Where the Boys Are, page 17
We sat in shocked silence for some time, and Melinda started to weep. Eventually, she was the one who broke the silence. “What are we going to do?”
Neither Stacy nor I had an answer to that.
Jane moved in with the sculptor the next day. Stacy found a studio apartment in Saint Paul. Nancy, having calmed down a bit, told us to take our time. With Jane’s help, I found a group house on Ridgewood Avenue that had an opening. The day I left I saw Melinda and Nancy sitting at the dining room table, both weeping quietly. I thought I heard Melinda say, “I can’t believe he did that to you.”
“It’s not the worst that’s happened to me since I came here,” seemed to be Nancy’s reply. I said my good-byes hastily and dragged my two duffle bags out to the waiting taxicab.
Weeks later, Jane received a postcard from Melinda, who had moved back to Decorah. In the note, Melinda said she’d seen city life, had witnessed its callous cruelty and casual squalor, and never wanted to live within sight of a skyline again. She gave her regards to everyone and said she was planning to become a teacher.
With my khaki slacks and penny loafers, I was a bit of an ill fit in that rickety Victorian mansion on Ridgewood Avenue, which was precariously perched on a litter-strewn slope above Highway 94, with downtown Minneapolis marooned on the other side of the freeway. But they said the house had been standing since 1894, so I decided not to worry about its foundation. There were eight bedrooms, and someone else was temporarily taking quarters in what had once been a formal dining room. The residents fell into three camps: homosexual men, vegan women, and a small posse of bisexual nudists. There was an old icebox, which the vegans actually filled with ice and used to refrigerate their soy milk and bean curd. I did not realize that the performer X was among the residents until I moved in, and I quickly observed that he more than anyone was able to maneuver freely between the house’s cliques. I learned that his real name was Christian McLeod, which sounded nearly as exotic as his stage moniker. When I was in the entry vestibule alone, I would thumb through his mail, fingering the letters addressed to him. Some people in the house called him Christian, some called him X. I asked which he preferred.
“I prefer whichever you like best,” he said.
The only bona fide couple in the house, Tory and Dean, were landscape architects—though they said their jobs usually involved scooping up dog poop from the yards of dowagers who lived in mansions near Lake of the Isles. They took a paternal liking to me, and I began to quiz them about X. “Be careful around his kind,” was all Dean had to say. “Oh, for crying out loud, he’s young,” Tory interjected, pointing at me. “Don’t be so prudish. Let him have some fun.”
“Just don’t let him break your heart,” Dean warned.
I had made the mistake of telling my housemates about my job at Kinko’s, which I described as a management training position. They didn’t know whether this made me an exploitive yuppie or just showed that I was easily duped into working overtime without pay. In any case, most days my shift started in the early evening, which gave me time to lounge around the house or pursue my interest in photography during the day. I took pictures of sagging old houses around Powderhorn Park. I documented the squalor of bridge underpasses, freeway exit ramps, and anything else I considered spooky or existential, having read Sartre in a senior year philosophy class.
At the house, I increasingly looked forward to any encounter at all that I might have with X, who often lounged in the sunporch down the hall from my room or wandered about in an oversize bathrobe that he didn’t bother to tie shut. He had been reading Kierkegaard and Kathy Acker lately, I noted. X was tall and sandy colored, too thin for some tastes. Few thought him beautiful, but then again few averted their eyes. In my case, initial intrigue was morphing into complete infatuation. I resolved to win his attention, and did it in a manner I thought he would respect. I decided to become a nudist.
Which is to say, wrapped in a towel on the way to the bathroom, when I had assured myself that there was nobody else nearby, I deliberately allowed the towel to slip off my waist as I passed the sunporch, feigning embarrassment. If X noticed, he didn’t give any sign of it, and continued reading.
