Where the Boys Are, page 11
The bird whistled again.
Bruce raised his hand then opened his fingers. I stared at light shining through them. “I’ve no idea how long this streak of responsibility will last, Bruce. What if I wake up tomorrow and can’t say no to a twelve-pack? What if I feel like I’ll die without booze? Sometimes I feel so fucking lame. What if I’ve made no progress at all?”
“Bird,” Bruce said.
First thing I noticed that night as I sat in my chair at the window eating a salad I’d thrown together from stuff I’d bought at a grocery store, was the Eric Bana guy across from his boyfriend at the circular table. They shoveled food in their mouths while looking down at their plates. Pretty soon, the Brad Pitt guy stood up from his chair. I stopped eating. His boyfriend said something, and I could tell from the twist to his mouth the words were biting. The Brad Pitt guy turned his back to his boyfriend, and I sat forward in my seat. The Eric Bana guy said something else. He yelled it. I couldn’t make out the words. The Brad Pitt guy went as if to leave the room, but his boyfriend got in his way. They locked hands, got into a pushing match. The Brad Pitt guy struggled. His boyfriend held on. I imagined the sounds of grunting. Then the Brad Pitt guy finally shoved his boyfriend out of the way.
The Eric Bana guy stood where he was, and then he sank into his chair at the table. He pushed his plate away. A minute later, he put his head in his hands. My heart sped up. He stood up from his chair and flew from the room. Where were they? I rushed out of the apartment and stood on the lawn. A light in their bedroom came on and I rushed over, tripping on my own feet. I stood by the window, panting. I could feel my heart working blood through my veins. Then I peered into the window. Nothing. I craned my neck. I’d begun to sweat. There, I saw them. The Eric Bana guy sat on the end of the bed, his back to me. The Brad Pitt guy stood in front of him. Then his boyfriend stood, went to move past him, but the Brad Pitt guy grabbed him and held on. His boyfriend turned. They appeared to lock eyes. Then the Brad Pitt guy mouthed something. I love you, he said. Something urgent lodged in my throat. They pressed their foreheads together, holding each other around the shoulders, and stood that way illuminated by light.
Back inside my apartment, the phone rang. It was a foreign sound, maybe Mom. Thing was, could I talk to her? I just about let it ring too long before I picked up.
“Cam?” I heard a voice say.
“Yeah?”
“It’s Eugene.”
“Oh.” Outside my window, all dark.
“What are you doing?”
What was I doing? “Nothing much.”
“Want to hang out?”
“Was there an AA meeting tonight?” I tried to remember.
“There’s always an AA meeting,” he said. “I didn’t go.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not off the wagon or anything, just didn’t want to go.”
“Who’s your sponsor?”
“Melissa. Who’s yours?”
“I don’t remember his name. Oh yeah, Kurt. I think he’s friends with that Jeremy Johnson guy.”
“Yeah, they hang out. So you definitely won’t consider the newsletter?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think you should do it.”
“I don’t know.”
“So want to hang out?”
“And do what? Like sex?”
“No. I mean, I’d like to, but we don’t have to do that.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Yeah, what? You want to hang out?”
“Yeah,” I said again, and then I gave him directions to my apartment.
Not until I’d hung up did it occur to me I’d never done that before, given anyone directions to where I lived.
Eugene had gelled his hair again but not quite as obviously as before. He wore new jeans and a green T-shirt. He didn’t look so bad, I thought.
“Want a drink? I have…milk and water, oh and a couple root beers.”
“Yeah, sure. Root beer’s good. It’s hard, huh?”
“What is?” I opened the fridge and took out the sodas.
“Not drinking,” he said.
I came back with the root beers. “Yeah.” I handed him a can.
“Thanks.” He cracked it open, then said, “I want a beer so bad right now.”
I looked at him. “Really?”
“Hell yeah. I want a beer all the time, don’t you?”
“Yeah, I guess so.” I didn’t look at him as I sat on the couch.
“It’s okay, Cam. Seriously.”
“What is?”
“That we want to drink.”
I lifted the root beer to my mouth and then swallowed a bunch of carbonated syrup. Yeah, it would have been better if it had alcohol in it.
