Boys Keep Swinging

by Jake Shears

  The next day, I took a flight to the Islip airport (it was the cheapest to fly into), where I caught a train to Penn Station. At one point we stopped suddenly on the tracks, the lights blinking out. I sat in the dark for hours, an unremarkable tangle of frozen trees just outside the window. A conductor sounding like she had throat cancer came on the loudspeaker to say we were experiencing difficulties and would be moving again shortly. Lady, I thought, it sounds like you’re experiencing difficulties and need to go to the hospital. The air in the car was getting cold. I pulled my cheap Old Navy coat closer to my neck.

  My only belongings sat near the train doors—two overstuffed suitcases and a backpack. I hadn’t known what to bring but had ended up leaving behind some of my favorite concert T-shirts in order to make room for long johns. My tattered backpack was heavy with books. I wanted to pull one out to pass the time, but it was too dark on the train to read. There was nothing to do but gaze out into the fuzzy darkness.

  Two men in suits who were clearly from New York sat across from me and talked about their jobs in finance. As the hours passed, they turned to me and, making small talk, asked about where I was from. I was bored by their conversation but flattered that they seemed interested. I asked one of them if he liked taking the subway. I was surprised when he told me he hadn’t taken a subway in years. I thought that everybody in New York did.

  Finally the lights fluttered on and we began moving again. Everyone around me looked tired. The lights of civilization flashed at the windows, then turned jet-black as the train plunged underground. We pulled into Penn Station and I shook hands with the two men. “Good luck,” they said. I wrestled with my luggage and managed to drag it onto the first escalator. There were so many people, and my suitcases were tipping over as I tried to steer them. The “good luck” those men had wished now seemed like a snarky jab.

  I reached the glaring fluorescent lights of the main floor. A subtle exit sign above the throng led me to a huge set of stairs. They towered like something you’d find on a Vegas stage, only with the rhinestones sanded off. There was no way I could get my bags to the top. Panicking, I walked in circles and wrung my hands, something I do when I’m anxious. In the midst of the chaos, the thought of finding an elevator didn’t cross my mind. All the other commuters, angling their paths in complicated patterns, knew where they were going. I considered asking for help, but to ask for assistance would have been embarrassing and people were walking by too fast.

  I couldn’t drag one bag up at a time because I assumed that if I left the other bag for a moment it could be easily stolen. Desperate, I took a breath and pulled the monoliths up, stair by stair, my heavy backpack making me feel like I could topple backward. Pausing to catch my breath, I remembered one of those stories about a mother who had so much adrenaline that she lifted a car off her baby. My forearms screamed; the climb was agonizing. If I loosened my grip, my luggage would tumble away, possibly knocking somebody behind me down like a bowling pin. I cried out as I reached the top, dropped my bags like burning pans, and shook my arms as I did a small dance of pain.

  Automatic doors hissed, opening into the loud city night. Brakes screeched, and the wind whipped at my scarfless neck. The line for a cab was rows deep and the thrill of arrival was exchanged for a feeling of dread. I had stepped into a mouth of ice, the buildings its jagged teeth, and between them, I was nothing but a tiny crumb of food.

  Lucy Blackburn, a college friend from Occidental in Los Angeles, now lived in a neighborhood called Gowanus in Brooklyn. But everywhere in New York could have been anywhere, for all I knew. I arrived at Lucy’s modest apartment building and carried the suitcases up the stairs once again, but now I could do it one at a time. She opened the door and squealed, a beacon of warmth and familiarity. I dropped the backpack and exhaled.

  “You picked a cold night,” she said. “It’s supposed to get, like, ten below. Hang on a sec, let me get you wine.” She retreated to the kitchen but kept talking. “I was supposed to go to this play tonight, but I was like, hell no. Too cold. So how was your trip? Was it really two days to get—?” She emerged with the drinks and stopped. I was crying in my hands.

  This was so stupid. I was totally fine. I laughed as I picked off tears with my fingers. I told her it had just been a long trip and slumped back on the couch. We talked, draining our glasses a few times, and I welcomed the small head rush. Lucy went to bed and left me on the couch. I kicked off my shoes and peeled away my pants, lay down, and pulled the soft blanket up to my chin. I knew right away I was going to have a hard time falling asleep.

