by Jake Shears
“Who’s he?” I asked.
“Ah, that’s my boyfriend,” Steve said.
That was a naive rookie move on my part. I’d let my guard down and gotten my hopes up at the same time. Excusing myself, I toweled off and dressed, making sure Steve got a good look at the ass he was missing as I hiked up my jeans. I threw my underwear in Matthew’s dryer and passed the open door of his bedroom. There was a black leather sling hanging from bolts in the ceiling. God help ’em, I thought. They were going to have a long night. Without saying goodbye to anyone I slipped out and started the walk up to Fourteenth Street to catch the train.
IT WAS FEBRUARY OF 2001, and I was working at Paper magazine.
“So the Gucci sandals are priced at $399?” I asked with the phone pressed hard into my ear, cradled on my shoulder. I marked up my page with a red pen as fast as I could.
“That’s correct,” the man on the other end said. He was the head buyer at Barneys. I was halfway through fact-checking a small fashion piece that had to be turned in later that afternoon.
“Are the sandals from the summer collection?” I asked, moving down the list.
“Yes.”
“Okay. Next, there’s some kind of key chain thing from Hurmees that’s priced at two hundred.”
Silence on the other end of the line, then a laugh.
“What was that?” He paused. “What did you call it?”
“A key chain? Hurmees?”
He cackled. “Jesus Christ, did you just get here from Nebraska? It’s pronounced ‘air-may.’ How can you not know that?”
“I’m sorry.” I could feel my face flush. “I usually work on music articles.”
“You might want to stick to that,” he said.
I hung up the embarrassing phone call and turned to Gary Pini in the seat next to me. “How was I supposed to know it’s not Hurmees? I can’t afford to buy that kind of stuff.”
“Not to be confused with herpes.” He didn’t take his eyes off his bulbous iMac. I sighed and realized I was crumpling the copy in my hands. I glanced around the office, worried that someone might have heard my gaffe.
Gary spun around in his seat, all sympathy. “Oh, those retail queens. Think they know it all. You got what you needed, just go turn it in.” Gary was in his fifties, and the nicest guy in the office. He had formerly run a record label, and now Kim Hastreiter and David Hershkovits, the co–editors in chief, let him have his own space to work on various projects in his retirement. He always gave me tips on good parties that were happening downtown and seemed to know just about everything going on in the city at any given moment.
“You going to Click and Drag tonight?” he asked.
“Yeah, I’m dancing. You coming?”
“I’ll make it eventually. I have to stop by Deitch Projects first. There’s some dinner where these artists are apparently building a walkway over people while they’re eating.”
“Maybe that buyer from Barneys will be there and they’ll drop a hammer on his head.” I stood up and went to deliver the piece.
The office for Paper was a maze of desks and anxiety, deadlines and heads down, hushed conversations punctuated with loud exclamations, personality the most valuable currency. Mickey Boardman, the fashion editor, strolled up the aisles in his sequined cardigans. “I want cool kids doing fabulous things!” He clapped his hands, talking to no one and everyone at the same time. “That’s what this magazine is about!” Copy was handed off as in a relay race, and any nonchalance was a ruse: With so much going on, everyone had to ignore each other to get any work done.
“Mark!” I grabbed at his sleeve as he shuffled past my desk. Mark Jacobs was one of the editors: a gangly, Roman-nosed party boy with a penchant for wearing ’90s rave T-shirts. He was so ahead of the curve, he made things ironic while they were still in circulation. Mark stopped and looked down at me, expressionless. He didn’t bother with a greeting.
“I’m dancing tonight, at Click and Drag. It’s at FUN now . . . in Chinatown.” I pulled out a flyer and placed it in his hand. He grimaced and walked away as if I had just handed him a religious pamphlet. “Debbie Harry’s singing . . .” I called after him. He collapsed into his chair and put his head in his hands.
“Jason!” To my right, Erik Meers, my boss, materialized. “I’ve got four Beautiful People for you. I’ll need them by the end of next week.” He placed a small stack of xeroxed photos in front of me. “The contacts are on the back. Just take it from here, please.” Erik was the managing editor, square and uptight, but gay with a pair of baby blues that were easy to get lost in.
