Where the Boys Are, page 3
I follow a hallway to the back and the noise gets louder. I try to read the graffiti covering the walls but it’s too dark, only the odd phrase jumps out, nothing that makes sense, private jokes about bands and groupies and activist groups long since disbanded. In the doorway to the main space a pair of girls gossip, forced to the fringes by the seething sweating crowd I can hear and smell in there. “…Girls and fucked them at school; all I know is…” one of them is saying, but I don’t linger, as much as I’m an eavesdropping addict. I keep moving because I’m picturing a crowd jam-packed with hot boys.
Which is exactly what I find. Boys in complicated leather coats, boys with Mohawks spiked up so high I swear they must have gotten hair extensions, boys shedding their winter jackets because the place is beastly hot with body heat. And the smell! It’s like sticking your nose in the armpits of fifty guys at once, from the fresh and clean to the stale and disgusting, but even the gross side of it is sexy, intimate, naughty.
I push into the crowd and look around for a space to stand in. The band at the front is a bunch of Latino guys singing in Spanish, their sound a sort of punked up surf-rock—have I ever seen Latino guys at a punk-rock show?—and I’m conscious of two things at once. One: the band is really good, in an interesting, exciting sort of way that most of the punk I’ve been hearing back home, at the Valatie Elks Lodge and in Greg’s basement, isn’t. Two: I don’t really care. The music’s not touching me. The spark is gone: that telltale tingle I used to get at the raw, naked sound of power chords and screechy boy voices. What does this mean? Am I broken? Have I become a sellout, an autistic drone like everybody else—an adult?
I don’t have a chance to be disturbed by this new development. I’ve never been surrounded by so many gorgeous young men before, and I repeat the resolution I made in Grand Central, make it a chant. I’m not leaving this city until I have sex with someone. At first I just say it to myself, but then I get bolder and start to mutter it, quietly, not that it matters, because the band is so loud people have to scream to be heard, and anyway, even if I were screaming it wouldn’t matter, because no one here knows me, no one here would care.
“Is it always this crowded?” I ask a girl sitting behind the merchandise table.
“No,” she says. “There’s a lot of pretty big bands playing tonight. Plus it’s a benefit for some kind of homeless organization, so, you know, lots of the political punk types turned out. The Stockyard Stoics are the headliners. Have you ever heard them?”
“No,” I say.
“They’re wonderful. You’re going to love them. This your first time at ABC No Rio?”
“Yeah,” I say, and offer her my hand. “I’m Simon.”
“I’m Susie,” she says, and shakes it. “You live in the city?”
“No, I live upstate.”
“Oh.”
“I gotta tell you, I’ve only been here like five minutes and this show knocks the pants off the rinky-dink punk shows my friends put on at the Elks Lodge and the Boys Club and stuff like that.”
“Yeah, this place is the best.”
Maybe punks are just much more resourceful down in the city, maybe they just have access to so much more stuff, but really, these kids have made themselves into stunning displays of punkness. Pants covered with band patches, jackets studded with giant spikes and chains and hooks, ears pierced with six safety pins, hair dyed to look like rainbow flags, punk-rock skinniness taken to disturbing extremes. If I lived in the city, I see, I’d have an eating disorder ten times worse than the one I have now.
Next to all this brilliant styling, the look I was so proud of when I double-checked it in my mom’s full-length mirror looks downright dumb. Long underwear shirt, a Sex Pistols T-shirt, a pair of ripped jeans? What the hell is this, a Nirvana concert? Anybody who wears a T-shirt from a band you can get at Sam Goody’s has got to be a loser. I see my chances of gagging on the cock of one of these guys dwindling fast.
From nervousness, I take out my camera and start taking pictures. The crowd is big enough that I can pretend I’m just taking general pictures when I’m actually zooming in on this hot boy or that one.
“Is this okay?” I ask the girl at the merch table, who for some reason I’m convinced is giving me the shark eye.
“Sure,” she says. “You just gotta respect other people when they say they don’t want to be photographed. We had this problem a couple of weeks ago—there was this old guy who used to come to all the shows, and he’d always bring this camera and take pictures of girls, and it was just totally creepy, so anyway, there was this band playing, and the singer’s a girl, and he’s right up front taking all these pictures, and the singer asked him to stop, and he wouldn’t. So the collective had a meeting and decided he was going to be banned from future No Rio events.”
“The collective?”
“Yeah, this place is run by a collective of volunteers who make all the major decisions. As long as you respect people and you’re not a pervert, you ought to be fine.”
“Who says I’m not a pervert?” I ask. “Although if I was, I’d be the sort that takes pictures of little boys, not little girls.”
“Well, then, that’s totally different. I am all for the sexual objectification of men. Way to fight patriarchy, dude!”
Solomon
I don’t notice the boy I end up leaving with until my friend Kris leans over and says in my ear, “Who’s your evil twin?” I look to where he’s pointing and see a white guy about my height, but that’s pretty much all we have in common.