  My eyes felt like they were bugging out of my head, darting under my closed lids as they still saw visions of the city. How could I possibly sleep? I was in New York! “Tonight” from West Side Story, the Sharks and Jets snapping their fingers and dancing, played in my ears. I saw David Byrne in Stop Making Sense, doing the herky-jerky in his oversize suit, Debbie Harry pouting in front of the Manhattan skyline. Sleep was going to be impossible. Instead of trying, I stared through the dim room. On the wall was a hologram poster for the movie Species 2. Depending on your perspective, the image vacillated between a beautiful woman in a fetal pose and a monstrous, green alien. Waiting to be hatched.

  I still hadn’t graduated from college. School was a placeholder, a grace period to make sure I got in the right getaway car, spare time to figure out how I would avoid a desk job in an office. I took classes that I actually wanted to take, trying my best to avoid requirements that I had no interest in. I had five semesters left to graduate, and wanted to spend them doing the most fun thing I could think of: writing fiction. Eugene Lang College, in the West Village, was perfect, with its special focus on writing workshops. I was glad to see a lot of queer kids, but I knew school wasn’t going to be the center of my social life. I was more interested in the people outside its doors.

  When I left the school on my first day of orientation, I didn’t really care where I ended up. I had no idea which way was north or south, but I could see the World Trade Center on certain street corners, which helped to reset my internal map. The storefronts and restaurants I passed were intimidating. I hadn’t eaten since finding a breakfast sandwich in Brooklyn, and I was hungry. Block after block, I passed places selling any kind of food I’d ever want, but I had this irrational fear that I would be spotted as a tourist, so I just kept walking. I finally got up the nerve to step into an Italian eatery with tomatoes painted on the walls. I ordered the cheapest thing on the menu, minestrone soup. I must have seemed like I was from another planet, because my waitress told me I was the most polite customer she’d ever had.

  I kept heading east as the masses, many done with work, jammed the sidewalks. It was getting dark. The yellow streetlights flicked on. The cold was accumulating in the dark spaces between the storefronts. The cheery rainbow-lit Indian restaurants, looking like an acid trip, jazzed up First Avenue. I passed Cafe Pick Me Up and thought it was a place where people would go to literally get picked up, like a singles bar. I was such an idiot.

  That night in front of the bathroom sink at Lucy’s I looked at my body in the mirror, all juts and angles. My eyes were still too big for my face. I turned and examined my flat butt and still felt like that prepubescent kid, not too long ago, praying to God for his armpit hair to start growing. It was going to take a lot to shake off this little-boy thing. I did everything I could to look older. Still, I wondered if I should take my hoop earrings with the beads out of my ears. They suddenly looked uncool.

  I wasn’t twenty-one yet, but had that same ID I had used in Seattle. “David Joseph Wiktorski” still looked like me about as much as Chita Rivera did. But I had all his stats, address, and astrological sign memorized in case any bouncer got wise and quizzed me. Not really having any friends yet, I’d be going out by myself. It was strange, though: When I finally did turn twenty-one, the ID just disappeared, as if it had never been there in the first place. A lot of stuff in my life happened like that. I got what I needed just as
I needed it.

  For example, a month before moving to New York, I met Gavin at a queer friend’s boozy birthday party in Seattle. He was a lanky, corduroy-clad guy with bushy sideburns, and he always seemed to be wearing orange or olive. We discovered we’d both be moving to New York at the same time and agreed right then and there that we’d move in together. He would find an apartment by the time I arrived.

  We talked on the phone and he told me he’d discovered the perfect place, that I was going to love it. It was in a neighborhood called Crown Heights, very up-and-coming with a real community vibe, he said. The apartment was shotgun style, two bedrooms, but one of them was “makeshift,” whatever that meant. Apparently there was room for a desk in the kitchen. He kept saying it was an amazing deal. It was just going to cost us 350 bucks each a month. I knew it was probably a dump, but I felt like I could handle anything.

  When I went to bed on Lucy’s couch again that night, it felt like I was in a little pocket, tucked away inside this giant hive. I thought of every single person, and all their dollhouse rooms, stacked atop each other like Jenga blocks, each building like a Russian nesting doll. I fell asleep thinking of bees. How wonderful it would be to have a place here, my own little hidey-hole in the hive.

