memorial

Finally, summer has arrived. I sat on a beach yesterday, Jacob Riis Beach, and dipped my legs into the Atlantic Ocean. The water was still freezing cold, too cold for me to go all the way in, but the weather was warm. The sun was shining. I was on a beach drinking vodka drinks surrounded by friends. I smoked a lot of weed and the day took on a glorious haze that the best summer beach days will take on.

Various tabloid covers were screaming about Virgin Rampages and Homocidal Virgins. I passed these papers in subway kiosks, in a bodega where I bought chips, in a bodega where I bought a Straw-ber-ita. Whatever that is. It tastes like the syrup from a Shirley Temple.

It was cool and refreshing and it is what I was drinking while I was on the subway platform at Broad Channel waiting for the A train. It was what I was drinking when I got a ticket for an open container.

I didn't want the day to end. I spilled out of the subway into Metropolitan. I drank beer and talked to various people and at some point, my desire for food, led me down Grand Street, toward my burrito spot.

I lay in bed eating a pulled pork burrito. I lay in bed still covered in sunscreen and sand, too tired to shower it off. I thought of skin and human beings and boys I wanted to have sex with, boys I have had sex with. I wanted to be on the sand again under the sun next to the ocean. I wanted that clarity brought on by that haze, everything eliminated from your scope of concern except for the things on that beach. These days are here now, these days of summer that are why I live in New York, that make all those cold and miserable months worth it. It is for this release, this sense of freedom.

Elton John's "Mellow"

We were lying side by side jerking off. I had my head pressed against the top of his chest. The had recently set outside his window behind some clouds, the sky now a deep shade of blue, something approaching black. There were deep shadows that ran down his chest, the outline of his pecs, of his abs, clearer than normal in this lighting. It was a beautiful sight. Every now and then I would cast my eyes out the window to take in the sight of the sky. There were lingering storm clouds, majestic looking things against an evening sky. His beautiful body, the beautiful sky, and back and forth, back and forth, hands stroking his cock or mine.

The skyline was familiar, a comforting thing to see. This guy lives two blocks from where I used to live on Meserole Street. I recognized the buildings out his window, saw the spires of that one church, the clouds forming some spectacular shapes behind it.

I had been lying in my bed earlier in the day, tired after having drank a bottle of rose with Diego in our backyard, had been napping, looking at various things on my phone, Scruff among them.

There was a message from this guy. I immediately perked up from my sleepiness and messaged him back. I didn't think I was going to hear from this guy anymore, had given on him. This is the guy that I hooked up with on 4/20 and who I had thought was so cute and sexy. I was a stoned mess that day and so the sex wasn't that great, and I had assumed that's why he never really responded to my messages to him afterwards.

Two messages were exchanged, a how's it going, a I want to touch your body, before he asked me to come over. I threw on some clothes and rushed over to his house. We smoked some weed at his apartment and then took off our clothes and had really fun sex against his window as the sky did incredible things.

After we wiped ourselves off with tissues and put on some clothes, he offered me a cookie sandwich that he had made. I stood in his kitchen eating this massive thing even though I don't really like eating sweets, did so just because it was something he had made, something he had offered, and as it was more reason to hang out with him and chat some more.

And I wish it wasn't true about not wanting things, not desiring things - that it's when you want something, want someone, that you are not going to get it, that only once you have forgotten about your desire for a thing does that thing come your way.

I walked home from his house, enjoying the dark sky, knowing that I had seen it shift to this current color over the past hour or so, knowing that things change but not that much and that if you keep your eyes on the thing, the changes are subtle, slow, that the transition makes sense.

"You Are Your Mother's Child" - Conor Oberst

I was punched in the back in the fourth grade by this classmate, someone I think back of as some budding serial killer. I am pretty sure his name was Jeffrey. He was from a military family, from Alaska I think. This may have been third grade, maybe fifth. The teacher was out of the room. I don't remember what I did to make this guy angry. I remember him raising his fist high and slamming it against my back. It hurt so bad. I smiled at Jeffery in response. I wanted to cry. I smiled, fighting back tears, not wanting this person to see, not wanting any of my classmates to see, how much I hurt, how much this person had been able to affect me. He hit me again and I smiled again, a crazy fuck you smile, my eyes watering with tears that were no longer doing such a good job of hiding. The teacher came in soon after and we resumed class, she having no clue about this psychotic scene that just took place, two emotionally distant kids trying to hurt each other while a class of children looked on. He punched me and I smiled as way of saying: that's nothing, you're weak, wanting to hurt his sense of pride.

