Where the Boys Are

by William J. Mann

  But I can’t. I can’t stop thinking about Henry. Worrying about him, actually. The world Jeff introduced him to can’t offer him the insight or solace he seeks. It’s a place of denial, a place where the wounded run for refuge. Oh, who can blame them for dancing their asses off? But it’s just running away from the inevitable. Brent didn’t die from the virus that lurked in his bloodstream, but from his refusal to face it, to integrate it, to take power over it—and from it.

  I let out a long sigh and open the door to my room. I switch on the light.

  Eva’s standing there, glaring at me.

  “What …?” I sputter. “What are you doing in here?”

  I’d left the door unlocked only for the few minutes that it took to walk Henry downstairs and see him off. And here she is, standing in the center of my room, holding something in her hands.

  She blushes. “I’m sorry, Lloyd. I was leaving you a gift.”

  “A gift?”

  She holds out a framed photograph. The two of us standing in the snow outside Nirvana. The day of our closing. “Happy sixth-month anniversary,” she says.

  My heart is still thudding in my ears from the start she gave me. “You could have given it to me downstairs. I don’t like anyone in my room.”

  I notice her visibly stiffen. “You had Henry in here all day,” she says.

  “That’s my business.”

  Her face twists in desperation. “It’s mine, too! I live here! This is our home!” She starts to cry. “You’ve been pushing me away because you’re seeing Henry now. Isn’t that right?”

  I feel my cheeks flush in anger. “I’m not seeing Henry.”

  “Oh, Lloyd! Why have you turned on me?”

  I sigh, dropping my hands to my side. “I haven’t turned on you, Eva. I’ve simply told you I think you need to be in therapy to work on your own issues. It’s the only way I can see us moving forward together. And I think it would be much healthier if we each had our own sets of friends, our own lives.”

  “That’s not how this was supposed to be!”

  “Oh? And how did you think it was supposed to be, Eva?”

  “I thought … I thought … we would be together,” she says in a little voice.

  I feel exasperated. “Is that why you locked me in my room, Eva? To keep me with you, and away from Jeff?”

  “I didn’t, Lloyd. I swear.”

  I lower my face close to hers. “Then how about all those E-mails, Eva? All those E-mails Jeff sent me that I never got?”

  She looks up at me with sudden terror in her eyes. I know I need to be careful here, that confrontation might not be the best approach. But it’s time—long past time, in fact—that she be held accountable for these things. Maybe it’s the shock she needs that will finally get her to look at her behavior.

  “Did you think I wouldn’t find out, Eva?” I ask, trying to keep my voice calm and level. “Until I began using my laptop, I read all my E-mail on the main computer downstairs, the one you log on to every morning before I get up. It must have kept you busy, constantly checking for and deleting all of Jeff’s E-mails.”

  “Stop!” she shouts, putting her hands to her ears, dropping the photo to the floor. The glass shatters. She makes a sound, shaking her hands in tiny fists.

  “No,” I tell her forcefully. “No more scenes!” I rest my hands on her shoulders. “I know that deep down inside you there’s a decent, strong woman, and that’s who I’m talking to right now. I can overlook a lot, but not dishonesty. Admit to me what you did and we’ll find a way to work this out.”

  “No!” she cries, breaking free from my grip.

  “Eva, you’ve got to stop trying to turn me into Steven. Steven was a gay man, just like me—with a life of his own just like me! You can’t make me into what you hoped Steven would be!”

  “Stop talking about him!”

  “Why? Because you’re afraid I’ll tell you what I know? That your anniversary wasn’t on Valentine’s Day—that Valentine’s Day was Steven’s and Ty’s anniversary? That Steven and Ty were lovers, and that he would have left you if he hadn’t gotten sick?”

  She slaps me across the face. I take a step backward in shock.

  Her face is white. Her look is one I’ve never seen before. A mixture of rage, hatred, fear, and desperation. It terrifies me.

  “I’d like the ring back, please,” she says in a low, hard voice. “You’ve never cared enough to wear it.”

