Where the Boys Are

by William J. Mann

  Where the Boys Are

  A Novel

  William J. Mann

  For Tim, Victor, and

  the boys on the dance floor

  Our lives are better left to chance—I could have missed the pain. But I’d of had to miss the dance.

  —Rockell, “The Dance,”

  lyrics by Tony Arata

  New Year’s Eve 1999, New York City

  Jeff

  Across the dance floor, some guy’s squirting Windex in his mouth.

  “Now I’ve seen everything,” Henry says, all eyes and attitude.

  I just shake my head. “Believe me, Henry. You have not seen everything.”

  For here on the dance floor, nothing quite makes sense in the way it does in the world beyond. Here the ludicrous becomes the sublime. Dress in spandex and sequins and funny little hats. Ingest substances not intended for human consumption. Stick your tongue down the throat of a beautiful stranger. Take off your pants and dance in your underwear. That’s just the way things are.

  “Still,” Henry’s sputtering, shaking his head, “the things some people will do for a fucking high. I mean, Windex—”

  “Henry.” I place my palms against his sweaty chest and press my face close to his. Eyes to eyes, nose to nose. “No talking on the dance floor.”

  It’s my rule, and he knows it, even if he conveniently forgets it whenever he wants to start gabbing. Henry’s one of the chatty types. You know the kind I mean. The ones who insist on telling you, right in the middle of an awesome Rosabel club anthem remix, all about their new job or the size of the penis on their last trick or—worst of all—how tonight’s DJ just really sucks: “Can you believe how he’s mixing in all this trancey stuff with all this high-energy disco diva blah blah blah blah blah.”

  Dance! We’re here to dance!

  That’s why I come, anyway: to escape, to forget, to get swallowed up by a moist cocoon of four hundred men with the music spinning me higher and higher until it’s taken control, slipping past my defenses like the fingers of a stranger trespassing beneath the waistband of my underwear.

  That happens, too. One more example of the way things are.

  “Oh, shit, Jeff,” Henry says. “He saw me looking.”

  I roll my eyes. “Who?”

  “The Windex queen!”

  A few feet away, to the giddy disgust of the boys around him, the tall blond guy is pumping the bright-blue liquid down his throat. But his eyes have locked onto Henry’s, and he’s now sidling our way, his lanky body easily angling around the huddles of boyflesh.

  “Jeff, you’ve gotta hide me!” Henry yelps.

  I just laugh. “Didn’t I teach you to fight your own battles, buddy?”

  “How you boys doin’ tonight?” the Windex queen purrs, holding aloft his bottle like a prize. “Wanta get really twisted?”

  I give the guy the once-over. A dyed blond, skinny and shapeless, with tiny little buds for nipples, one of which is pierced with a small gold ring.

  “Thanks,” I tell him, “but we’re as twisted as we want to be.”

  “You boys are no fun,” he says, pouting, moving on to his next victims. Henry leans into me and breathes a sigh of relief.

  “Do you think that really is Windex?

  “Henry,” I remind him, “no talking on the dance floor.”

  Okay. So maybe you think I’m coming across a little overweening here. I don’t mean to be. Really, I don’t. Oh, I’m sure in the course of this you’re going to hear people say that I’m self-absorbed, arrogant, selfish. They said it last time, they’ll say it again. But it’s just that I’ve come here to dance, to close out the rest of the world for a night, to forget what I want so much to forget. Is that so wrong? So much to ask? I have no patience for dance floor vaudeville.

  And maybe tonight I’m a little more impatient than usual. You see, it’s getting close to midnight, and Lloyd still hasn’t shown.

  “Forgive me if I use my voice again, Jeff,” Henry says, drawing close. “But are you starting to think that Lloyd isn’t coming?”

  “He’s still got time,” I insist.

  Henry snorts. “And you’re still convinced he’s going to tell you he wants to move back in with you?”

  Here’s something you need to know about Henry: he’s my best friend and I love him and he’s terrific and all that, but he can be a total nag. I think somewhere down deep, Henry would like us to be more than just friends, and the idea of my ex-lover and me moving back in together probably unnerves him a little bit. So I just smile. “Well, we’ll just have to wait and see,” I suggest sweetly, “won’t we, Henry?”