He was gone in a year or so, family relocated to another military base, where he would be the new, out of place kid in some other classroom, probably again resorting to violence to deal with his situation.

I sometimes like to attribute, on days when I am prone to meandering, nostalgic thoughts, my poor posture to this moment, that ever since that moment, there was always some fear in the back of my mind, however small, that someone was going to come up behind me and punch me in the back. As a result, I tell myself in these thoughts, I crouched inward, a defense mechanism, hunched shoulders, back turned in, always braced for a punch that I still fear coming some 25 years later.

I have been made more aware of my posture lately because I injured some muscles in my shoulder a month or so ago while lifting weights at the gym. I went to a doctor, who prescribed me physical therapy to help heal it. In these two physical therapy sessions I have been to, they have explained to me that my injury was probably due to my posture. They explained it in ways that I don't entirely understand, but which seem to make a lot of sense. I knew I had bad posture, but wasn't aware that it was so bad that it could cause me physical problems. They have given me various posture exercises to do at home, which seem really easy, but because of my poor posture, are actually really difficult. I wish I could take this physical therapist I saw today around with me everywhere for her to tell my how to stand and where my shoulders should be.

I am trying to take as much advantage of this physical therapy as possible right now as my health insurance will probably be ending soon. A couple days ago, I turned in my two week notice to my job. My days in hospitality are quite literally numbered now. I can't believe it's almost here, that it's going to happen. I think for a little while there, I had thought I might be working in hospitality for life, it having already been five years or so. I am so excited to see what it is like to wake up two weeks from now and not think about what various disasters await you at a hotel full of rich, needy people, to not think about such petty things even when off from work in the evening. I wonder where all that mental space devoted  to that will soon go. I am so excited to find out.

I had a burrito tonight.  I have one just about every night these days.

we lived for music

"She has her solitary meal, as spartan an athlete's before a race (some say to avoid occlusion of the drugs she plans to take), as they scream drunkenly. And then, just as the Polish barbers who stand all evening by the stoop are turning back to go upstairs to bed, she slips out of her hovel - for the queen lives among ruins; she lives only to dance - and is astride the night, on the street, that ecstatic river that flows through New York City as definitely as the Adriatic washes through Venice, down into the dim, hot subway, where she checks the men's room. An old man sits morosely on the toilet above a puddle of soggy toilet paper, looking up as she peeks in, waiting himself for love. The subway comes; she hurries to the room in which she has agreed to dance this night. Some of the dancers are on drugs and enter the discotheque with the radiant faces of the Magi coming to the Christ Child; others, who are not, enter with a bored expression, as if this is the last thing they want to do tonight. In half an hour they are indistinguishable, sweat-stained, ecstatic, lost. For the fact was drugs were not neccesary to most of us, because the music, youth, sweaty bodies were enough. And if it was too hot, too humid to sleep the next day, and we awoke bathed in sweat, it did not matter: We remained in a state of animated suspension the whole hot day. We lived for music, we lived for Beauty, and we were poor. But we didn't care where we were living, or what we had to do during the day to make it possible; eventually, if you waited long enough, you were finally standing before the mirror in that cheap room, looking at your face one last time, like an actor going onstage, before rushing out to walk in the door of that discotheque and see someone like Malone."

-Dancer From the Dance, 115

Elton John - "Amoreena"

It started on Saturday. I was getting my hair cut at a neighborhood barbershop. They started playing Dog Day Afternoon on their television. I didn't immediately recognize the movie even though I had seen it some years ago. I was instantly taken with the opening. There was a beautiful Elton John song playing that I was not familiar with, but which had those qualities that the best Elton John songs have: somehow even though you only half understand the lyrics, you are sent tumbling into some deeply sentimental state, realizing the beauty and comedy in the sadness of this human life. Even though you don't really understand all the lyrics, you can hear it, the meaning, in those piano chords, the moments of restraint and then the clanging build, keys pressed harder and harder, and in Elton John's voice its sad wails sings his subject's name, Amorrena. You can hear what it is he is feeling. You feel it too. It doesn't even matter what he's singing, what the words are, because you know what he's saying. You hear the feeling.

This song happens over shots of a seventies New York City, images of which always stir something inside of me, which show the city I dreamed it to be before moving here, shows the city in some state that seems in some ways better, shows a time now forever lost before air conditioning and cellphones and everyone staying indoors to play on the Internet, before huge impersonal chain stores ate up every single block.