  The subway ride to Crown Heights took longer than I’d first expected, and when you ascended the stairs to the street you could tell you were definitely not in Manhattan anymore. The neighborhood bustled but was weary from some unseen weight: Derelict people muttered past, and cars shook from their own earsplitting bass. Between the train and our apartment there was a Laundromat that resided behind an ancient scratched window. It looked like a vortex of despair. Gavin said a place down the block had great meat pies; it was run by a family that had been in the neighborhood forever. That sounded promising, but the jars of pigs’ feet in the window scared me off. I felt glares from fellow pedestrians and it made me nervous. Gavin’s enthusiasm for the sketchy neighborhood always sounded like he was trying to convince himself more than he was trying to convince me.

  Our apartment building was on the ironically named Park Place. Leading from the sidewalk there was a crumbling walkway that ended at an erratically painted crimson door, with splotches on it that looked as if someone had just been slashed. The first day we were there, Gavin rummaged through his murse for the keys. But we didn’t need keys. I gently pushed the door and it flew inward. The doorknob was broken and the lock had been kicked in by someone. Maybe they had just been locked out. I tried to remain optimistic as I stepped into the dark foyer, which reeked of pee. There were various papers and debris scattered on the peeling linoleum. It resembled the inside of a defunct dishwasher, dirty plates and all.

  I walked up the chipped stairs two at a time to the apartment on the third floor. It had a working lock this time, and the door hadn’t been kicked in, thank Christ, but looked like it easily could have been. My heart was sinking fast. This was going to be so much worse than I imagined. I opened the door.

  It was just an empty railroad apartment. Small, with the slight smell of leaking gas, but I felt a comfort in its blank potential. There was a little kitchen area with a cheery window and a bathroom on the side. Beyond it was an arid hallway, which was my “bedroom.” There was no door on either threshold, but I could at least fit a twin bed and have enough room to walk past it. Beyond my hallway was Gavin’s bedroom, with windows and a closing door. I couldn’t argue; I mean, he found the place. And for the time being, I was stuck with it.

  Soon after moving in, I thought I’d found an extra window. There was an indented square, painted the same yellowish white as the wall. I walked over, pulled the handle with a loud, wood-breaking crack, and swung it inward. A cloud of stale dust and cobwebs poured forth like something in an ancient cursed tomb. It was an old shaft. All sound disappeared into it, yet there was a soft roar emanating from its depths, like from a seashell you would find on a beach in hell. I poked my head in, looked down to see what was on the bottom, and was confronted by a whispering, endless blackness, a gateway to some dimension I’d rather not visit. Withdrawing from its maw, and shutting it with some elbow grease, I decided to just keep that thing closed.

  Early mornings seemed to sand off the neighborhood’s sharpest edges. It was the only time of day that seemed safe-ish. I pushed open the wrecked front door and made my entrances into the freezing air, stepping down the walkway framed by two strips of crusty, frozen dirt. My first stop was always the Jamaican pot-pie shop on the end of our block. With the most grateful smile I could muster, I received their watery coffee like a precious elixir, ignoring the first gritty swallow but appreciating its warmth.

  As I passed off my crumpled dollars to the emotionless man behind the counter, I felt like he could see the green on my skin as if it were as clear as the darkness of his. I’d never felt so white in my life. Perhaps, I thought, my unease here stemmed from some kind of racism I carried, buried deep, that had now been unknowingly and unwittingly uncovered. How else could I explain it? But there was another angle that made me tense that I couldn’t ignore: I was blatantly gay. There was no way I was passing for a straight guy, with my bright colors, combat boots, short bleached hair, swishy gait, and, worst of all, my voice—a voice that I had tried all my life to hammer the femininity out of, to no avail. But I had become used to walking down the street, just being myself. The thought of having to tone it down, just to get by unnoticed, rankled me. I’d done too much work to get this far and have to pack it in.

  I was unprepared for the weather, stacked with layers, sweaters on top of sweaters. But I was still cold. I’d spend evenings in what was going to be my sad Laundromat for the foreseeable future. It had cracked yellow walls and corroded detergent machines. Grim-faced moms were inside, accompanied by children, screaming with glee and throwing themselves around like marshmallow pinballs.

