Sweet Tooth

by Tim Anderson

“YOU TOLD HIM I’VE NEVER DATED A GUY?”

  “YEAH, I DID, SORRY.”

  Ugh, really? I thought. Not wanting to take home a desperate virgin? That’s a thing? Either that or he was just being polite. Jesus. Strike two.

  I looked over at the bar, where the small number of actual adults old enough to drink congregated. Maybe there would be a dusty old professor of English among them who would take me home and read to me.

  I sauntered to the bar to check out the merchandise, and to my amazement saw a guy nursing a beer whom I’d had a crush on when I was in high school. He ran a gift shop in North Hills Mall that I used to go to so I could browse through the posters and also gawk at him. He was perfect for me: ten years older, tall, rugged, handsome, great arms, and completely out of my league.

  I’d never seen him dressed in anything but black jeans and a tight black T-shirt. He must have had dozens of the same ensemble. It suited him, I thought as I squeezed in beside him at the bar. Concerned about looking too bright-eyed, dopy, and virginal, I set my face with a mature, bored expression, and gazed over at him, full of what I hoped was enticing German ennui. He looked over at me. I said “Hey,” but didn’t smile because to smile was to buy into the lie that men are anything but trails of misery and deception, as young Werther might have put it if he were here with me at the bar watching epileptics shake it to the Lords of Acid.

  “Hi,” he said, sounding even more bored than me. He then reached out his arm behind me. I turned my head and closed my eyes, positive that at any moment I would feel his strong grip on my shoulder. A second later I opened them and saw that he was pulling his arm back, and his hand was holding a beer. Oh. I was standing in front of his beer. That’s what was happening there.

  The man in black left the bar and strolled over to one of the pillars by the dance floor, taking his beer with him. Bye, man in black. Bye, beer.

  Strike three.

  Desperation, the new fragrance by Tim Anderson. Makes you smell undateable, apparently.

  A few months later Jennifer and I were ensconced in Chapel Hill, slumming it in an exquisite basement apartment on Pritchard Avenue Extension. It smelled like centuries-old mold, was extremely poorly lit, had brown carpet that camouflaged the numerous jumping cave crickets that had probably lived there for generations, and was conveniently located next door to a married couple who clearly needed counseling, judging by the number of plates and coffee mugs being hurled against their kitchen/my bedroom wall. Most important, it was cheap as dirt and close to campus, exactly the type of glamorous abode any blossoming young gay boy would wish to plant his vanity mirror in, if only he could afford a vanity mirror and didn’t constantly dread seeing his own reflection.

  Known by its fans as “the Southern part of heaven,” Chapel Hill was allegedly North Carolina’s liberal oasis, a place the depraved and deprived could converge upon to let their freak flags fly. Were you a young boy who liked to wear your girlfriend’s skirts? Were you a skinhead in impossibly tight jeans who loved nothing more than to hang out constantly in front of a hipster pizza parlor? Did you love tuneless indie music and change your hair color according to the hue of your mood ring? Well, then, apparently Chapel Hill was the place for you, if the words of North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms were anything to go by. Once asked what he thought about the prospect of building a new state zoo, Helms said, “Why do we need a zoo when we could just put up a fence around Chapel Hill?” OK, that was a pretty good one.

  Chapel Hill was, at the time, the next big thing. It was 1992, Seattle was old news, and the Chapel Hill music scene was blowing up with nationally and internationally revered bands like Superchunk, Archers of Loaf, Flat Duo Jets, and Polvo, bringing unwashed young corduroy enthusiasts from all over the country to the hallowed ground of Franklin Street to see and be seen at local venues like the Cat’s Cradle, Local 506, the Hard Back Café, and The Cave. You couldn’t swing a guitar string on the street without lassoing at least one bassist, one drummer, and a few thrift-shop mamas wanting to be rock stars.

  Jennifer and I didn’t want to be rock stars. I played the violin but hadn’t picked it up in a few years, and Jennifer was tone deaf. (Ask her to sing “Lovesong” by The Cure for you sometime.) But we weren’t opposed to being close to those who wished to be rock stars. After a few months of waiting tables at a cocaine den with a truly horrendous record of health code violations called Colonel Chutney’s, Jennifer managed to get a job at Pepper’s Pizza, ground zero of Chapel Hill cool. Every employee there, to our naïve eyes, was in the top tier of the city’s social life, and if we could just touch the hems of their secondhand garments, we were bound to find out where all the best parties were. And maybe they would know if there’d be any gay people there.