Together, the two of them, the song and those opening shots of seventies New York that it serves as the soundtrack to, sent me far, far off somewhere. I have been there since Saturday. I like wherever it is I ended up. I play the song on repeat again and again throughout the day, wanting this feeling, this sentimentally to continue, still hearing the deep feeling in this song each time, sometimes hearing new aspects to it that I had not heard in the many, many previous listens to it over this past week.



I have been reading Dancer From the Dance this past week also, often doing so while listening to the album this song is from, Tumbleweed Connection, on my headphones as I ride around the city. I listen to this sad song about ardor and distance and read this novel about a gay culture also gone, men struggling with the closet in a way that I think will feel more and more foreign to people just discovering their gayness, that the process they will go through will be so different (thank God!) than what men of these earlier generations went through, and this book will seem so silly and repressed to future generations who may not get what these emotional struggles were about. There is so much shame and self-loathing on just about every page of this novel. I love those subjects though, which is probably why I like these early gay novels so much. My head is swooning reading about these moments, seeing so much of myself in some of these scenes, in some of these actions:

"That night he got out of bed and put on his maroon polo shirt, which everyone said he looked so handsome in, and went downstairs and drove off in his car, where he did not know. He just drove. He drove around that wilderness of gas stations and fast-food franchises that surround Washington as once the armies of the Confederacy had, drove around in that crimson glow of doughnut shops and new-car showrooms, in which all things, cars, faces, bodies, gleam with an otherworldly light, and he kept driving - never admitting what he was about - until he came to Dupont Circle and there he stopped and got out under the green trees and met a man and went into the park and blew him." (73)

As once the armies of the Confederacy had [surrounded Washington] - what a gorgeous and unexpected phrase for describing the suburban fast food places encircling DC.

I sigh at pretty turns of phrase, at scenes of love, at the way Elton John's voice says everything sometimes, at the cute guys on the subway, at this one guy I see on Scruff who I have an insane and probably hopeless crush on. There is so much beauty out there to see and take part in. Just keep playing that song you like. Play it again and again without care if it makes you feel like this, makes you feel more alive.

Paul Simon - "Under African Skies"

I was a bit stoned when I arrived at Black Bear Bar last night for the Xanadude party, a bit buzzed on whiskey. I heard a Smiths song and got really excited for this party, was really surprised they were playing the Smiths, as I thought the party was all dance music. Unfortunately, the Smiths song was coming from the party in the main room. Xanadude was happening in the back bar and was indeed straight-up dance music. It was dark, it was crowded, bodies pressed against bodies. Soon after getting there, this one guy started dancing with me. He danced closer and closer. I kept backing away from him, doing a circle around him get on the other side of him, all because I wanted to dance, to feel my limbs move with rhythms. I felt cramped. This guy just wanted to dance close and flirt. The darkness had me wary. I didn't know who I was dealing with. I have terrible night vision. I didn't know if he was cute or what. He would punch me lightly in the stomach every so often in a way that kind of turned me on, the thrill of violence. I escaped a couple times to go to the bathroom. Each time, I could hear another Smiths song coming from the main bar, some Morrissey theme to the night seemingly. I kept thinking I was at the wrong party. Will someone please make a gay Smiths night somewhere, please?

Every time I came back to the party, I would linger in back, taking in the scene, trying to eye friends through the darkness. Somehow in the darkness, this guy kept finding me. I couldn't escape him. He was nice and so I wasn't trying too hard to do so. Also keep in mind that I was stoned and had very little social skills as such to try to extricate myself from this situation. I kept on eyeing people I had crushes on but was unable to pursue them as I had this person dancing against me all night. I saw an acquaintance, a beautiful man who I have a crush on. I decided that it would be a good time to dip out of this scene, that I didn't want my crush to see me grinding dancing against this person all night. I told the dancing guy that I was going to pee and instead left, another Smiths song I loved playing as I walked out.

I got a burrito from the Mexican truck on North 6th Street. There were packs of gays on the march, a Saturday night, people looking good, looking for sex. I had different priorities. I just wanted to go home and lie in bed and eat this burrito and dream about boys. In some ways, I get more pleasure from these imagined encounters with people, of what I might do, than the actual things, me leaving a bar where various crushes were because I was too stoned to shake off this one boy. It was easier to leave.