“What are you talking about?” I ask Kris.
“He looks just like you.”
“You need to stop smoking crack,” I say, “it’s doing horrible things to your brain.”
“You two were separated at birth. You don’t see it?”
“Not even a teeny bit.”
“Okay. I’ll talk you through it. Okay? Look: if you took away the corny half-assed I’m-too-young-for-stubble-but-I-think-it-makes-me-look-older stubble, and the butch skinhead haircut that screams “I’m a total faggot softie trying to look tough,” and you took away the sparkling clean new clothes, and you gave the kid some lessons in style, well, there you are!”
“You’re retarded.”
“No I’m not. And now he’s seen us staring, and he’s staring back, but not at me! Because I don’t look like I might be his long-lost twin brother.”
“You’re so retarded.”
“Here he comes! Be still my beating heart.”
The boy in the Sex Pistols T-shirt comes and stands near us and pretends to be trying to get a better view of the band. As the crowd shifts and writhes he inches closer, until he’s standing as close to me as Kris.
“Aren’t these boys just divine?” Kris asks him between songs.
“Yeah, I really like their sound.”
“Who’s talking about sound? I mean their look. I want to have sex with each and every one of them.”
“I hear that,” he says, and smiles goofily, looking back and forth between us both.
Simon
I ask the scruffier one if he wants to smoke, and he does. I offer one to his friend, who just waves his hand and says, “I have much better ways of killing myself, thanks.”
“You come here a lot?” I ask on our way through the long narrow hall.
“I try to be here every Saturday. You know they do this every week. I love it. This is the best place in the city to see punk shows.”
“I always wanted to see a show at CBGB.”
“No you don’t,” he says. “That place is vile. Every single time I’ve been there, you hear fucking idiot guys in the bands saying all this homophobic and racist shit. It’s horrible. This place does a great job of screening out that kind of shit.”
“That’s good.”
“We can smoke out here,” he says, pushing open a rusty old door to show a courtyard like some wrecked urban garden somewhere in England after the war.
“Nowhere to sit,” I say, since the rain has soaked the benches and the tree stumps and the old ripped-up rocking chair.
“So who needs to sit,” he says, smiling, and out of nowhere he’s got a lit match cupped in his hand.
“I’m perfectly happy to stand,” I say, and move close so he can light the cigarette in my mouth. When it’s lit I don’t step back.
“My friend Kris says you look like you could be my long-lost twin brother,” he says. “Myself, I don’t see it.”
“Well, we’re both totally gorgeous,” I say. “So I can see how your friend would be confused.” A slight smell of body odor wafts from his shirt, which is tattered in a way that might be intentional but might not, and his pants look like a strong wind would shred them, and his hair is lustrous from grease and pomade and the light drizzle still splashing onto us. I move a hand through it, rub my fingers against his scalp. “You have nicer hair than me.”
“Aw, shucks,” he says. “I use a special shampoo called sweat.”
“Sexy.”
Solomon
In spite of the general hardcore-boy look, which I usually hate, I’m totally crushing out on this kid. He’s so clean-cut it cripples the hardcore vibe he’s trying to get across. One of his feet is keeping the back door open, so a faint bit of light lets me see his features. He slouches, which somehow makes him look taller, like he’s stooping down to keep from hitting his head. Yet he’s almost exactly my height. Something tells me he bought his jeans special for tonight. From Abercrombie & Fitch. The light from the door shows me how flat his ass is. Me, I’m in shadow.
“Let the door shut,” I say. “This courtyard is pretty neat at night.”
When it clangs closed, I point up at the tenements that surround us. It’s only eight PM, so there are lights in most of the windows. We see people moving around, living their lives.
“Wow,” he says. “New York City is voyeur heaven.”
“Where are you from?”
“I’m from a shitty little town upstate called Hudson. Horrible horrible place. I can’t wait to graduate and go to college and get a bazillion-dollar job and be able to move to New York City.”
“Sounds like a plan,” I say.
My eyes have adjusted and I can just make out his face. He’s looking at the shut door. “Will we be able to get back in?”
“Not sure.”
“Come here,” he says, and pulls me forward very gently by the face. With both hands on my chin. Our lips hit and he slides his hands around to the back of my head, rubs it, rolls his fingers all through my hair.
“I wish I’d showered before I came,” I say.
“I’m glad you didn’t,” he says, his voice a whisper. “Your hair is so soft.”
Simon
“You live around here?” I ask.
“No, not at all,” he says, and chuckles. “I live in…Queens,” and I swear he grimaces at the word.
“That’s far?”
“It’d take us an hour and a half to get there by subway.”
“By cab?”
“Just as long.” He looks up at the bright windows of the buildings above us, and from my egotistical overactive-imagination perspective his eyes are moist—he’s stricken at the thought of the chance he’s missing.