I’d known I needed to find an internship somewhere, and working for a magazine sounded like the most fun. Interview was a long shot, and Time Out New York was utilitarian but not cool enough. I had been reading Paper since I had arrived in the city, and Peter Murdock, an interiors photographer I had met at the Cock one night, was a contributor and had taken me to a couple of their parties. They drew a pansexual mix of sophisticates without being too exclusive.
Paper’s focus was on the creatives of the city. And through that office I saw a way in. I could eavesdrop and learn what people were up to, where they were going. To my interview, I had worn a maroon turtleneck and tight jeans, with a fake-fur-lined brown pleather snow-bunny jacket. They called me to come in and work the next day.
It was my last semester at school and I had two writing workshops left, so I could be at the office most days. I was fact-checking and running samples to fashion shoots, and was eventually given small articles that no one else wanted to write. The first time I held an issue with two of my pieces in it, with my own byline, it was the closest thing I’d felt to fame.
Paper was started in 1984 by two friends, Kim and David, who were both imposing, intimidating figures. I marveled at the perspiring assistants with their thick skins as they frantically multitasked. When Kim or David walked by, I did my best to look busy, hoping both that they would and wouldn’t notice me. I was ecstatic to contribute to the magazine, but understood that I didn’t want to spend my life in an office. The best thing was the opportunity to interview people and get a glimpse of each person’s creative process.
Whenever I was chastised for not getting an article turned in on time, I just stared up at the walls. They were lined with every Paper cover in order of the time they were published. It was a lineage of celebrated artists: Björk, Sandra Bernhard, the B-52’s. I told myself that one day, my own face would be on one of those covers, up on that wall.
I took the xeroxed photos off the desk and slipped them into my backpack. It was five thirty, time to head to the gym. I stepped out onto lower Broadway, and the pedestrian traffic was a churning whirlpool. It took me a second to orient myself and find a walking rhythm before I accelerated, navigating my way past Canal Street, where the throng was the most dense. The sidewalks were full of Midwestern women with updos, walking in groups, on the lookout for bootleg bags. It was a strange ecosystem, these women doing deals in side alleys with people from all over the world, passing off cash for phony purses. Performing a kind of acceptable drug deal, they must have felt a simulacrum of danger as they stole away with their score to show off to their friends back home.
Crunch Fitness on Lafayette was packed by six. It was a warehouse of mirrors, all squatting, pushing, and heavy breathing. We gently flexed at ourselves when we thought no one else was looking, pulled up our tank tops for a quick peek at our abs. I stared at the older guys with their facial and chest hair, bubble butts popping as they climbed StairMasters to nowhere.
On the floor I did my best, learning form from watching others. I still thought I was too skinny, and never meant to be one of them. After workouts, I’d look for any new signs of a body in the mirror and then scold myself for wanting what they had. I resented that I’d been trained to love such physiques.
At the machines I saw Benjamin, a bartender from Barracuda, pumping his legs. They looked like they could have their own address. He was a big French g
uy, out of my league, but always lovely to talk to. “Those hamstrings.” I sat on the machine next to him and shook my head. “How the hell do you get those things?”
There were lots of characters around. Randy, the cowboy from the Village People, was always working out. Matt Damon was in the boxing ring occasionally. A few times even Britney Spears could be seen on the stretching mats. My favorite, though, was a guy who never left the treadmills. I called him Swamp Thing. He had an unhealthy green pallor and was always chugging two Venti Starbucks coffees while he ran for hours, his greasy hair hanging over his wet forehead. Super weird. I swooned over a hunky, rugged daddy type who’d had one of his ears torn off. Once, he honked the horn of his truck at me and waved as I was crossing the street on Lafayette. I felt like Sally Field winning her second Oscar.