But let me tell you one thing, I don't regret the decision. If you had tasted that burrito, you would understand.

anniversary

Eleven years ago, I moved to New York, this city I am still living in, that in many ways I feel married to. I have dated some guys while I have lived in this city, been in love with a couple of them, thought I would marry one of them. It didn't last with any of them. I am alone on these streets walking from here to there, alone until I realize that this is my man, this is my love, this is who I am married to.

I used to dream about moving to this city as a child. It seemed cool, exotic, slightly dangerous. It held the promise of everything my suburban upbringing seemed to lack. I imagined some bohemian life of poetry and cocktail glasses clinking all the time and conversation until the early hours. The city is and is not like those fantasies. It is whatever you want it to be, whatever you make of it.

A lot has changed. I have. New York has. Bars I used to like no longer exist. Good friends have moved other places. I sometimes wonder how they did it, how anyone could leave this. And then there are days when I don't wonder that, days when I wonder whether I may soon some day leave all this, the city I love erased more and more each month, bookstores closing left and right, record stores all gone, frozen yogurt places and drugstores on every block multiplying. The diviness that I love requiring more and more seeking.

But you can look at these signs of change, 16 Handles and Duane Reades, and focus on them, get depressed about things, or you can look at the gorgeous limestone and brick buildings that this city is made of. You can look at the beautiful and ugly people that walk up and down these streets, all of them walking with places to go, determined. You can look up from your own circular thoughts and see a man who makes something in you crumple because he is so goddamn sexy. You can wonder where he goes out, where he came from, and where he is headed to. You can wonder this until another person catches your eye, which will happen not too soon after if you are alive to the environment around you, if you are open to this city and what it has to offer. You can see the confidence with which that woman in that nice trenchcoat marches down the street. There is an energy here that I love, that is somehow part of the landscape here.

Last year, unhappy with the direction my life had been taking, I decided to make some changes. I applied to school for advertising, where I am now writing this, from an industrial building on the Dumbo waterfront overlooking the Manhattan Bridge. I got a tattoo on my wrist of this date, 4/24, to always remind me how I felt when I moved here, with what enthusiasm and dreams I had at that point, how hungry I was to take on things. I have gotten that back. You can't be lazy here. Or, you can, and you will be unhappy. But it's about staying hungry. We walk fast for this reason - there is palpable hunger out there in these crowds - it's invigorating, something that gives me charge.

It's amazing to look at the sun shining on the East River below and to follow its shorelines, seeing the outline of lower Manhattan, thinking of all the people who have been here over the centuries, all of them hungry for the promises this city holds.

New York, I love you. I am not going to let you down. I am going to be the man you love.

Easter

It being 4/20 and all, I got stoned today, though really no excuse is needed. For some reason, I thought it would be a great idea to watch Downfall while stoned. The last days of Hitler spent in his bunker somehow proved a riveting movie to watch on this sunny day. I looked at Scruff on and off throughout the day, messaging various cuties of varying distances away. There were flirtations that went nowhere.

A cute boy messaged me. We flirted. He said he was looking for company. I asked him if he was looking for sex or company. Sex, he said. He used the word company though. Like one does, he said. I told him I would be there in fifteen minutes.

I walked over, listening to Sky Ferreira's "I Blame Myself," a song I have been listening to over and over again all weekend. I buzzed his buzzer, number 7, walked up two flights of stairs, and knocked on his door. He answered and I was in a goofy mood from still being slightly stoned. He was a little nerdy looking but had a really cute smile. There was that awkward conversation in his bedroom, the making out with our clothes on in his bed. We took off our clothes and this guy was really beautiful. Clark Kent/Superman. Out of his clothes, he was really cut, had this stunning chest that I kept running my fingers against as my eyes took it in, up and down, my hands trying to understand this beauty, my eyes wanting some physical confirmation of it.

He had his windows open. I watched people walk past on the sidewalk below as I got head. I wondered if that man parking his car across the street could see up to this window, little lit box of me eating this guy's ass.

There were Deleuze books stacked on his bedside table, maps on the wall. We came lying side by side jerking off.

I told him how I didn't really do much this weekend except for look at Tumblr porn and talk to guys on Scruff. Me too, he said. We started talking about Scruff. He lamented that he spends so much time looking at a grid of male faces. He made an analogy to Foucault's idea of the panoptican, that this was its inverse, that there are all these little squares out there, human faces, and we hope, really hope, that they are looking at us.

