If You Knew Then What I Know Now

by Ryan Van Meter

  That the absolute truth then is there isn’t even just one of you. There’s a whole crew of possible you’s—faces I see around and glance at and act anxious in front of. You are the one with the adorable ears who seems even more nervous than me. You are the one who sings when he dances, who might look a little too much like my ex. You are the one who is so tall and with such wide shoulders that the gentleness of your smile surprises. You are the one with the dark beard, and the laugh that makes your whole serious face break open.

  That for a long time, I thought it wasn’t possible for two men to love and be happy together forever. That later, I started believing in this kind of love again, even though I’m still not sure it’s possible. That I want it to be this way, or else I don’t want it.

  That on our first date we shouldn’t go out for Indian food because it gives me the flu. That we shouldn’t go out for sushi either because I tend to dislike people who like sushi. That I will wear my striped shirt because it makes me feel taller. That I may stare into your face from time to time and think, This is happening! That it would be nice if we could laugh often, and at some point, if you think we’re having a good time, it would also be nice for you to smile and tell me so, and then I’ll say something like, “We should do this again,” and then, at the end of the date, we won’t have to wonder what the other one is thinking. That I will want to hear your boyfriend history but will not ask, and this I promise. That sudden silence doesn’t always mean awkwardness, sometimes it means ease. That we should split the bill. That you will have to lean in first to kiss me. That if you lean in first to kiss me, I will kiss you back.

  You Can’t Turn Off the Snake Light

  We’re kissing in my bed, naked and sliding along each other. My mouth on his neck, his mouth on my ear. “Say something dirty,” he says. It’s morning, and we’re fooling around before work, keeping ourselves quiet because my roommate shuffles on the other side of the wall in the kitchen, eating cereal. Fooling around before work is new to me. For that matter, waking up next to a man so many weeks in a row is new. This is the man who will be my first boyfriend, and we’ll be together almost eight years before he decides to leave, but at the moment, we’ve only known each other a couple of months. This is also the first man to call me his boyfriend. And now suddenly, on a Tuesday morning, this man is also the first to ask me to say something dirty.

  The only other thing I’ve ever been asked to do by a naked man in a bed was to bite. That man was ten years older than me, and the first I ever dated after coming out. All over, he said, stretched out under me on his belly with his arms reaching to either side. Before that evening, whenever we were in his bed, or mine, he would ask, gently, “Have you ever done this before?” It never mattered that regardless of whatever we were doing at the moment my answer was always, always no, he still asked. “Don’t worry about it being too hard,” he said, about the biting. “It’s never too hard.” Below my window, somewhere in the darkness, a neighbor trudged down the gangway rustling sacks of groceries and dropping the house keys. Candles burned—I thought at that time that being in bed with a man required candlelight—and the jumpy yellow glow might have helped the room not appear like a skimpy-salaried twenty-three-year-old’s: blank walls, curtainless windows, a spindly nightstand rescued from an alley, a writing desk just a little too small. I leaned over the man’s flat back, put my face against the rubbery muscle nestled next to his spine, and pinched him with my teeth. He twitched under me, his head hanging off the mattress. I kept at it, patiently drawing on him parentheses of teethmarks, covering the surface of his skin as though I was running an iron into every corner of a wrinkly shirt.

  What I thought about later, after our short time together ended, was that I hadn’t considered whether or not I even wanted to bite a man all over his back. I just did it because he asked me and I liked him. So when my first boyfriend makes his request for something dirty, I wish saying it were as easy as biting. Part of it is certainly that the man I bit didn’t mean as much to me as the boyfriend does. Even if what I’m feeling so early in our knowing each other isn’t all that clear. We’ve just recently decided to be boyfriends but we haven’t made any promises, and the descriptions and definitions of any specific feelings have been left unsaid. I just know I want to be around him as much as possible, and when I see him after not seeing him, I know that my face always comes apart in smiles.