  He just smirks and goes silent. Finally.

  We both fall into the music. It’s awesome tonight, being New Year’s and all. The Ecstasy is sending warm shivers thoughout my body. I reach over and run my hands down Henry’s torso, tweaking his nipples as I pass.

  He opens his eyes. “Just because you’re rolling, Jeff O’Brien, is no excuse to hit on your sister.”

  I pull in close. “You know you want me,” I tease.

  Henry pushes me away. “What I want,” he insists, “is to be in Miami. Brent is in Miami, and you can be sure he’ll tell us all about it.”

  Okay, a few more notes on Henry. I created this monster. Yes, I admit it. I take full responsibility for what he’s become. Henry Weiner was once a good boy who never had more than a couple of Heinekens at happy hour, whose idea of a big Saturday night out was watching retro Cyndi Lauper videos at Luxor with a couple of pals until midnight. He was one of those nameless, faceless guys you see on the sidelines of clubs, standing with their cocktails, watching the world pass them by. He was a 120-pound insurance-company geek on the fast track to corporate paralysis when I met him, enticing him to take off his shirt and step into the limelight. I’ll never forget the look of sheer wonderment on his face as he slipped in between Brent Whitehead and me on the dance floor. Now Henry weighs in at 185, has a hard-won six-pack of abs and a star-burst tattoo around his navel. Now it’s very important to Henry to keep pace with the other boys—especially Brent, circuit boy extraordinaire, who makes sure he’s at every important party around the nation and whose primary goal in life is to get a photo of his sweaty torso into the pages of Circuit Noize magazine.

  I look over at Henry with mock sympathy. “Now, now, buddy, we were just in Miami last month for the White Party. Let’s not become complete stereotypes, shall we?”

  He sniffs. “All I know is, it’s warm in Miami, and we froze our butts off on Tenth Avenue tonight.”

  “Hey, you’re the one that nixed the cab.”

  He shakes his finger at me. Literally. Like some old schoolmarm. “And well I did. After paying a hundred bucks to get in here tonight—not to mention what I had to fork over for the X—I wasn’t paying out any more cash than I had to.”

  I lace my fingers behind Henry’s back and pull him close, crotch to crotch. “So what happened to it?” I purr into his ear. “Ecstasy is supposed to give you a love for all mankind.”

  Henry smiles. Our faces are close enough that I can smell the Altoid in his mouth. In moments like these I can tell he wants to kiss me. Or me to kiss him. I can feel my dick swell against him despite myself.

  “I’m just not independently wealthy like you,” Henry needles. “And besides, it’s the millennium, Jeff. I’m always going to remember where I was when the twentieth century turned over into the twenty-first—and here I am, in New York of all places, where I could be any time, any year, any century.” He pouts. “And Victor Calderone is spinning in Miami. You love Victor Calderone, Jeff.”

  “Junior’s doing a fine job here.”

  Henry smirks. “So long as the power doesn’t shut off at midnight.
”

  “Oh, don’t start with the Y2K stuff.” I hold my hands up. “How many gallons of water did you stockpile again?”

  He ignores me. “At least in Miami we wouldn’t freeze without power.”

  “Henry.” I narrow my eyes at him. “Read my lips. Ix-nay on the dance floor talk.” I grab him around the waist just as Junior mixes in “Unspeakable Joy” by Kim English.

  Henry smiles nastily. “You know, maybe Lloyd got stuck in the thirteenth century and can’t make it back to the twenty-first.”

  “Don’t be snide, Henry.”

  Okay, time for a little more background. Lloyd—the guy I’m waiting for—the guy with whom I’ve spent the last eleven years of my life in a crazy back-and-forth pas de deux—had a first stop to make this evening before winding up here at Twilo. It was a past-life regression gathering at some lady’s house on the Upper West Side. Now, I can make fun of Lloyd’s New Agey-ness, but I will not tolerate others doing the same thing. Not even Henry.

  “I’m not being—” Henry suddenly stops. “Oh, God, Jeff. He’s coming back.”

