best of... breakfast at tiffany's parts one to five
Sunday, January 29, 2012 at 03:27PM Meryl Streep is punishing me for having gay sex. Amen.
Author’s note: because it has always been my intention to keep this site somewhat PG-13, for the duration of this post I have made the executive decision to replace the term “gay sex” with “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”
I am writing to you now from an expensive round of antibiotics and a neck that is covered in boils. The pharmacist says that I am not supposed to consume any coffee or alcohol while taking this drug, but I am not about to give up breakfast and dinner. There is a plague upon my studio apartment and I can tell you exactly the reason why: I am having Breakfast at Tiffany’s and lots of it.
Now, typically I associate good things with being flipped over but this pancake has been burned one too many times. The unfortunate truth is that Meryl Streep has never looked fondly on me putting my homosexuality in to practice. Ever since I first laid hands on another man at the young age of 22, I have been the target of fire and brimstone falling out of the sky. But this time she has gone too far, and like Anne Hathaway in the The Devil Wears Prada, I am starting to feel the heat.
My dissension to infection began last Monday night at my girlfriend Joy’s place. After a lovely evening of red wine, cheese plates and Ella Fitzgerald, I begged her to accompany me to the gay bar so that I could put the sex in our relationship. She and I both knew very well, a boy on the side is the key to any succesful straight woman - gay male relationship. And so true to form, she had a gentelman caller of her own who was scheduled to drop by later that evening.
“Come on,” I said egging her on, “it will be fun!”
“How many times have I heard that line before?”
It was true, the last time I convinced her to come out to the gay bar with me she ended up with a 24 hour self-esteem complex after no one offered to buy her a drink.
"Plus sweetie," she carried on, "you know how much I’d love to help but the French Connection is coming over in thirty minutes and I have yet to prepare another cheese plate."
After ten minutes passed and she still showed no signs of moving, I began to suspect that my sex life was not motivation enough for her to leave the warmth of her apartment. I knew that desperate times called for desperature measures, and so, in one bold move I poured the rest of the open wine on the table into my empty glass and proceeded to down it in one sip. I chugged it like it was a king-size can of Lucky and I was in high school just about to fool around with a girl.
"What do you know?" I said, wiping the fermented grape juice from my lips. "You are out of booze. Now let's go out and I will buy you a drink."
Joy stared at me in disbelief. My actions could only be considered as alcohol abuse and she and I both knew it. What can I say, the only thing worse than a desperate gay man is a desperate gay man in heat.
"You have thirty minutes," she said, "now pass me my jacket."
Because Joy lives in the heart of the gay village, it only took us three minutes to walk to the bar. At my suggestion, we arrived a trendy lounge called 1181 at quarter passed midnight. "Any other venue," I reasoned, "would be a waste of our outfits." 1181 is known for its shirtless bartenders and weekend drink specials. On Friday and Saturday nights, the bar turns in to a total meat market as men from in and outside Vancouver line up to show themselves off. Since it is shaped like a London townhouse, breathing room is limited; but luckily, what it lacks in girth it makes up for in length.
Because it was Monday night Joy and I had no problems getting in. As we walked through the front door, I could smell the unmistakeable scent of Dolce & Gabanna in the air and knew I was home. On the speakers, a hit remix by Kaskade was playing in to its seventeenth minute. It was not busy by any means, but luckily there were enough men sitting at the bar to give me some ounce of hope.
"Isn't it wonderful?" I asked Joy, stealing a line from Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's, "
how nothing bad could happen to you in a place like this?”
“Of course darling, but isn’t this the same bar that you thought you were drugged by that Canadian soldier last year?”
“Ohmygod I totally forgot about that. Bad things do happen in a place like this.”
By the time we reached the bar, it did not take a magnifying glass to realize there were less diamonds than rough. From antique closet-cases to over-polished muscle daddies, I was notably disenchanted by the selection of men available.
“I guess going home alone isn’t the worst thing that could happen,” I whispered in Joy’s ear, “Macaulay Culkin seemed to make a pretty good go of it.”