  What I don’t know right now are any actual dirty words to say. And it’s not only that I’ve never said such words, but also dirty things have never been whispered to me. I haven’t even seen much porn for any ideas. Just the one with the two guys working out, one spotting the other at the bench press—the one my boyfriend stole from his roommate’s closet, which we watched on his 10” black-and-white TV with the also-borrowed VCR teetering on top. But everything they said was mostly related to exercise.

  I pull myself off my boyfriend’s chest, and sink into the mattress beside him. I hold his face. We keep kissing. I wrap my ankle behind his and pin us together. Because we’re waiting for me to say something—to play along and satisfy the request—the room feels suddenly silent, heavy with the absence, amplifying the sounds we’d normally miss. The bed squeaks under us, the birds peck at the eaves outside the window, our feet skid and shush against the sheets. I suck in air, scoot against the mattress and lift my mouth to his ear.

  “I—” is how I begin. Subject, I think, now verb then object. Didn’t I graduate almost two years ago with an English degree, didn’t I take creative writing classes, wasn’t I a copywriter in an ad agency scratching out headlines all day long? This should be easy. “I—” is the next try, more of a way to stall than to repeat for the sake of emphasis. But it also commits me to the pronoun. And I wonder why I always tell people I want to be a writer—how saying things like that makes them expect me to be good at saying things like this. What’s the point of dirty talk anyway—isn’t it always pretend? Don’t we all know that? I should just say something quickly without worrying how it sounds—tame, immature, inexperienced, whatever. We’ll be late for work if I don’t hurry. Just say something.

  “I love you.” It comes out in the loudest whisper I’ll ever hear.

  My friend Tom sits next to me on a stool in our town’s only gay bar. The place is dark with black lights and video screens, and crowded with chrome tables. A huge mirror stands like a wallflower next to the dance floor, and a disco ball twirls from the ceiling. Tom sips his whiskey neat while I poke the lime at the bottom of my gin, and when the skinny young waiters stamp around in sneakers and $25 underwear, it’s difficult not to think of this place as a brilliant but awful cliché of every other gay bar I’ve ever been in. The entrance is actually in an alley, recalling those old days when gay men had to slink past trashcans to an unmarked door. The music is always too loud, so Tom and I have to lean into each other up front where we always sit so we can watch the arrivals—each time the door swings open, we swivel to see who’s here, becoming part of the cliché ourselves. Unfortunately it’s never anyone cute, which is the point. We end up here every couple of weeks.

  “I read an article in Time today,” I say, close to his ear, over the hammering beat. “It was called ‘Are Gay Relationships Different?’” Tom sets down his glass and gives it a small push. “Well, of course they are,” he says.

  “Right.” But I don’t feel as sure as he seems. “I guess there’s something different about the way we argue?” I try, but fail to recall the details of a psychology study the author quoted about common causes for gay male breakups—not mentioning my own relief that constant nagging and general fussiness were not among them. “And then there’s the whole monogamy and promiscuity thing,” I say, shrugging, smiling, bringing us to our old favorite argument.

  At twenty-five, Tom is eight years younger than me and never lived inside a closet. He wears makeup and a nose ring and cuts his own hair. When I hadn’t dated anyone months after my boyfriend dumped me, and I would often announce that
I would never date again, not ever, Tom suggested I have a one-night stand. “I think you just need some emotionless sex right now,” he told me, and I said I didn’t know there was such a thing, at which he shook his head. Another night when we were perched on these stools, we compared numbers. How many men we’d each been with. When I told him my number, he smirked and told me his, which was exactly mine when multiplied by ten. “Yeah,” he said. “You should really have a one-night stand.” Being afraid of ending up in some man’s deep freezer is my general reply to his goading, and I usually suggest that he should be more careful—the debate quiets there. But once he had the actual statistics, he wouldn’t give up. He pointed to a man walking through the door at that moment, a man Tom knew wasn’t even my type, and when I wrinkled up my face, he said he’d also throw in twenty bucks. “It’s still ‘no,’” I said. Then I started laughing. “What now?” he asked. “I miscounted,” I said. “I accidentally added one.”