  I study her. It’s as if she’d just drunk a potion and turned into something else. No more tears. Now her face is contorted, her mouth full of fangs. I just stand there looking at her.

  “My ring!” she shouts.

  I open my drawer and retrieve it, handing it to her. She takes it and looks down at it in her hand.

  “This should go to someone who cares,” she says, pushing it down into her pocket savagely.

  “Eva, if you don’t think I’ve cared, then you’re wrong—”

  She cuts me off. “Oh, you think you know me so well,” she growls in a voice alien to my ears. Low and full of contempt. “You think you know so much.”

  I watch her. She moves toward me, her hands held out like claws at her side.

  “Well, you don’t know anything,” she spits. Her eyes grow large as they glare up at me. “Anything!”

  “Eva,” I say, trying to calm her.

  She screeches suddenly like a banshee. She’s in my face, her hands just inches from my skin, her nails ready to scratch my eyes out. Then she pulls back, shaking her head, the tears flying.

  “You think you know me, but you don’t, not at all,” she sobs. “Oh, but you’ll learn, Lloyd. You’ll find out what I’m really like.”

  She rushes from my room, slamming the door behind her. I quickly lock it, thankful that the key is in my pocket.

  Was that a threat? For the first time, I feel fear in this house. Fear of her, of what she might do. Of what she might be capable of doing. I’m bigger, stronger, but there was such rage in her face. She had hit me, and came close to doing so again. What had she meant, that I’ll find out what she’s really like?

  I’ve got to get a grip here. It’s my fear, my utter disappointment, the shattering of all my dreams. I stoop down to pick up the shards of glass from the photograph. I feel trapped here in my room. A feeling of despair washes over me, and I start to cry, looking down at our smiling faces. How much hope we’d had then. How had we gotten to this place?

  I cry harder. For a man who believes in a purpose for everything in life, in this moment I can’t see anything that makes sense.

  One Month Later, The Folsom Street Fair, San Francisco

  Jeff

  San Francisco. Is there any gay man on the planet who, on his first visit to the City by the Bay, hasn’t fallen in love with the place?

  Anthony sure does. He’s standing here on top of Twin Peaks, his arms outstretched, the wind in his hair, looking down at the city, turning all at once in a circle, marveling at the panoramic vista of sea and sky and rolling land. “So open,” he says, his voice choking up. He’s actually getting emotional over it. “So free. Nothing in the way. You can see forever up here!”

  We’ve come to San Francisco for the Folsom Street Fair, and I’m giving Anthony a tour of the city. From Twin Peaks we head down to South of Market, where the fair stretches from Seventh to Twelfth Street. We’re hardly what you’d consider leather guys, but the Fair is a wide-open, inclusive event, three hundred thousand strong. Everyone is leather for a day—kind of like St. Patrick’s Day, when everyone becomes an honorary Irishman for twenty-four hours. Just as I did last year, I proudly strapped on the leather harness Javitz bought for me so long ago. It does make my pecs look pretty good.

  Anthony attracts the lion’s share of attention, however, wearing a pair of my leather pants and no shirt. Strangers come up to him to run their hands down his torso, marveling at his abs. He’s in his glory. It’s still summer here, eighty degrees without a pinch of humidity; back ho
me the weather has already turned chilly. San Francisco seems a Shangri-la to Anthony, a gay paradise of love and sex.

  And isn’t it? We started our tour in the Castro, where Anthony was struck by the history of the place, just as I had been over a decade earlier, when Javitz first showed it to me. This was ground zero for queerdom, and Anthony drank up my tales of gay history with a voracious thirst.

  “This was where Harvey Milk had his camera shop,” I told him.

  He looked through the glass, then back at me. “Tell me again who he was.”

  So I filled him in, recounting Milk’s legendary out-of-the-closet career in the seventies, and how the riots after his assassination proved once and for all what kind of collective power angry queers could wield.

  “One more gay man killed by the forces of reaction,” I mused, looking up Castro Street toward Market, thinking of the generations of gay men who had crossed at that intersection, so many now gone.

  Anthony was looking over at me, the sun highlighting his hair. “What happened to Harvey Milk’s killer, Jeff?” he asked softly.