He's beautiful. He's smart. He's a math teacher. He plays piano. I wasn't expecting to like this person so much, but he was super sweet and cute, and I found myself more and more attracted to him as we kept talking, hoping that I would get to hang out with this person again.

He told me about the awkward date he had the night before. He really likes this guy and hopes he gets another chance to hang out with him, that he wants to date him. Despite my hopes being dashed by this guy talking about some other guy he liked, I kept our banter going, talked about how gay men don't know how to go on dates, that most gay men never participated in those rituals growing up. He told me he liked my outfit once I was dressed. We kissed goodbye. I walked down those two flights of stairs, put on my headphones, and blasted this song, "I Blame Myself," over and over again, walking home down Grand Street, taking in the night, past memories floating around, hoped for future ones somewhere out past those.

the time, having it

While I was waiting for the subway, I was reading in The New Yorker  a story about advances in fancy airline seats for business- and first-class passengers. Airlines are trying to one up each other, an arms race of luxury, comfort, and isolation, these airlines in search of these big spending passengers.

A guy, vaguely skaterish dude, came up to me. He asked me if I had the time. I looked at him suspiciously, annoyed that someone was talking to me while I had been lost in reading, also sensing some scam, some trouble. 99 times out of 100, when someone approaches you in New York, it is not anything you want to hear. And so I have learned to deflect, to avoid. They usually want something, your time, your money, your sanity, your phone. 

I was about to tell this guy that I didn't know what time it was, didn't want to take my phone out of my pocket. It's a defensive crouch that I have taken so many times on desolate streets in sketchy neighborhoods when at an hour no one needs to know the time, someone asks it of you. It comes from some not entirely ungrounded fear of being mugged. Instead, when this guy asked me, I did pull out my phone, but accompanied by an audible sigh, vaguely annoyed, and told this guy the time.

He heard my annoyance. He apologized, said that he had just lost his phone yesterday and how much it sucks not having a phone. I felt like a dickhead. I probably am a dickhead most of the time. I don't mean to be. But there are so many moments that I have closed myself off to by always being in some figurative crouch, hoping to prevent any sort of crazy from even coming near me.

The guy was really cute and really friendly. I wanted to know him, imagined that we could hang out and get a drink because it's not like he had a phone to contact any of his friends to meet up, that we could have fallen in love as we wandered Brooklyn and the night talking about phones and how sickeningly dependent we are on them and life in general. And yet I closed off to this fantasy from every even having whatever small chance at reality it may have had on some fantastical faraway land. Once I actually looked at this person, looked at his eyes, saw this human being, bothered to look away from the magazine in front of me, I saw this beautiful person, this human being, vulnerable, open, and looking to make a connection.

On the train ride home, I mulled further on my assholeness and also pondered these social changes that have occurred in my lifetime, that this person apologized for a casual approach to a stranger, something that in the time before smartphones used to be such a common occurrence, people asking other people with watches what time it was, the asking of people for directions before we each began carrying a GPS in our pockets. This is a fairly recent change. How many chance encounters have we closed ourselves off to with these technological changes? How many people will never know a happiness they may have because they never met that person who in not too far off times, would have asked them if they happened to have the time?

Taylor Swift - "Holy Ground"

It was yesterday that I really noticed. I was taking numerous selfies of myself at Brooklyn Bridge Park. Trying to select a real cute one to post on Instagram - because self-preservation isn't a full time occupation, Ani, so much as self-presentation is - I kept on not choosing photo after photo noticing striking crow's feet around my eyes in them. I am turning 33 in a couple months and so this isn't really shocking news that I am developing wrinkles around my eyes. I am going to spare you the gay panic of physical imperfections setting in more and more noticeably, of youth fading. These things happen. This is life. People age. People die. This is not another gay narrative fearing aging, fearing the loosening of one's grasp on youth, on what a large part of your culture celebrates as the erotic ideal.

And yet, after work today, were you to look, you would have found me in the aisles of Duane Reade looking at various eye creams for a good long while, reading reviews of certain ones on my phone while I stood in the aisle holding this or that brand, reading over their youth-renewing, age-defying, time-warping claims. 

I bought one of them, its claims of youth seeming the most convincing, skirting just perfectly that line where reality brushes up against fantasy. 

I got stoned tonight after class, ate a burrito, and listened to (and am still listening to) Taylor Swift, who grows on me more and more as a songwriter with each listen.