In the locker room, it was hard to keep my eyes to myself. All the goods were on full display, muscles exposed, not having to strain against their stretchy gym clothes. V-shaped silhouettes soaped themselves up through thick banks of steam in the showers. Guys would keep the curtains only half-drawn. There were tiny holes ripped in them so some could peep. But it was creepy when you just saw eyeballs poking through the holes in the plastic. Eventually the gym put up more durable curtains, so people just had to leave them open, no more ripping.
Guys were more well behaved in the sauna. But it was still a morphing tableau of towels and glistening skin, a cramped box where everyone pretended not to look at each other. It was where I had met Iannis, with our towels barely draped over our dicks. He was a beefy Greek guy with a voice like Kermit the Frog, which drove me wild. We exchanged small talk as we put our clothes back on at the lockers. I asked him if he had a boyfriend, which he confirmed. “But he’d love to meet you. What are you doing right now? Do you have time to come over? It’s just up the street on St. Marks Place,” he had said.
Their apartment was one long shabby rectangle; the bathtub sat in the kitchen, and the walls were lined with books. They had a pet tarantula in an aquarium. Iannis’s boyfriend was an attractive poet in his thirties named Tom Breidenbach. He was quiet, with strange mouth tics and a steely reserve. Their apartment became my second home. Tom and I would get stoned on strong weed, listen to Patti Smith, and talk into the night, losing track of time. He’d flip through poetry books and read aloud. Some nights he would start his paranoid conspiracy-theory talk and a dark anger would bubble out of him. The three of us watched VHS Werner Herzog movies on their old TV, while I drifted to sleep on the couch, which was really just a twin bed. Sometimes we would have sex and then fall asleep until noon. I’d wake up first, wrap a blanket around myself, and sit by the window, maybe looking at a fresh coat of snow on the street.
They weren’t the only ones I met at the Crunch locker room. I’d make small talk with half-dressed guys and get numbers to dial on weekends. A couple months before, I’d met a stunning boy named Ned Stresen-Reuter in a steam room at a Crunch in Midtown. I recognized him from the current Gap campaign. We hung out a few times, chastely, as if having sex would break whatever spell was pulling us together. Finally after a dinner at the Cowgirl Hall of Fame in the West Village, he came home with me. We made out for about five minutes in my bed, ravenous, gnawing each other’s faces off, having held back for so long. I started barfing before we even took off our clothes. Must have been food poisoning from the dinner.
One of the hottest guys at the gym lived in an apartment above mine. He was a square-jawed superhero with preppy clothes, topaz eyes, and a Colgate smile. I couldn’t understand why he of all people was flirting with me. Our location made things convenient: If we were both around I could jump up to his place, take care of business, and be out in an hour. Sometimes when we had sex I would go back downstairs, lie in my bed, and stare up at the ceiling, as if I could see through his floor. But the joy was fleeting. Sometimes we’d be covered in sweat, and I’d trace the lines of his form. He was literally in my hands, but still felt unattainable.
I had moved out of the Cake Factory in the fall. One night I was boiling water to make a pot of pasta, stepped out to pick up some laundry, and realized I had locked myself out. I didn’t want to call the fire department. I thought they could break in our door and get us all busted for living in the space. So I decided to sprint as fast as I could to the L train, rode into the East Village, and ran all the way to Bowery Bar, where Anne Marie was bartending, me panicking that the loft was going up in flames. I arrived coughing and sweating. She gave me a set of keys and ten bucks for a cab ride back. By the time I made it back into the Cake Factory, the saucepan was burning and smoking the whole place up. I had been so close to setting the place on fire. I took it as a sign it was time to leave.
I moved into a spot on Bleecker Street, a block away from CBGB. It was a basement that used to be an old black-box theater. There were still pulleys and contraptions screwed into the wall where curtains had once been. I found the room from borrowing printouts that a friend had received from Rainbow Roommates, a service that helped queer people find fellow queer people to live with.
