days when I'd consume five, six, seven, eight bottles in a night. It was such a silly phase, and I can understand why it's over, despite how it sets me apart from most of the boys here. How could I continue to do all that and still stay removed, up on the ceiling, always watching while participating at the same time?

Standing here, everything about me is heightened: my eyesight, as sharp as a falcon's, detecting the slightest stirring in a darkened corner; my sense of smell, recoiling from cheesy cologne amid the suffocating smoke; my sense of taste, so sweet in anticipation that my tongue caresses my lips; my hearing, tuning into the mock conversations that persist around me. My breath comes in a steady, deliberate rhythm, and I am aware, very aware, of how I tighten my stomach muscles to give the illusion of defined abs.

Tonight I watch them all: strung out and high, out of control. I am not one of them, not one of these children who pop their pills, drink their drinks. I know no one here. Yet I remain in place, still trying to find that boy on the dance floor, the boy with the deep dark eyes, the Keanu clone. Where did he go?

“Hey,” a voice says near my shoulder.

I turn. But it's not him. It's something nondescript, a tourist from one of the suburbs, most likely. He's probably my age, in a knit shirt and khaki shorts. I smile and move past him. I feel him watching me as I move away.

Keanu is across the room, deep in conversation with a muscle boy, a boy whose pecs and biceps have been pumped considerably larger than mine. Steroids, I console myself. He suddenly tweaks Keanu's nipple, and they kiss. I turn away and finish off my beer.