“Why don’t we get a hotel room?” I ask, my boldness making him blink. “I’m rolling in dough!”
“Are you kidding?” he asks. “Hotels are crazy expensive in New York!”
“You don’t know of any good cheap fleabag motels?” I ask. “I’ve always had fantasies about that. What’s the hotel where Sid Vicious killed his girlfriend?”
“I don’t know any places like that,” he says. “The only hotels I could even find are the touristy ones in Times Square.”
“Well then. Let’s go there. I’m telling you, I’ve been saving my pennies from the bookstore where I work, and I want to really live large on my one night in the big city.”
“I can chip in some,” he says, both hands sunk in his pockets.
“No, don’t be silly,” I say. “Listen, I’ve got three hundred dollars in my pocket and I don’t want to leave this city with a single penny of it.”
“I’ve never been to a hotel with anyone before,” he says, folding his arms and looking at the ground. His cigarette is done.
“Me either. Exciting, no?”
Solomon
“What do you mean you’ve never been on the subway before? You mean you walked all the way from Grand Central Station?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh my god! Why didn’t you take the subway?”
“It scared me. I couldn’t figure it out. I was afraid I’d get lost.”
“Wow.”
The rain has stopped completely. We walk toward the subway, heading for Times Square, heading for a hotel, and when we get off at Forty-second Street the Broadway shows must have just gotten out because the sidewalks are packed with people. Families from all over the country, misty-eyed after Cats or Phantom or whatever. Big crowds around stage doors, waiting for the stars to come out and sign things.
Simon
The subway takes forever coming, and I’m already out of things to say to this weird slightly smelly city kid. On the wall is an ad against animal abuse, with Russell Simmons squatting to hug his pit bull. Under the dog someone wrote PIT BULLS ARE DUMB. Under that, someone said, SO ARE PEOPLE BUT THEY BOTH DESERVE RESPECT. Further down the same platform, someone tagged JIHAD DEATH across the endless forehead of the fat bald guy from Seinfeld. On the train, two tired-looking black ladies talk about some rich rapper on the cover of a magazine one of them is holding. “And they’re always talking about their big Rolexes. Talking about how they come from the street, how they grew up in the projects, how they still got people there. I don’t care, long as I had anyone, third cousin, whatever, long as I had anyone in the projects you wouldn’t see a hundred-thousand-dollar watch on my arm.”
He takes me to a posh hotel in Times Square and we walk through the lobby and I’m feeling like a rich guy buying a hustler, I’m feeling on top of the world; I tell the lady at the desk I want a room “as high up as possible.” And the room is almost two hundred dollars, and I pay in cash, and it’s on the twenty-third floor, which doesn’t sound so high, but when we get there and we look out the window it feels very high.
“Wow,” he says, “I haven’t stayed in a hotel room since I was a little little kid.”
“Isn’t it exciting? Hotels make me feel…important.”
“I want to take a shower first,” he murmurs, softly, when I wrap him in a bear hug and bury my face in his neck. “I stink.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I say, my face burrowing down into his armpit. “I like it.”
“No, I really need to take a shower. I haven’t taken one in like forever.”
“Be my guest,” I say, magnanimously. Just in case he forgets he is. He’s in there a long time and I spend most of it at the window, watching the crawl of cab lights and the barely-visible blips that are actually human beings, human lives as valid as my own. The hotel room’s heat is up too high. When the shower stops I open the window and start to take off my clothes, listen to the noises he makes moving around in there. Faucet going on and off, towel scrubbing at his skin, toothbrush scratching at his teeth. Who carries a toothbrush around with them?
Solomon
He’s standing by the window when I leave the bathroom. I go back to join him, and we kiss for a long time, wrapped in an increasingly complicated hug. The lights are all out except for in the bathroom, but the door there is mostly shut, and we’re standing so that I can watch out the window. The city, throbbing like a giant organ. Nothing noble like a heart, more like a huge heap of intestines. Or some sick animal, dying slowly. Or the ocean.
In a hotel you know you belong. It’s like an apartment: money has changed hands, and money gives you legitimacy. When you’re sleeping on someone’s floor the dark outside is stronger, and louder. You’re only there by the grace of a courtesy that might vanish at any moment. And then where would you be?
Simon
Since I was thirteen I’ve fantasized about sucking my own dick, and this must be sort of what it feels like. His head bobs up and down and in the poor light from the half-shut bathroom door he looks just like me. What an egotistical little son of a bitch I am!
Solomon
As happy as I am, I have a hard time sleeping, and when I do fall asleep I keep waking up. I meditate on the lovely sight of his back, his neck, lit by light from the street. But when I try to curl up against him he twitches, jerks himself away. I wish I could go get my notebook out of my backpack. The stubble on his cheek, like the grain in an old black-and-white flick, jerks and jumps as he sleeps.