  Two things at once: on my right, I spot the Windex queen approaching again, a tall flurry of arms with a mischievous gleam in his eyes, and on my left, beyond the perimeter of the dance floor, I catch a sudden flash of goatee and one well-rounded shoulder. Lloyd. He’s quickly obscured again by the throng of manflesh, but I’m sure it was him.

  “Come on,” the Windex queen is saying. “Just one little baby squirt?”

  I watch as the freak show pumps a dollop of the blue stuff into his mouth and swallows it, licking his lips. Henry makes a face in horror.

  “Girl,” I say, tapping a finger against his sticky, sinewy chest, “if you’re drinking Windex, then I’m a straight boy from Jersey City.”

  At that moment, the crowd parts, not unlike the Red Sea, in fact, and I spot him again. Lloyd. Our eyes connect. He waves when he sees me. God, how beautiful he looks. I quickly slip around the Windex queen to push into the throng of flesh.

  “What’s the matter?” the guy asks, mock-innocently. “Was it something I did?”

  Henry frowns. “It’s not you,” he says, raising his voice so I can hear. “It’s his ex-lover, with whom he’s expecting a roses-and-champagne reconciliation at midnight so they can fade out together behind the end credits and live happily ever after.”

  So let Henry be snide and sarcastic. That’s what sisters do best, isn’t it? Well, screw him. I’m not sure I still believe in happy everafters, given everything that’s happened in the last five years, but right now, spotting Lloyd across the dance floor, all that matters is that he’s here.

  Lloyd

  Even before I see him fully, I know it’s Jeff. That’s just the way it is with us. We have this uncanny way of finding each other, of connecting across great distances. Even during the time we were apart, if I would have a dream about him one night, he was sure to call the next morning. Don’t laugh. I believe in such things as psychic connections, soul mates, partners with whom you travel from life to life. How else to explain Jeff and me? It’s not as if we’re much alike. He actually enjoys these places with their smoke and sweat and stink and drugs. So call it whatever you want, but there is something bigger than the two of us that keeps us together. There has to be.

  “Hey!” Jeff pushes his way out of the snake pit of the dance floor.

  I can’t help laughing at the image. “You look like one of those devil kids emerging from the cornfield.”

  Jeff’s eyes widen and he raises his arms like a monster. “The Cheeldren of the Corn,” he intones ominously, then breaks into a broad grin. We both laugh and fall into each other’s arms. It’s one of our favorite bad movies, watched on a rainy day in Provincetown, a pan of brownies rapidly disappearing between us.

  We kiss. Lots of tongue and lips. I determine pretty quickly that Jeff is on X. His torso is sticky and wet. I’m shirtless, too, having adhered to the unwritten but widely observed policy of shirt removal moments after checking one’s coat, but unlike Jeff—who no doubt has already been here for a while, slipping and sliding across countless boys on the dance floor—I have yet to break into a sweat.

  “You look great, Cat,” I tell him. And he does—better all the time, it seems. Jeff’s always been good-looking—dark hair, classic features—but now he’s bigger, broader, more cut. He’s spent a lot of time at the gym over the past several years. And why not? He’s had nothing else to do and hasn’t needed to worry about money the way he used to. Besides, I think the gym, like his clubbing, is a way for him to escape. To forget. Jeff spends a lot of energy forgetting.

  “You, too, Dog,” he tells me. “You look great, too.” We kiss again.

  Our old nicknames flow easily. In fact, everything’s been surprisingly easy these past few months, almost impossibly so. We stand there pec to pec, chin to chin, arms wrapped around each other’s waists. We’re the same height, so we’re able to stare into each other’s eyes until we both, at the same time, let loose with a grin. That’s been happening a lot: whenever we look into each other’s eyes for any length of time, we just can’t hold back the smile.

  “I’m really glad you got here before midnight,” Jeff says softly, holding my face in his hands.

  I wink at him. “With twenty minutes to spare, too.”

  “I never doubted you for an instant.”

  Okay, so he probably did, but it’s sweet of him to pretend. He kisses me passionately for a moment, then pulls back to gaze into my eyes again.

  I smile wryly. “How much X did you do, Jeff?”