The apartment was basically one big room, with three makeshift “bedrooms” built inside. But the walls were only partitions, rising to about two feet beneath the ceiling. The entire place had no windows except for a tiny one in the kitchen. My roommates were two gay guys in their thirties named Matt and Tim. Matt had an office job and was obsessed with Broadway musicals. Tim was a DJ I had met one night at IC Guys; he had hired me to dance at SqueezeBox, where he sometimes controlled the lights. They were both odd and melancholy. I was their wild child, and the relationship was familial and caring, even though I interrupted their peace with my cacophonous comings and goings. Still, I think they liked having my energy around.
That night, Tim and Matt were perched in their usual spot on the couches watching SpongeBob SquarePants. “Hey, guys,” I said as I rushed past them.
“Jason, that guy Steve stopped by to see if you were around,” Tim called over my wall. “I told him you’d be back, but he just said to leave a message on his pager.” Steve Kramer still refused to buy a cell phone. He was the guy I had met in Matthew Delgado’s hot tub six months ago, when he’d been there with his boyfriend.
I had thought about him constantly since we’d met. So, one early evening on a whim, I had grabbed my copy of A Home at the End of the World by Michael Cunningham (whom I’d been stalking and begging for an interview) and taken it to the Hangar on Christopher Street, where Steve bartended. He had served me drinks while I read, and we’d talked in between customers. I was happy to find he was now single. We started dating. He was an easy crush: thirty-three, mellow and artistic, prone to making eclectic mix CDs and crafting light boxes using vintage porn and real butterfly wings. He could be guarded, withholding, and standoffish, a tactic that worked: I was obsessed.
In the new apartment, I had a strange, unfinished, tiny square of a bedroom, which I painted bright yellow to make it feel less like a tomb. But no matter how bright the walls were, it still felt cramped and claustrophobic. The discomfort was worth it: I was smack-dab in the middle of downtown now. I could walk just about anywhere I needed to go: the Paper offices, Crunch. At a brisk pace, it took me about twenty minutes to get to the Eugene Lang campus.
My evening’s go-go wardrobe lay before me on my bed. The night was “biohazard-military themed” or something, so at the army surplus store I had bought a union suit, some combat boots, a gas mask, and a camouflage G-string that was two sizes too big. I tried it on one more time as if my dick might have magically grown in the last twenty-four hours. It was going to take a couple cock rings to even begin to fill it out. I had a camo bikini, an army-green trench coat, and a trashy long blond wig with a soldier’s helmet for my girlfriend Jess, who was coming with me. She was going to look like Private Benjamin at the Spearmint Rhino.
I put an evening bag together and returned to the living room. My roommates were zoning out with a VHS tape of Kiss Me, Kate on Broadway.
“Debbie Harry hasn’t performed in a while,” Tim said glumly. “I’d like to see her tonight.”
“Why don’t you throw something on and come out?”
“Eh, I wouldn’t be any fun. It’s not been an especially good day.” Tim had been sick for years; some days he was spritely, most days he was pretty slow. He almost never left the house.
“Well, call me if you change your mind.” I finished zipping the bag and threw it over my shoulder. “All right, boys, time to make the donuts. Don’t overdose on musicals.”
“Don’t overdose on adoration,” Tim said.
Click + Drag was a technology fetish night that Rob Roth threw and had been going on for years, originally at Mother in the Meatpacking District; it had now moved to a new space in Chinatown called FUN. Rob only threw one every season these days, which made them all the more special. But the old one was before my time, so I didn’t know the difference. The room could have fit an airplane, and had towering walls for video screens that stretched in all directions, causing a pleasing sense of vertigo on the dance floor. There was an upstairs lounge behind glass. You could look down at the crowd as if observing zoo animals under strobe lights.
Tonight, with Debbie Harry being the musical guest, the place was, as expected, rammed with people, packed and raucous. I danced behind strips of biohazard tape hanging from the ceiling like Mylar curtains. My gas mask became hot after a few songs, but I kept it on, loving how weird it looked with the G-string. You could see Debbie in the upper balcony, behind glass.
After her set, I took a cocktail up to the second floor and was introduced. She had an air of poise and detachment. “Thanks for letting me dance tonight,” I said. “And for the great set.”