  “They let him out,” I spit. “He served only a few years. Finally he killed himself.”

  “Is that what he should have done?” Anthony asked me. “Was that only right—that he took his own life?”

  I remember thinking it was an odd question. “Yes,” I said. “I suppose given that justice hadn’t been served by the courts, it was the only way the whole tragedy could ever come to a close.”

  Anthony just nodded. What was he thinking? Why didn’t he talk? Why, after all this time?

  Despite my playing tour guide for him, things haven’t really been all that rosy between us. Not for over a month, really, not since my meeting with Mrs. Riley. I mean, here I am, knowing about his past but unable to talk to him about it. I’ve wanted so much to convey Mrs. Riley’s message to him, but after Brent’s death it seemed impossible. Anthony became a high-strung bundle of nerves, easily rattled, quick to dissolve into tears. Raising anything I’d learned risked setting him off. I’ve come to realize just how emotionally fragile he is.

  “Do you want to talk, Anthony?” I’ve asked several times, trying to get him to open up. “About the real reason Brent’s death has so upset you? Do you finally want to talk about your past?”

  “No!” he’s cried. In his eyes I’ve seen—what? Terror? Shame? Madness? Maybe all of them, but mostly it’s desperation. I let the matter drop.

  So the distance has only grown, and Anthony surely feels it. He’s gone back to sleeping on the couch, a move I made no attempt to change. I’ve begun writing, the first tentative pages of a story, the first attempt I’ve made in almost two years. I spend my days at my computer, while Anthony watches television alone. He knows things have changed between us. On the flight out here, he looked over at me with those puppy-dog eyes of his and said, “Jeff, I have a feeling when we go back to Boston, you’re going to want me to get my own place.”

  I agreed it might be best.

  I just can’t keep up the pretense with him anymore. You have to understand what I mean. How can I go on being intimate with someone who doesn’t trust me enough to share the most basic facts of his life—and who continues to disappear one night a week without explanation?

  And there’s something else, too. Lloyd’s been coming to Boston fairly regularly. Things between Lloyd and Eva have deteriorated pretty rapidly over the last month. He jumps at any chance to get out of Province-town and come up to Boston—and not just to see me, as it turns out. He and Henry, wonder of wonders, have become quite the buds. Lloyd even went with Henry and Shane to the Russian River a few weeks ago. Lloyd, at a circuit party, dancing all shirtless and sweaty with several hundred other guys. I admit I felt a little piqued, given how Lloyd would never, ever consider doing that with me. “It was awesome,” he told me. “I felt such a bond, such a connection with the guys there.”

  “What have I been trying to tell you?” I asked, exasperated. “The circuit isn’t just about mindless drug abuse.”

  Still, I tried not to act all pissy about it. That would totally backfire. Lloyd would get aggravated, and I’d give Henry the satisfaction of thinking I’m actually jealous of their friendship. Isn’t that a crazy thought? So I just said I was really glad Lloyd had had a good time and that maybe he’d cut me a little slack in the future about the whole circuit scene.

  Besides, it wasn’t like I could’ve gone with them or anything, not with Anthony on my hands. He’s really been a mess these past few weeks since Brent died, and he’s always worse right after one of Lloyd’s visits. Twice Anthony came in to find Lloyd and me hunkered down on the couch watching old movies, Mr. Tompkins snoring between us. He just headed into the bathroom and stayed there until the movie was over and Lloyd left for Provincetown.

  In many ways, I think both Anthony and I view San Francisco as a good-bye trip. Sad, maybe, but inevitable. At least we’ve managed a few smiles together over the past few hours. Anthony’s thunderstruck by the fair: all the leather, the whipping demonstrations, the boys in studded collars being led around on leashes by their masters. Anthony’s eyes bug at the sight of a rubber-clad woman dripping wax on the upturned nipples of a bound girl-slave. His head keeps whipping around to watch the hundreds of butts, some tight and hard, others flabby and hairy, protruding from black leather chaps.

  “You’d never see anything like this in Boston,” he gasps.

  “Sodom by the Sea,” I tell him.