So I had to up the ante. I sat by my window the next morning, counting off as residents and their guests left the house. Some few, who were home during the day, had to be tolerated as a risk factor, but I was careful to consider their schedules and listen for the creaking of floorboards. X took his perch on the old divan in the sunporch, its upholstery lacquered with age. My heart began to pound. I took off my clothes and stood inside my room, so exhilarated by the thought of walking naked past X that I immediately became aroused, and the cautious Iowan inside of me screamed not to take such a dare. Think of the things people will say about you, my inner voice roared. You’ll be the talk of the house, for crying out loud.
On the other hand, nothing ventured, nothing gained.
I pulled the door open and stood there, excited beyond all telling, knowing that X was just steps away. To fortify my courage, I recited, as best I could remember, Henry V’s Saint Crispin’s Day exhortation to his troops. I then stepped into the hall and turned toward the sunporch and the bathroom beyond. As I came into the opening in front of the porch I felt the hot sunlight washing over my pale flesh.
“Whoa,” X exclaimed. “The shy boy is bold today.”
I giggled and hurried on my way, closing the bathroom door quietly behind me. I took a lukewarm shower. As my erection faded, I wondered whom X would tell about my little exhibition. When I was done, of course, I had no towel. It was a contingency I had not planned for. I had to go back naked as well. I shook the water from my hair—it was long in those days—and made the return trip.
This time I looked in at X. He seemed to be waiting for me, sitting up with his bathrobe open. He beckoned me toward him.
“So what brings this joie de vivre on? Not that I’m complaining,” he said.
I said something along the lines of “I dunno.” I looked at him and he looked at me. The sight of his hazel eyes scanning my body excited me, and I became aroused again, letting him watch me rise. We both laughed a bit.
“It’s about time you loosened up,” he said, standing and slipping the terry cloth robe off his shoulders. He cloaked me in the robe to dry me off. Then he took it back and spread it down on the divan, asking me to sit down with him. I sat right next to X. I told him he was sweet to let me dry off on his robe. We held hands and then we held each other’s cocks and kissed very passionately. In the intensity of the moment, I forgot that anyone else from the house could walk right by us. X leaned me back and laid himself down on top of me, face-to-face, and I don’t think we stopped kissing at all during this repositioning.
Afterward, we cleaned up after ourselves, applying a damp cloth dipped in Woolite to spots on the old divan, but I was proud that a small stain remained, hardly a lonely one on that old piece of furniture. But I knew exactly which one represented the abandonment of my virginity.
For six months, we lived in a kind of coital bliss. I had practically abandoned my room in favor of his. He taught me positions and the practical aspects of seduction and foreplay. X was not ashamed to discuss these things, and the opportunity to instruct seemed to excite rather than dampen his enthusiasm. Everything seemed to be going fine, until I started prodding him to think about the future. Perhaps we should get a place of our own, I suggested.
X, who was on the verge of turning thirty, did not like talking about the future, making plans or commitments.
“I really want to be with you, only with you,” I told him.
“Let’s just take things one day at a time,” he replied quickly, patting me on the head. He was sometimes quick to silence me with a long kiss, and he wasn’t afraid to slip a hand down my boxer shorts at the same time. I learned to recognize these signs that I should stop talking.
But I was old-fashioned. Iowa mores were drilled into me, and I found myself trying to inject them into my bohemian lover. When X had an affair with Chaka, a vegan and a Wicca practitioner whom I had presumed to be a lesbian, it struck me to the core. I demanded that we move to our own apartment. He suggested that we cool things down, and admonished me for wanting commitments that I might later regret. What could I say? I thanked him for the brochures he gave me about a photography class at the MacPhail Institute. He did, after all, take more interest in my photography than anyone else in the house, or outside of it, for that matter.
During this “cooling down” phase, X spent less time in my area of the house, and seemed to have abandoned the sunroom altogether. He even started fastening his robe. Often, I found his door closed when I passed his room.