  A half-naked waiter delivers our next round. He barely looks old enough to serve these drinks, and even though most people mistake me for younger than I really am, I suddenly feel old as he stands in front of me with his hips tilted. Perfect skin, ten pounds or so underweight. There’s nothing the least bit attractive about him, but when I think about myself at his age, every corner of myself stuffed with shame and secret crushes, I can’t help but envy him. Where would I be now if I had his confidence then? He hands me change, I give him a dollar. When he’s gone, I bring up the magazine again. Even though it didn’t ultimately last, I sometimes think of my eight-year run with my ex as a kind of achievement, a credential allowing me to speak on such matters. I ask Tom, “Why are you sure our relationships are different? If love isn’t all the same, then how do gay men learn to do it?”

  We both think. If we learn to love by trying and failing, then I wonder how many times it takes before you get it right? Tom answers, “I don’t think we do learn. Or we don’t just do what straight people do.” He brings his glass to his lips but doesn’t drink. “I think we reinvent love every time.”

  And I don’t know what to say, I am that surprised.

  Tom Brokaw wears a grey suit and speaks to us with a blue wall behind him. I’m sitting on the floor in front of the TV, petting the brown yarn of the shag carpet. My dad dozes on the couch, and in the kitchen, my mom bangs pots. I’ve already set the table. I’m seven or I’m eight or I’m nine so I don’t actually listen to the news because I’ve tried and don’t understand, but it’s still something we do before dinner, the same as carrying our plates to the sink once we’ve eaten, and my brother and I taking our baths when the clock says 8. So I’m coloring or playing with Star Wars guys or reading a library book, waiting for the call to the table, and flashing up on the screen—as it has been now for days or weeks or years?—is AIDS. Four letters I can read but make little sense of, even if it seems to everyone that I’ve been reading since I was born. The word sounds scary, the serious way Tom Brokaw’s lips crimp and his voice slows when he talks about it is scary, as is the way he always says this word with “gay,” another one I don’t understand.

  More than twenty years later, as much as I’ll sort through my memory, I won’t ever locate my first image of two men in love. But I’ll realize that the first gay men I ever saw, the only ones I knew for most of childhood in fact were the dying men on the evening news.

  I am a fifth grader, and a boy on the news with the same name as me has AIDS and his school is afraid of him. He got this disease from blood in the hospital—the doctors didn’t mean to give it to him—but even so, everyone in his Midwestern town that isn’t very far from my Midwestern town—I’ve asked—is scared to be around him including the other kids and some teachers. And even though his family says he isn’t, everybody at his school calls him “gay.”

  By this point, I’ve learned the meaning of “gay.” After a neighbor showed me a Playboy he stole from his dad, and I recoiled at the sight of it, and he told the other boys in our class, and one of them told me I was gay, I asked my mother if that were true. She sat on the edge of my mattress right before bedtime. My room was dark, but the light above the bathroom mirror shined from across the hall. Her face was a shadow. “No,” she said, patting my leg through the blankets. “You’re not gay.” And though she never accused me of anything, I knew it had been wrong to look at the naked women in the magazine, and I knew there was something wrong about “gay” based on the way the boys at school and Tom Brokaw talked about it, so I still felt guilty.

  Besides that night with my mother and my question, no one in my family ever talked about what gay was. And if AIDS came up, it was because of the news, and the stacks of papers and Time forever piling on the living room carpet or kitchen table. One Saturday afternoon, when I was a sixth or seventh grader, we met one of my aunts for lunch at Wendy’s, and she whispered that we shouldn’t touch the knobs of the restroom doors after washing our hands at the sink because of AIDS. I told her that you couldn’t catch it that way, and she shook her head. “They don’t really know how it’s spread.” But this would have been in 1987 or 1988 when they actually did.