  The trip was planned months before, back when we all envisioned it to be a happy excursion. But the flight out here had been miserable. Not only had Anthony pouted the whole way, but Henry was still distant: cordial but aloof, as he’s been for months. I’m not even sure if we’re friends anymore. He and Shane have plans to stay elsewhere, while Anthony and I are crashing with Zed, the guy I dated briefly last year. That, of course, has made Anthony even more insecure, fearful that I’ll end up sleeping with Zed again. All in all, a wretched flight, made worse by turbulence from Cincinnati to the Rockies.

  But once we landed in the fabled Golden City, our spirits rose. I even permitted myself to take Anthony on the tour. It’s a glorious day, the Golden Gate sparkling in the sun. I remember my own first visit to the city, as a bright-eyed twink on the arm of Javitz. How I loved the place; never, not even in New York, had I seen so many queers. Even then there were still a few Castro clones walking around, in their tight jeans, flannel shirts and handlebar mustaches, though most would be extinct, due to AIDS and the fashion revolt against them, within a few years.

  I loved just as much the topography of the place. Turn a corner and suddenly you’re at the top of a hill, looking down a long, long lane that rises and falls to the water below. Behind you, mountains scrape the sky, and it’s rare that anything obstructs your view. Anthony, too, was in awe of this as he stood atop Twin Peaks, tears in his eyes, like a Jew on Mount Sinai, or a Muslim finally arrived in Mecca.

  Yet Anthony’s emotion, like so much about him, remains curious. His wonder is perhaps understandable to anyone from the East, where towns are tucked into valleys, not spread over hills, and where buildings reach so high and cluster so tightly together that even a view into the next block is often impossible. But why the tears? Why did Anthony weep at such a vast expanse of freedom, at seeing the wideness of the world, the limitless opportunity in front of him?

  A snippet of conversation comes back to me:

  “I can’t stand being inside for too long. Especially in places as small as that apartment.”

  “A little claustrophobic, eh?”

  “Yeah. Actually, a lot claustrophobic.”

  “Look, Jeff,” he’s saying now, pulling on my hand. “This guy’s eating fire.”

  In front of us, a burly man in leather overalls is swallowing flames from a stick as if they were cotton candy.

  “Anthony,” I tell him, suddenly conscious of the time, “you can stay and watch, but I need to hustle if I want to catch Varla Jea
n.” Varla Jean Merman, Provincetown’s own drag queen for the new millennium, is performing in a few minutes on the stage at Seventh Street. “We can meet up later.”

  “No,” he says, running after me to catch up. “I’ll come with you.”

  So like a child …

  That’s what Randy Phillips had said about him. You know who I’m talking about, don’t you? Randy Phillips. R. Phillips, from the apartment in Chelsea. The guy Anthony had been with in New York before he met me.

  “He was always afraid of getting lost,” Randy explained. “He stuck to me like glue—until New Year’s Eve, that is, when he met you.”

  There was bitterness in his voice. I guess I can understand it. In his view, I took Anthony from him. Stole him away from his very house.

  Yes, my investigations have continued. Lloyd’s idea was a good one, and as soon as we returned from New York, I found the phone number for R. Phillips online. I called and left a message, explaining I was a friend of Anthony Sabe’s; not surprisingly, he didn’t call me back. But I was persistent, finally catching him at home on a Sunday morning. He wasn’t too happy to hear from me, especially when he realized who I was.

  But he didn’t hang up on me. He seemed curious to know what had become of the golden boy he’d met in Miami, who’d so briefly brightened up his winter.

  “Have you found out much about him?” he asked me …

  “No. Actually, I was hoping maybe you might tell me a few things. You see, I’m worried about him.”

  “He know you’re calling?”

  “No,” I had to admit.

  “You’re out of line, dude, going behind his back like this,” Randy said.

  I acknowledged I probably was. “But I wouldn’t be calling you if I felt there were any other options. You see, I’ve come to care for him a great deal, and his state of mind has become very fragile of late. A friend of ours died, and he’s been really upset. I was simply hoping you might have some insight.”