“Why did you drink?” he asked me.
“Why’d you?”
“Wow, okay, well, it was very cliché.”
“What do you mean?” I studied his face. He was probably blushing.
“To feel like I fit in,” Eugene said. “Like I said, totally cliché.” He lifted his soda can and drank so long I thought he might drown himself. When he finally set it down he covered his mouth to burp and then said, “Sorry.”
I shrugged. Eugene smiled. I felt myself smile too, which was weird, because I hadn’t expected to do that.
“You’re the first person who’s been cool to me the whole time I’ve been here,” I said.
Quiet. Then Eugene said, “Same here.”
Wonder who looked in on us as I reached for his hand?
WILD NIGHT
Simon Sheppard
O
San Francisco, city of horny ghosts…
Nobody likes a sentimental old fool, I suppose. And nostalgia, as the saying goes, ain’t what it used to be. But let me tell you (anyway) that yes, it was good to be young and horny way back in the 1970s—before gentrification, before HIV, before the death of dreams.
The Castro? The Castro was where you went to dance, to drink, and, in the early days, to hang out with the Cockettes after hours at the all-night donut shop. Though if you did crave quick cock, there was Jaguar Books, with its makeshift upstairs orgy room: hand over a mere twenty-five cents at the turnstile and it was just a short climb to something like ecstasy. And if something just a little grander was on the bill, the 1808 Club, six blocks away on Market Street, offered a maze of glory holes for Castro-area cocksuckers.
But if Eighteenth and Castro was the intersection of a burgeoning queer community, the town’s throbbing libido was based a little lower down, south of Market Street, South of the Slot. Down on Folsom Street.
I was young then, of course, and temporal distance lends enchantment. But I truly think it’s true: on those few gritty blocks bloomed a garden of earthly delights, a cock-filled cornucopia redolent of Weimar at its wildest, Sodom before the brimstone, Eden before the Fall.
Back then I was also, in my peculiarly jaded way, innocent…or at least inhibited. There were places, scenes, where I never set foot. There was the Cauldron, where “water sports” had nothing to do with surfing. And the Slot, where men fisted each other, a pursuit that seemed so anatomically improbable that when I first heard about it, I dismissed it as an urban myth…but no, it turned out that all it took was a bottle of poppers, some patience, and a glob of Crisco. And there was also the Catacombs, a dungeon so depraved, it was whispered, that the Slot was a convent by comparison.
(I did make it at least to the front desk of the Slot, where a boyfriend of mine worked as a towel boy. It is, I suppose, a minor-but-lasting regret of mine that that’s as far as I ever went.)
So, heavy kink was beyond my ken. I did, however, patronize a few of the more mundane penis-palaces. I got down on my knees in the misty precincts of the Ritch Street Baths’ tiled steam room, thrusting my tongue into the nether regions of a half-seen muscle-hunk, thereby contracting a positively gruesome case of shigellosis (though not even that erased my taste for rimming). The Bulldog Baths, down on Turk Street in the seamy Tenderloin, featured—if memory serves—the cab of a semi truck plunked down, shining headlights and all, in the middle of a rather butch orgy room, as well as a two-story cell block, a novelly transgressive mise-en-scène for the same old sodomy. The Twenty-first Street Baths, nearest bathhouse to the Castro district, was airy and uncontrived by comparison.
And I once paid a visit to the Sutro Baths, the city’s only coed bathhouse; the men were mostly heterosexual, the women decidedly outnumbered, and I dimly recall giving head to a very cute boy, who might or might not have been bisexual but in any case made the visit well worthwhile. I also remember a campout room, with tents set up in a dimly lit space achirp with the piped-in calls of crickets, an invitation to sex in the great faux outdoors. On second thought, that campout room might have been somewhere else; it’s been quite a while. (But hey, this is a love letter, not a grand tour.)
Still, the bathhouses, however fabulous, however hot the action (and who can ever forget the sight of that famous fister with his arm sunk improbably deep into another man, only to pull it out and reveal he was an amputee?), for all their sometimes-deluxe and always lust-filled ambience, ran second place in my affections to San Francisco’s infamous backroom bars.