“I’m sorry love, now let’s get that drink you owe me and get out of here.”
Just when I thought all hope was gone, the most gorgeous man walked through the door. He had olive skin, brown eyes and a great jaw line. He was also thirty years younger than the rest of the men sitting in the bar. Dressed in second-hand blue jeans with no-name shoes and a white American Apparel T, he was just the rock I was looking for.
"Joy," I said. I could barely breathe and and as a result, had to limit my words to one syllable. "Look... over... there."
She knew exactly who I was talking about and sighed relief that she was off the hook.
"Does this mean I can go?"
"Yes."
"You know you still owe me a drink though right?"
"Yes."
"You will be careful, right?"
"Yes."
"Promise?"
"Yes."
"Love you."
"Yes."
She kissed me on the cheek and made her way for the door. As she passed the man in question, she whipped her head back and mouthed the word "hot."
I took a seat at the bar and crossed my fingers that he would sit down beside me. When he did, I had no clue what to do next. It is no secret I am much more confident behind a keyboard than I am in front of another man.
"Hello," he said, showing off his smile.
"Hi," I replied, still on the monosyllabic streak.
"How are you?"
"Well." It is always important to be grammatically correct, especially when you cannot form a full sentence.
I figured I needed a drink to loosen me up, and so I strung enough words together to ask him if I could order one too.
"Can ... I ... buy ... you ... a ... drink?" I sounded like Colin Firth in The King's Speech but something told me I was not going to win an Oscar for this performance.
"Sure," he acquiesced, "Double Petron Silver on the rocks."
I reached in to my pocket and pulled out a ten dollar bill. I placed it on the bar in front of him and said, "this is all I got."
“A Kokanee will be fine,” he smiled.
One drink led to another and before I knew it, it was ten o’clock in the morning and he was lying naked in bed beside me. An hour later I got up and poured a shot of espresso into my morning cup of Bailey’s. I was careful not to wake him up, and tip-toed to the washroom to wipe off the smile that was now plastered across my face. As it turned out that was not hard, because as soon as I flicked on the light switch, I screamed in terror at the sight of my own reflection.
Overnight a boil had erupted at the epicenter of my right cheek. I could not believe it. This cannot be happening I repeated to myself, spinning in to a complete panic attack. I pressed my nose up to the mirror for closer inspection and screamed once again. This is happening. Unsure what to do I turned off the light and took a seat on the edge of the bath tub.
I wanted to crawl back in to bed and start the day all over again but I couldn’t. Minus the marriage, mid-life crisis and New York brownstone, I felt like Elizabeth Gilbert in chapter four of her best-selling novel Eat, Pray, Love. Like her, I too had locked myself in the washroom with a man in my bed and a problem that was much too big to solve in one day. Except whereas her struggle was real, mine was unquestionably superficial. I knew I had to ask for help and there was only one Academy Award winning actress who could give it to me. 
In the dark, I laid out the bath mat on the floor in front of me and prayed to Meryl Streep for guidance. She had put me in this pickle and was the only higher power that could get me out.
“What do I do Meryl?” I asked.
“Go back to bed, Fox,” she answered.
Miss Gilbert and I may have shared a page from the same novel, except this is where my story breaks off.
“No way Jose!” I replied getting back on my two feet. Making the decision to end your marriage is one thing, but succumbing to a facial blemish is unforgivable. If Meryl was not going to help me, I was going to have to help myself.
I flicked back on the light switch and screamed once again. Unfortunately this time, my gentleman caller heard me.
“Are you ok?” he asked, knocking gently on the bathroom door.
I cannot tell you how many times I have locked myself in a washroom to get a man’s attention to no avail. And now for the first time I don’t want it, I bring the Good Samaritan home.
“Perfectly fine!” I gasped. I sounded like a fourteen year old girl with a pregnancy test and something to hide.
“But I thought I heard you scream.”
“Oh yes - that! My bad! No troubles is all, just discovered that I am out of mouth wash and got a touch too dramatic. I can’t think of anything more terrifying than morning breath, can you?”