  My feelings on my current situation switched from happiness to devastation as often as I passed under store awnings, like fast-moving clouds that made the sun flicker and hide again. I longed for the familiarity of my favorite cafés in Seattle. It was so easy, being there. One day in Crown Heights, I spotted a sign for a bookstore across from the subway, but my excitement was punctured when I realized it was some kind of religious reading room, looking just as destitute and crumbling as the Laundromat a block away. There was nothing in the landscape that I recognized.

  Each day as I made my way into Manhattan I felt catapulted through the intestines of the subway. I watched strange men on the platforms, yelling over the screech of wheels, their eyes aflame. I’d listen to their freaky prophecies and wonder where they laid their heads at night. One day I saw a heap of junk in the corner of a subway car I was in; riders were giving it a wide berth. At first I thought it was garbage, but then I saw the appendage of an actual human being under the layers of debris, accompanied by the smell of rotting flesh. It was frightening, I’d never seen people in such bad shape.

  I discovered that the best way to brave the long ride was to do it with other people, convincing casual friends from school to get beers with me and take the train back to the Park Place apartment. I got the sense that when we arrived, they realized it wasn’t much of a destination, after all. But we drank and listened to Goldie or Tricky on my desktop PC speakers, while I tried to make up for the bleak surroundings with funny stories and sometimes weed. I brought home straight guys from my classes, both of us so hungry for company we were able to talk our way through an evening, our knees drawn up to our chests on my twin bed. It was a familiar and stale sensation, some small part of me hoping they would let their knees down and kiss me. There was probably some small part of them praying I wouldn’t try such a thing.

  The city outside was voluminous and dark and lonely. I tried to not be scared, told myself I’d made the right decision coming to New York. But at dusk, when I skittered from the station to my building, doing my best to stay out of the shadows, I was disquieted, looking over my shoulder while simultaneously trying
not to look back.

  Wonder Bar in the East Village was my first hangout. Nashom, a towering, gorgeous black man, tended bar in the long, rectangular room, which was shaped like a loaf of bread. The groovy interior was painted a green zebra-striped camouflage. I stationed myself on a stool early in the evenings and wrote in my notebook splayed on the bar, scratching away with my pen, nodding my head to the house music played by the DJ, visible through a cutout portal at the far end of the room. I ordered vodka tonics and lost myself in whatever story I was working on.

  Older, drunk men sidled up to me. “Hey, there,” they said with their gray suits and glassy eyes. “What are you writing?”

  I’d cover the page, self-conscious, and tell them it was just a story.

  “You’re cute,” they’d say. “A little guy, small. You know that?” I’d turn back to face the bar, flushed, not knowing how to respond, except to shrink away when their arms slithered around my shoulders. “What, you don’t like me?” They’d turn to the empty air beside them. “He doesn’t like me.”

  Nashom, the bartender, would lean in. “Can you take your drink elsewhere? You’re bothering him.” I’d exhale and flash a grateful grimace.

  “Don’t be afraid to tell those guys to fuck off,” he told me once. “If you don’t want somebody talking to you, you don’t have to talk to them.”

  “I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings.”

  “You could break a bottle over their heads,” he said. “Those motherfuckers are too drunk to feel a thing.”

  There’d always be a friendly, coherent man with nice eyes or a solid build who wouldn’t be too intoxicated and invite me back to his place. The thought of slogging to Brooklyn so late at night wasn’t as enticing as sharing a bed with a sexy stranger who lived within walking distance. Wherever we went, I still didn’t have any sense of where we really were. He’d point out various restaurants and shops I’d say I’d check out. We’d enter some unmarked door with chipped paint or a smeared window, or a fancy lobby with a doorman. Sometimes it would be a closet-size apartment or an unfinished loft that looked like a handful of people lived there. He’d show me his photography portfolio, or tell me about his styling job. We’d fall on the mattress or climb to the bed by a ladder, engage in fumbling foreplay, never fucking, then, after coming, drift off, smushed up against fresh drywall or some broken nightstand. I’d creep out the next morning, gingerly climbing over a bicycle in the entryway, or we’d wake up and make breakfast. Then I’d walk to school, my backpack already with me, wondering if anyone would notice that I was wearing yesterday’s clothes. I usually never saw him again.