  Each Pepper’s employee had some sort of cosmetic handicap that prevented him or her from getting a job in the real world: pink unwashed hair, tattooed faces, heroin eyes, bull-ring piercings, scabies, etc. It was a wonderland of hipster funk, and we wanted all up in it. So it was quite a coup when Jennifer, who had no outwardly visible signs of her potential as a dirty hipster unless she wore a shirt low-cut enough to show the peace sign tattoo on her left breast, landed a job in the kitchen. She set to work with gusto, and within no time she was as surly as the best of them.

  My first item of business was to try to find some damn gay friends. Immediately upon arriving in town, before even registering for classes, I called the office of the campus gay group, B-GLAD, the Bisexuals, Gays, Lesbians, and Allies for Diversity, because you gotta start somewhere, may as well take the easy route and grab the low-hanging fruits, no? No one picked up the phone, so I left a message.

  “Hi, hello, um, hey, this is, uh, my name is Tim and I’m tall and slim. Ha ha, just kidding. Anyway, just calling to find out about your group and stuff and, you know, just moved here and want to see what you guys are about so if you could give me a call…”

  A few days later I got a call from the president of the organization, a gentleman named Doug whose pants were, apparently, impossible to charm off.

  “Thanks for calling me back!” I said, genuinely surprised. “I wasn’t sure if maybe I got my phone number right or if maybe I didn’t press pound.”

  “Uh, yeah, so I got your message. What exactly is it you wanted to know?”

  “Oh, just, you know, stuff about what your organization does.” Specifically, I left unmentioned, whether there were any Speedo-sponsored ice cream socials planned.

  “Well, we meet once a week to discuss strategy for outreach and to plan activities. You can come to a meeting if you want.”

  “Great. And how big is the group?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Small but growing. Does it matter?”

  Defensive. OK. “Oh, no, I’m just, you know, curious.”

  “Yeah, well, there’s a trivia night coming up. You can come to that if you want.”

  “Sure, OK, well, that sounds like fun.” That did not sound like fun. “Thanks for your time, I’ll hopefully get a chance to meet you guys soon.”

  He hung up without saying good-bye, and I got off the phone feeling whatever the opposite of wooed is. For an organization called B-GLAD, their spokesman was awfully glum.

  Soon after that I went down to the liberal commie volunteer-run bookstore and purchased a pink triangle pin, sticking it to my backpack and feeling immediately on display like the fat lady at a carnival. This tiny pin, I hoped, would be a game changer. Visibility was key, it seemed to me, and I wanted it known what team I was standing out in left field for.

  One day a girl approached me after our American History class and asked me about the pin as we were walking out.

  “Hi, I’m sorry, I don’t want to pry, but I noticed that you have that pink triangle on your bag…?”

  “Yeah,” I said brightly, not sure that being chatted up by a friendly young lady was really what I’d had in mind when I stuck the pin to my bag.

  “Are you single?”

  “Yes!” I blurted
out, before laughing and then, in a more reserved tone, continuing. “I mean, yes, I am currently single.” OH MY GOD I’M SO LONELY PLEASE HELP ME.

  “Well, I was just thinking, I have a gay friend…”

  To a seasoned gay man, this is one of the most horrifying sentences in the English language. But I didn’t know this yet. She went on to tell me that her gay friend was newly single and looking, and she would love to set us up.

  “Oh, sure,” I said and shrugged, going for nonchalant and not at all desperate. “I’d love to meet him.”

  So a few days later we just happened to meet him after class on purpose. We walked out of the building, and all of a sudden a young gentleman walked up behind us, tapped the matchmaker on the shoulder, and gave her an enthusiastic hug. He was scruffy yet also pretty, like a choirboy after a bender in Berlin. He wore a raggedy old Madonna T-shirt and cut-off jean shorts, and he had eyes as red as a desert sunset.

  “Drex! Hey, girl, what the hell is up, hon?”

  “Hey, Joel! This is my friend Tim.”

  He looked me up and down and shook my hand limply. “Hi,” he said, with the fakest smile I’d ever seen in my nineteen years.

  “Hi, nice to meet you.” I smiled. Then, oops, he had to go.