I was heartbroken, but stoic. I read Anna Karenina, rather prominently, hoping he’d notice and recognize my distress. But he was very busy applying for grant money and rehearsing a new performance piece. He spent more time away from the house than before. Word got around that he was seeing someone, a graphic designer famous for producing one of the early album covers for a local rock band that itself had gone on to national fame.
By the start of my second winter in the old icebox house, relations between us had thawed into a begrudging friendship. X even stopped by my room occasionally to look at photographs or drop off a flier about an upcoming show, and he was less fastidious about tying up his bathrobe than he had been in the months immediately following our split. Once, we even revisited the past, you might say, when he’d stopped by to return a book and found me in my bath towel. But we were both apologetic about it afterward and heartily agreed that it didn’t mean anything.
That was at the start of the winter when I became famous, and when everyone else got fed up with the cold and decided to leave town.
The weather turned bad in November, and stayed bad through April. It began with the biggest blizzard I’ve ever seen, one that closed schools for two days. As soon as the snow stopped falling, I put on my snow boots and went out with my camera to document the carnage. I photographed the lumpy outlines of cars in white burial mounds; snow like inchworms lining telephone wires, like lichen covering bare tree branches; snow reflected in the glass of office buildings; snowdrifts barricading the doors of houses; sloping piles of snow that seemed to drag mansard roofs down from houses. Jane, who also worked at Kinko’s now, helped me make postcards with the photos. They sold like hotcakes. The Café Weird on Lake Street invited me to enlarge some of the pictures for a show. These larger works all sold as well. All of a sudden I was the “snow guy.” The weekly tabloid City Pages even printed a small feature about my triumph, publishing a couple of images from my blizzard portfolio. At parties and gallery openings and even in the artsy sort of pubs, I was suddenly somebody who was known. It helped that I was young enough not to hear the slight tone of condescension when more avant-garde artists told me that my photos were “cute.” I was just glad to finally be someone about whom something could be said.
But even as my star was rising, the exodus of those I held dear had begun. Jane herself was the first to go. A psychic told her boyfriend, the sculptor, what he’d known all along: now is the time. After twenty years of dreaming about achieving a national reputation, he needed to reach for the stars. The two of them packed up an old station wagon, scraped the frost from their windows, and headed east to New York. Stacy didn’t actually leave the Twin Cities; she just disappeared with her fiancé into one of the outer suburbs stitched to the fringe of the metropolitan area. X was the shocker. As he hadn’t worked in any conventional sense for years, I wondered where he contemplated getting together enough money to move to California. But he and the graphic designer did just that, with an eye toward getting involved in independent films. Around that time X had also turned his attention to standup comedy, reasoning—perhaps correctly—that performing nude after the age of thirty wouldn’t draw as large a crowd as it had in his twenties. (In truth, he still had a lean and attractive body, but audiences were dropping off because everyone who wanted to see him already had). They hitchhiked to L.A. in March.
“Not to worry,” Dean of the landscaping duo told me. “Most of them will be back by June. It happens every winter. It gets cold. People feel pent up with cabin fever. Everyone says they’re leaving for one place or another, but most of them don’t go. And of the ones who do leave, half are back within six months, complaining about the crime or the smog or the high cost of everything where they went.”
He suggested I should just wait it out. But wait for what? I was already famous in Minneapolis, but I didn’t know what my next act was.
With X gone, I began frantically searching for love. I looked in coffee shops, at gallery openings, at the Gay 90s or the Saloon and even at the 19 Bar, but I found none. Instead, I was reduced to walking briskly past crowds near the dance floor, puffed up with attitude, just to see if I could turn heads. (Jane had taught me this trick.) I felt abandoned and shell shocked, especially when spring came and none of the migratory exiles returned as Dean had promised.