Now there are those—queer men amongst them—who decry recreational sex. Just the other day, cruising for action on Craigslist, I ran across a posting by a no doubt splendid fellow who insisted that we gay guys grow up, stop fucking around, and take our rightful places as properly partnered monogamous men, preferably with rugrats in tow.
Sure, responsibility has its upside. And, if I’m honest with myself, I’ll have to fess up that I’ve wasted an uncountable number of hours in the pursuit of more-or-less random orgasms. When I should have been studying graphic design at City College, for instance, I often as not took a sex-filled study break in the men’s room. On the other hand, all the techniques I learned back in the era of X-Acto and hot wax layouts are as obsolete as blacksmithing, but I still recall that blond in the bulky white sweater who was my very first tearoom trick.
And heaven knows the action in the balcony of the Strand Theater kept me entertained through any number of execrable double features. It was, yes, a formative experience for me to get blown during the battle scenes of Young Winston, though the long-gone theater’s balcony, with its sticky floors, scampering rodents, and dozing junkies, now seems as long-ago and far-off as the Boer War.
Somewhere along the line, I’m sure I visited at least one of the provocatively titled “adult theaters” in the always-gamey Tenderloin—the Circle J? The Tearoom?—where classic rain-coat-on-the-lap mutual hand jobs were fitfully illuminated by the glow of grainy porn “loops.” And I dimly recall visiting the Church of Priapus, a sodomitical sanctuary where, in my flawed memory at least, the “services” were held in a grungy apartment reeking of cat pee. Ah, those were indeed the days.
And the nights.
After dark, you see, lust ran wild at wide-open San Francisco’s sex bars. In those days, before the Internet made getting laid as potentially easy as ordering out for pizza (and too often as frustrating as hell), a night at the backroom bars was perhaps the simplest, safest path to getting one’s rocks more-or-less off. And, unlike going to the baths, stopping by a bar for a blow was an impromptu, low-commitment affair; the borderline between a beer at the pub and public sex was permeable indeed.
I recall the feelings of anticipation as I alighted from the Muni bus and headed down some dimly lit street in what was then still a rather industrial part of the city, a neighborhood where faggots and funkiness had not yet been supplanted by het fashionistas strutting their stuff at bridge-and-tunnel boîtes. Heading down the sidewalk toward expected stand-up sex, humming Van Morrison’s “Wild Night” to myself, I felt so very naughty, so much more sleazily mature than I’d been when I first moved to San Francisco and settled into a gay hippie commune not far from Golden Gate Park, a delightfully drug-soaked place where Sylvester and the other Cockettes would come to call, and where I rather successfully kicked over the traces of my well-behaved middle-class upbringing.
Okay, I still wasn’t nearly as rakish as I thought I was. Yes, I went to the weekly slave auctions at the Arena bar, but mostly to see Mister Marcus fling embarrassing questions at nearly naked contestants who, when commanded to, readily bent over to display their well-used holes. I had very little idea, though, of what actually went on once the slaves were taken home by the Masters who’d successfully bid for them; it would be another decade or longer before I learned to swing a flogger and properly degrade tied-up bottomboys. Poor me.
My still-vanilla nature didn’t stop me, however, from hanging out at the Black and Blue, where, if fading memory serves, a gleaming motorcycle hung suspended over the pool table and a semisecluded little corner alcove provided cover for cocksucking.
There was, too, the even more suavely monikered Hungry Hole. I’m sure I hung out there, I’m sure that I swallowed gallons of what porn writer Dirk Vanden dubbed “someone’s unborn children,” but I’ll be damned if I remember a single thing about the place. Except the name. And though the orgy room at the hyperbutch Ambush had a popper-soaked notoriety that approached the status of legend, I have no memory of playing there, either. Maybe the chaps-and-chains ambience intimidated me. Or maybe I was too stoned at the time for memories to stick.