  “Well, let’s set up a coffee date,” Drex said.

  “Yeah, OK,” he said, businesslike. We settled on an evening a few days away, and he departed.

  On the day of our coffee social, I got a call from Drex in the afternoon.

  “Hey, Tim, it’s Drex,” she said, sounding burdened.

  “Hey! We still on for tonight?”

  “Well, actually, Joel just called, and he said he’s not feeling well, so he’s cancelled.”

  “Oh. Oh, OK,” I said. This sickness of Joel’s was not a total surprise—he’d seemed to fall ill immediately upon meeting me, though I chose not to dwell on that. But denial, as they say, is more than a famous movie theater in Mesa, Arizona, so…

  “So we’ll just reschedule,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said, meaning the exact opposite. “I’ll see if he wants to do that.” Bless her, she was trying.

  I finally got the picture, and spent the next few hours bitch-slapping myself for not getting the picture sooner.

  So this was the “I have a gay friend” matchmaking game. More fun than Chinese water torture, less fun than dancing with a mop.

  “I’m gonna pierce my tongue,” Jennifer said one night as we sat in the living room taking bong hits and listening to Liz Phair.

  “You’re what?” I said as I drove an ultra-fine insulin syringe into the head of a stuffed bunny, one of a collection of stuffed animals Jennifer had housed on top of the entertainment center when we moved in. I’d always been lazy about properly disposing of my syringes after they were too dull to use, and one night after doing a few beer bongs at our neighbor’s house I’d come home to smoke some weed and eat a late-night dinner. Bleary-eyed and world-weary, I’d taken my insulin shot, noticed a fluffy stuffed panda looking at me all haughtily, and a new trend was born. Maybe it was me or the weed or the copious amount of alcohol, but I just thought the little critter actually looked cuter with a syringe coming out of its head. I didn’t plan to continue loading up the happy-faced bundles of fluff week after week, but I had really underestimated how satisfying it was to jab a syringe into something besides my own leg or stomach. Soon enough it became a hard habit to break. And it did make for a nice edgy and postmodern art installation for visitors to enjoy between bong hits. Plus, I wanted to see how long it would take for Jennifer to notice. Tonight was the night.

  “I wish you’d stop doing that,” she said as she exhaled a cloud of skank. “It’s creepy. Like, voodoo or something.”

  “You know what I wish?” I said, placing the stuffed bunny back on the entertainment center. “That Liz Phair would just shut the fuck up about dudes being disappointing. I mean, at least she’s getting laid. Like, all the time. Is there anything she does in her day-to-day life that involves not getting laid?”

  “So I think I’ll just do it myself, the piercing,” Jennifer said.

  “Or, oh, you know who really bugs me? En Vogue. Dancing around all sexy while pointing to some poor schmuck and singing he’s never gonna get it, in four-part harmony. It’s just cruel.”

  “Well, maybe next time he’ll give his woman a little respect,” Jennifer sighed. “Anyway, I figured I could just use one of your syringes.”

  “Oh, and Mick Jagger, cry me a river about not getting no satisfaction. It’s insulting to those of us who are really suffering.”

  “I’ll just inject some Anbesol into my tongue to numb it, and then once I can’t feel anything I’ll just jab a hole straight through.”

  “Ugh, and don’t get me started on fucking Patsy Cline.” I was not inclined to cut any pop, rock, or country star any slack whatsoever. I looked over at Jennifer for an amen of some sort. She stared at me blankly.

  “Wait,” I said, “did you just say Anbesol?”

  “I think that should work, don’t you?”

  “Piercing your own tongue? With one of my syringes and some Anbesol?”

  “Yeah.”

  I thought about someone else’s issue as hard as I was able to for a few seconds.

  “Hmm. I’d also have some whisky handy.”

  “I think you have kind of a sour expression on your face when you’re just standing around,” Drex told me one night when we were having dinner at her and her husband’s house in Carrboro. “It might make guys reluctant to approach you?” Drex had made me a little project of hers—she wanted to find me a man who would love me and accept me for the awkward, brittle, gangly little space monster I felt myself to be. “Like when you first got here, you looked like your cat had just shit on your favorite CD.”

  “But this is just my normal expression.”

  “You should try to make an effort to brighten your face up. You know, smile and raise your eyebrows or something. You have a tendency to look a little dismissive and judgmental. You know, to some people.”