In the heat of July, I returned to photography almost obsessively, after abandoning it for a few months to revel in my fame. I took summertime photos of the exact locations covered in some of my famous blizzard photos, and paired the photos together. But this tripe did not startle anyone. I began photographing people—with their permission—hoping to break new ground. When I first saw Adrian, feeding pelicans from a pedestrian bridge over a small pond in Loring Park, I knew I wanted to shoot him right away. Of course, I also knew that I wanted much more than that. Adrian was black, and he had bleached the tips of his dreadlocks orange. He allowed me to photograph him sitting on a rail of the bridge, beside a pelican that was not afraid of people, with the IDS Tower in the background. His smile was guarded and flattering at the same time, like that of someone taking a dare or telling a secret. He was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen.
Adrian showed me a flier for his band, Same Time, Different Place, with a mimeographed picture of himself with two white girls. They were opening for Babes in Toyland at the 400 Club, so I knew they must have some kind of reputation. “I’m the boy in the girl band, or at least the girly boy in the girl band,” he explained. I’d never heard of his band, but my knowledge of the local music scene did not extend far beyond Prince, Husker Du and the Replacements.
Adrian was much shier than X. We talked for a long while in the park before I ventured to invite him back to Ridgewood Avenue, and we talked for an even longer time seated on my futon before I dared to touch his hair. I don’t think we started undressing each other until we’d driven down every conceivable lane of conversation at least twice. We kissed and giggled and got used to each other’s skin for a long while. I was amazed at how easily one could stumble upon sex in the city, how it might just be waiting for you in a park on the edge of downtown. I didn’t think to call it sex, though. I thought, I’ve stumbled upon love. I thought this as I was licking his nipples—he had the most sensitive nipples of any man I’ve ever met. He actually gasped when I kissed them.
The next morning, he came into the kitchen with me, grinning a bit sheepishly as we navigated around assorted housemates. I showed him the icebox that the vegans used, and he said he’d seen iceboxes in old houses before, but never one that was actually used.
Little did I know that the wheel of fortune was already spinning. Two days later, before Adrian and I had the chance to reconnoiter for a second date, I received two urgent phone messages from Jane in New York. I called back figuring she wanted a favor, perhaps for me to send something. But it was much more serious than all that.
“His roommate is moving out at the end of the month, and he’s so sweet. I can’t believe it, Fred. You’ll be living right across the hall from me.”
“But Jane, I can’t just leave right now. Things are starting to work out for me here. I’ve got irons in the fire. I’m planning to reprint some of the blizzard photos for Christmas cards.”
“Take the irons out of the fire and get your butt to New York. You can’t really make it as a big-time photographer in Minneapolis. I know there are some exceptions, and I know it sounds snobby, but to really become well known as an artist you have to be known in New York.”
“I need to think about it for a while.”
“Think about it? Fred, do you have any idea how hard it is to find an apartment or a sane roommate in New York? Both just landed in your lap. Move here, if it doesn’t work out you can always move back.”
“But I don’t even know this guy you want me to move in with. Shouldn’t I meet him or something?”
“There isn’t time. But guess what? He’s from Iowa. It’s perfect. His dad taught at Iowa State. He’s really into urban environmentalism. You’ll get along great.”
“Let me think about it for a few days. I just need to process this.”
“You can’t take that much time. He’ll get someone else. I’m going to tell him you want it. I’ll front the deposit for you. You can pay me back when you get here. I’m giving him the deposit tomorrow afternoon. So if you change your mind, call me before then. But don’t change your mind. New York needs you.”
After we hung up, it occurred to me that perhaps Minneapolis needed me more.
What sealed the deal, however, was the assurance that my roommate-to-be was from Iowa. Though I had no interest in going back home, I retained a provincial faith in the goodness of people from Iowa.
When I called Adrian, I told him what I believed to be true: that I’d be back in six months. I was just going to get my feet wet in New York, take a photography workshop if I could, explore the city’s cultural landscape. But I was committed to being part of the Minneapolis scene. After all, I already had a reputation and some clients. I don’t recall exactly what Adrian said, but he seemed stunned that it was all happening so fast.