  Around that time, I remembered that as a six-month old, I’d fallen off the countertop in the kitchen. My head was concussed and my skull was cracked, and the ER doctors kept me in the hospital overnight to track my vital signs. This would have been late December 1975 or early January 1976. Thinking of the other boy with my name, and picturing myself wriggling and screaming on that kitchen floor, I reasoned that I must have received a blood transfusion. It seemed impossible that I hadn’t. And I knew that the blood saved in hospitals for such emergencies wasn’t tested for HIV in those years because the virus wasn’t even around yet. So at the age of thirteen, without any actual evidence, I convinced myself I was HIV positive.

  It’s difficult to understand why I so easily accepted that fate—why, one might say, I wanted to have AIDS. Because I didn’t ever tell anyone about my self-diagnosis—I wasn’t looking for sympathy or all the attention the other Ryan got for his disease. But I knew something separated me from the other boys in my class. Ever since fourth grade, the word “gay” and its harsher synonyms had followed me down school hallways, into locker rooms and school cafeterias. One afternoon in eighth grade, in the after-lunch rush of boys in the restroom trying to beat the fifth-hour bell, I stood at a urinal. Over the hum of hand dryers and swooshes of flushing, one of my classmates shouted. “Hey, Ryan. Do you ride the cotton pony?” It took a couple of years before I figured out his euphemism, but the fact that my neck still changed from pale to red in about two seconds was all the confirmation he and the others in the room needed. I wasn’t a boy like they were, and it was in my blood. Maybe deciding that I had AIDS was the proof I wanted for that difference—something real, measurable and best of all, not my fault.

  It’s July 25, 2008, and I’m back in Chicago for the weekend. Two years ago, I left this city for a small town—the one with the lone gay bar—and it was there, almost exactly a year after my eight-year boyfriend left me, that I met the new man I’m dating. Before we met, he’d been planning to move to Chicago, and a few months later he did—settling into the same neighborhood I’d left a few years earlier. We hadn’t wanted to stop seeing each other, so now we visit back and forth. It says something when you’re willing to drive four hours for a glimpse of somebody and people I know call him my “boyfriend,” but he and I don’t use that word. We can’t even bring ourselves to say “relationship.” We were both hurt very much the last time.

  On this date ten years ago, I came out of the closet, and we’ve returned to the site of my admission—a gay bar. Coming out of the closet in a gay bar seems sort of beside the point, but for years and years before that big night, I could very easily insist I wasn’t gay even while dancing under spinning lights to “Disco Inferno.” I used to be a perfect liar.

  This new man I’m dating keeps shaking his head, stunned I remember the exact date of my anniversary. This bar is only a
few blocks away from his studio apartment, but tonight is the first time he’s been inside. The bartender scoots our drinks toward us. He’s handsome and tall, probably in his late forties, and he grins at us in the crooked, devilish way of handsome, tall bartenders in gay bars. He was a bartender here ten years ago, though his eyes are gripped a little deeper now with crow’s-feet, and the shiny round at the crown of his head has widened. After coming out, I became a regular at this bar and met every man I dated in Chicago here. It’s a place full of ghosts. In those days, I wouldn’t have needed to order my drink—this bartender would have just seen my empty glass, and fixed me another. I had to actually order tonight, and I’m crestfallen that I wasn’t recognized but also relieved. And anyway, my drink has changed.

  “So where would you have been ten years ago?” I ask my new guy. It had been a Saturday night. I was twenty-three at the time and here with my best friend who was visiting for the weekend. She was the first person I had wanted to tell. In fact, the week before she arrived, as I drove home each evening from my office, I practiced. With the radio turned down, I said aloud, “I am gay. I am gay. I am gay.” I wanted to run any quiver out of my voice. In the end, I’d need a couple of drinks to even get started, and we’d have to lock ourselves in the women’s restroom so we could cry.