  Perhaps she was right. I could be putting guys off with my unwitting scowling. I definitely needed some sort of coaching, because my experience at gay bars could best be described as “lacking any promise of sex whatsoever.” I had a hard time approaching anyone, and apparently everyone at the bar had been told by the door guy on their way in to just ignore the guy in the thrift-store shirt that smelled of mothballs because he’s got crabs.

  “Anyway,” Drex went on, “I’ve got a new guy for you. His name is Matt, and he’s just come out of the closet, so he’s a fellow newbie.”

  Matt was a friend of a friend of an old roommate of Drex’s. I showed up on a Sunday night at Drex’s friend’s old roommate’s house, where the matchmaking was to happen. The plan was for Matt and me to meet, then go out somewhere to hang. I sat around the kitchen table with Drex, her friend Cindy, and her old roommate Dan waiting for Matt to show up. When he arrived, he entered the room like a dervish saying hello to everyone, grinning from ear to ear, his eyes wide and expressive, his teeth polished and gleaming, his perfectly square jawline seemingly drawn by the good people at Marvel Comics. I stood up, and he shook my hand vigorously.

  “It’s so nice to meet you!” he enthused. Really? I thought.

  “It’s nice to meet you, too.” I smiled while I said it, keeping Drex’s advice in mind. I kept my smile attached to my face for as long as I could, then downgraded to a pleasant, engaging lip curl, while still keeping my eyebrows at attention.

  “So what are you guys gonna do?” Cindy asked him.

  I wasn’t sure what the answer was, but Matt had some thoughts.

  “I don’t know, I’d really like to go to the Power Company, what do you think, Tim?”

  The Power Company was a large multilevel gay club in downtown Durham, the biggest club in the Triangle.

  “Yeah, sure, that sounds fine,” I said, still smiling, my voice overflowing with gusto and verve.
Matt’s enthusiasm was contagious, and as I took in the view of his awkward fashion sense (silky black shirt buttoned up to the top under an angular tuxedo jacket, plus acid-washed jeans) and what my x-ray gay vision could sense was an impressive washboard stomach, I actually wasn’t having to force myself to smile. The guy seemed pretty nice.

  We decided that I would drive. I pulled out onto Franklin Street headed for Durham, and Matt kept the conversation going.

  “I’m so excited about going to the Power Company! I’ve never been. Have you been?”

  “No,” I said, pressing the clutch and preparing to switch gears. “Been wanting to. I’ve heard it’s humongous.”

  “Me too! Hopefully there’ll be some cute boys there tonight, even though it’s Sunday.”

  My foot slid off the clutch as I put the car into fourth, and the car shook and screeched. I slammed the clutch back down, and we stabilized. “Sorry about that!” I said. “Not sure what happened there.”

  “Hey, Tim,” Matt said, “I just want you to know that I’m really happy we’re doing this, but I wanted to be totally honest and tell you that I’m really not interested in dating you. I hope we can be friends and do things…as friends. Know what I mean?”

  I did my best to keep my plastic smile in place as I considered the endless string of words that were coming out of his pie hole. Hmm. Don’t people usually say they just want to be friends after a date is over? And does doing things as friends include at least some oral?

  “Oh, OK, well,” I stammered, “I’m glad you made that clear.”

  “I mean,” he interrupted, “is that cool with you? ’Cause I think you’re really cool.”

  “Oh, you know, sure,” I said, my head spinning. “It’ll just be nice to…have someone to go out to gay clubs with.” Yes, that would be nice.

  “Oh, I’m so glad that’s how you feel!” He hadn’t changed his tone of voice during the whole exchange—it was happy, enthusiastic, excited, friendly, cloying, and annoying.

  Thank God there was no dancing to be done at the club that night, since there was a drag show on. So we went upstairs, ordered some sodas, and sat overlooking the stage. The crowd was sparse and skewed a little older than us. Matt looked around at the talent like a kid in a candy store while I stared longingly at the exit signs. As the performances started, Matt’s face lit up even brighter than before, which I didn’t think would be possible seeing as he’d been grinning all night as if he were in a Mentos commercial. A queen named Pristine Taint, enveloped in every imaginable shade of green, took the stage and lip-synced a terrifyingly wonderful rendition of “Here Comes the Rain Again.” I nodded and said under my breath, “Amen, sister.”