I do vividly recall the back room at Folsom Prison, even though it was pitch black, save a single dim red bulb somewhere ceilingward. That was a venue for venery at its most anonymous, where touch, taste, and smell were all you had to go on. On a good night, bounties of sweaty flesh—indistinguishable as its owners might have been in that Stygian, popper-infused gloom—fused the transcendent and the trashy and the true.
Best of all, though, was the Boot Camp, where the back room was in fact in the front room, an orgiastic area partitioned off from the bar by nothing more than a few oil drums. I still remember—or at least think I remember, which is pretty much the same thing, really—one stand-up fuck, my bottomboy perched on a bench while I plowed away, as one of the breakthrough booty moments of my life.
If you are, like me, one of the fortunate ones who slutted around back then and still managed to survive, then you most likely have your own memories, your own favorite dives, too. Ah, where is the sperm of yesteryear?
Okay, sure, I was looking for love—a love I was shortly to find in an enduring, endearingly open relationship that is, I’m thrilled to note, still going strong. But that search for affection didn’t preclude the call of those wild nights, that quest for meaningless, objectified, endlessly lovely male-to-male (to-male-to-male-to-male, sometimes) sex. Because San Francisco was, as it had always been, about adventure, possibility, the gilded bacchanal. Or at least so the myth goes.
And then came the crash, part, as it happened, of one of the greatest health crises in the history of humankind. Okay, nobody saw it coming. But even if, as Prince has pointed out, parties weren’t made to last, this particular orgy wound down especially quickly and brutally, with a sickening viral thud.
We all know the story. The butch boys and fabulous fisters started dropping like flies. In, tellingly, 1984, then-mayor Dianne Feinstein shut down the bathhouses…which, truth be told, had not been all that proactive in the face of oncoming plague. Folsom Street became a ghost town, Castro Street an outpatient ward. Larry Kramer kvetched at us. Homocon Andrew Sullivan castigated us for being immature and irresponsible, even while he was secretly cruising for bareback sex. We were goaded to disavow sex, drugs, and rock and roll, unless they were, respectively: in the context of a committed relationship; Viagra; and the Clash’s soundtrack to a Jaguar ad.
In the bedraggled City by the Bay, sex took a decided nosedive. Defunct backroom bars and bathhouses were supplanted by no-private-cubicles sex clubs, from the clean and well-lighted Eros, to Mike’s Night Gallery, which was neither. The hospital overlooking Buena Vista Park was turned into pricey condos, the neighbors began complaining about hanky-panky in the underbrush, and defoliation followed. The overgrown paths at Land’s End—where I’d screwed a dog-walking redhead slung over a log while his pooch waited patiently—fell under the supervision of the National Park Service, and families replaced fucking. And, lest we forgot and got a hard-on, the walking wounded of Castro Street served as a memento mori: Not only silence equaled death. Sex did, too.
Yet, even amongst the trendy restaurants and trendier nightspots, and even amidst the plague, South-of-Market sex in bars persisted. There was the dangerously crowded patio of the Powerhouse. And, sleaziest of all, My Place, a hangout for pervs from every walk of life, from tweaked hipsters to closeted husbands; like the Strand Theater before it, My Place epitomized the great democracy of dick. And let’s not even talk about what took place at the urinal trough. Sure, the bar was engaged in a running battle with the powers that be, which led to some odd regulations: once I was reprimanded by a barback who told me I could fuck my friend in the back of the bar, but only if his trousers remained up around his thighs. Go figure. Eventually, the state’s Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control got its way and permanently shut the joint down, and then there were none. More or less.
Now the Strand stands shuttered on Market Street, awaiting the wrecking ball. A discount supermarket has been built on the site of Folsom Prison, while the Black and Blue’s former home now houses, chromatically enough, a paint store. Folsom Street Barracks bathhouse, destroyed in a massive 1981 fire, has been replaced by a het-yuppie bar serving microbrewery beers. And where the Boot Camp reigned, there’s now a Chinese restaurant. At 1808 Market Street there stands the chastely welcoming GLBT Community Center, apparently unhaunted despite being built over untold orgasms’ graveyard. At least the Arena was succeeded by the relocated Stud, the city’s original hippie-stoner bar, which didn’t host sex, but did feature Yoko Ono on the jukebox.
