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by Robert McLaughlin



This was in 1999, way before the health department began cracking down on all the groping, moaning, and squirting going on in the bathroom. You’d peer into that dim bathroom and see men with potbellies and last season’s Calvin Klein jeans all tangled together in a sticky pile-up. You’d think to yourself, are they all clamoring for the same dot on a Twister mat? It was always so shadowy in the front room of the bar—all it was really lit by was the white Christmas lights along the walls and the glow coming from the TV showing low-rent porno (porno so amateurish you’d see rashes and pimples in places you didn’t want to see rashes and pimples). The bouncer, who was 6’5 and hulking and very Harley Davidson, what with his frizzy gray beard and constipated scowl (I imagined he ate kidnapped children as midnight snacks) was always the first person you’d see when you walked in. Imagine seeing this guy in the ugly light coming down from a bad porno. God knows what I was looking for that night. It wasn’t sex; most of the men who went there were either homely in a buck-toothed, backwoods, Kmart kind of way, or amped on speed with the gnarly complexions and dilated pupils to act as stop signs for your convenience. I get a vodka and lurk in the dark against the chain link fence that was arranged in the back for maximum prison yard effect sexiness. I grow tired quickly with all the cruising, watching all those sets of eyes slink by that appeared as if they could detach and gobble you up. Back and forth, back and forth—following all the action in that bar was like being at Wimbledon. I decide to go smoke because cigarettes help me focus. You’d have to walk down this hallway that had Day-Glo-painted walls to get to the back patio, and this hallway was lit by black light. People like me with pale skin and freckles would look like pasty raver zombies flecked with specks of mud in this hallway—so attractive. I light up as I step down and join the smokers and soon enough this cute skateboarder (he had the body of a swimmer and Mark Hamill’s 1977 face) was hitting on me. Wow, someone hot. A friend of his joins us. I can’t remember what this guy looked like—I wasn’t paying attention. All I can remember is that he kept smoking pot at a furious clip from a tin foil pipe. Laughs, MORE DRINKS, bullshit chat, closing time, I’m slurring…the situation changes. The three of us stumble back to Hamill’s apartment down by the End-Up and get REAL comfortable in about 15 minutes. A key turns in the front door and oh shit Hamill’s boyfriend is home and no-face and me get shoved out the back door carrying our jeans and shoes and erections. We lose it and wobble to his SRO in the Tenderknob and he throws me down on his bed that smells like bleach and tells me the only way he’ll be able to cum is if I fuck him. He drags on his pipe and flicks on the TV and an evangelical Sunday morning service was on. Oh, you’re smoking crystal, I realize while watching the minister thump his hand on the podium (I can be SLOW). I zip up and wiped his kisses off and leave. I walk home as the sun rises and watch the seagulls swoop down on O’Farrell Street while thinking about my upcoming 27th birthday. This is my life?

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