  “Just one bump.” He gets edgy, a little defensive—not what I want or what I intended. “You said you trusted me. You know I don’t get sloppy anymore.”

  I nod. “I know, Jeff. I just worry that a little X—”

  “Can lead to more? Please, Lloyd.” He kisses me. “I’m okay. Just expressive. You said I needed to be more expressive.”

  A point of order here: Jeff was once very expressive about things, without the need of any drug. I remember, when we lived together we’d have fights about the laundry, in which he’d kick the basket of clothes all the way down the stairs. Once, fed up with bill collectors, he tossed a ceramic dog his grandmother had given him across the room, where it shattered into a dozen pieces and left him heartbroken. I then painstakingly glued it back together for him as best I could.

  Jeff never used drugs in those days. The emotion was real, heartfelt. The old Jeff used to cry over episodes of Laverne and Shirley—whenever Laverne would realize what a schmuck she’d been and how happy she really was living with Shirley in a basement apartment in Milwaukee, and then the two of them would start singing “High Hopes” as the camera panned up and out through the window. Jeff would be over there blubbering on the couch, and I was never quite sure if I wanted to laugh or cry along with him.

  Then things happened. All the stuff he’s been trying so hard to forget. He started doing drugs—and the nasty ones: crystal and GHB—and he shut down, reined in all those emotions. I hardly knew him. The Jeff I’d lived with for six years hadn’t been afraid to let his feelings show. He might not have always known what they meant, but he let them flow. This new Jeff was as tight as a drum. It was a bad time. I worried he’d overdose. But he refused any contact with me or any of his old friends.

  Then he just quit. He called me one day, out of the blue, saying he was giving it all up. And for the first time in three years, he acknowledged why he’d turned to drugs. It was grief. About Javitz—our friend, our mentor, who’d had the audacity to die one night when Jeff wasn’t there. That was Javitz for you: always audacious.

  Just how Jeff had managed his epiphany, I wasn’t sure, and he hasn’t talked about it. I just worry that even a single bump of Ecstacy might lead him back, push him over the edge to that dark place again. But I’ve promised to trust him. If we’re rebuilding whatever it was we lost, I have to have faith in him. I have to believe in Jeff.

  “Lloyd,�
� he’s saying, kissing me again, “I want you to know something. I don’t ever want to celebrate another New Year’s Eve without you.”

  I smile. That much emotion alone is worth the price of admission. For three New Year’s Eves we were apart, and I missed him terribly every single year. Once New Year’s Eve had been a tradition for us: Jeff, me, Javitz, and our cat, Mr. Tompkins. Times Square would be on the television set, and a couple of bottles of champagne would disappear rapidly. The picture of domestic tranquility.

  Except, of course, it wasn’t, at least not toward the end. I admit it was me who stirred the pot, upset the apple cart, whatever cliché you want to use. I was a dog pacing the parameters of my pen, filled with a wanderlust I couldn’t explain. My karma in this life has always been about traveling, on journeys both within and without, and I had begun to question my confinement. I had no doubt that Jeff was my soul mate. Yet my own soul was yearning to see what else there might be out there for me.

  Okay, so I sound a bit highfalutin. I don’t mean to be. I can laugh at my cosmic quests as much as anyone. But it was heartfelt and honest. I loved Jeff, but it had all settled into something way too easy, far too predictable. So I left him. That’s what it boiled down to: I left him. I said we ought to try living apart and moved out. For a while we tried to maintain a facade of togetherness, but it couldn’t sustain itself.

  Especially after Javitz died. Everything—all of our trials over the past few years—always comes back to that.

  Jeff has taken my hand and moved us back toward the dance floor. He has a way of doing that: bringing me out of my head and back into the world. Is there any wonder why I missed him so?

  “I don’t want to leave Henry alone out there too long,” Jeff explains. “You know how he gets.”

  I smile. “I know how you get standing around when the music is this good.”

  I wish I could predict how he’ll react to the news I want to share with him. He’s changed so much in the way he responds to things. I don’t know whether he’ll be happy for me, or angry, or hurt, or indifferent. And when should I tell him? Certainly not on the dance floor. Jeff hates it when people try to talk to him on the dance floor.