“I have a piece of gum in my bag if that helps.”
For God sakes just let me die on the side of the road already.
“No worries mate, just going to brush my teeth and I’ll be out in a second.”
With my left hand covering my mouth in the likely event I would scream again, I took a closer look at the scarlet mark on my face. For a moment I entertained the possibility that it might be a pimple, but ruled out that prognosis due to the fact that Monday nights are always green tea facial nights, and I never forget to apply a mask. This was clearly something Proactiv did not have a solution for. It was burning ring of fire sent from Meryl Steep herself, and my complexion was on the brink of collapse.
I had no time to waste so I dumped out the full bottle of mouth wash sitting on the counter in front of me and pulled out my first aid kit from under the sink. I removed my emergency tube of Loreal Concealer and applied 40 CC’s to my finger-tips before blending it in to my face. The cover-up I was using was the palest shade available and pretty soon I looked like I was auditioning for the gay vampire role in the upcoming Twilight. I took a deep breath before opening the door and crossed my fingers that he wouldn’t notice.
“Oh my God what happened to your face?” he screeched as soon as he saw me. He was still very much naked and I was still very much a hot mess.
I was left with no choice but to fake illness, and so I did. I theatrically placed my hand over my stomach and told him that I thought I drank too many Bombay Sapphires even though I knew that was not possible.
“You look terrible,” he reiterated. He had that maternal chicken-soup look in his eye and I feared that he was going to go Good Samaritan on me again if I didn't get him out of my apartment and fast.
"Although it pains me to say this," and it really did, "I am going to have to ask you kind sir to find your pants and leave."
The next day the situation escalated from manageable to “I am never going to leave my house again.” In forty-eight hours the boils had spread down my neck to my chest and I made the official transformation from a gorgeous redhead to a walking plague. I scrambled to find a bible in my night-stand to find out what was wrong with me; but it quickly occurred to me that (a) I did not live in a hotel and (b) I did not have a bible. Left with no choice but to seek an immediate turtle-neck followed by medical attention, I checked in to the walk-in clinic down the street and prepared myself for the worst.
As an undiagnosed hypochondriac, I am no stranger to the Canadian public healthcare system. In the last five years, I have spent just as much time (if not more) sitting in waiting rooms as I have racking up expensive tabs at the bar. Equipped with a triple-venti-non-fat-half-sweet caramel macchiato and the latest copy of Details, I took a seat next to the least contagious looking person in the room and made myself cozy. The nice lady behind the desk informed me the wait would be anywhere from one to seventeen hours, so I knew I was not in a rush.
Looking around the room, most inconspicuously I might add, I checked to see that all the usual suspects were in play. To my left was the clever teenager, whose questionable cough and over-protective mother had managed to get him out of the class for the afternoon. His fictional symptoms were no doubt incurred by a grade eleven chemistry test he failed to study for. Further down to my right was the classic Kerrisdale house wife, whose brand new Michael Kors bag bounced furiously up and down on her two anxious knees. That, combined with the speed in which she was turning the pages of last year’s Vanity Fair led me to believe she had come to refill her prescription of diazepam. And in the seat next to me (the well-dressed and diseased homosexual), was a cute young mother and her baby boy.
The boy, whose name I later learned was Tommy, could have not been a day over one. Tommy was dressed in a fabulous pair of Osh Kosh B’Gosh denim overalls that were copper-snapped over a red plaid shirt. He looked like a little lumberjack and his outfit could only be described as ‘Paul Bunyan Chic.’ If I may take these next two lines to talk about myself, I will remind you that I have been trying for years now to bring back denim overalls with absolutely no luck. Apparently there is an unspoken reservation of the clothing item for painters and children under five: a complete injustice if you ask me.
Well, as I sat there, I tried to lose myself in my magazine but Tommy was entirely too distracting. He had shuffled down from his mother’s lap and crawled on to the floor in front of me. Surrounding him on the ground were several wooden blocks from a play-set that his mother had given him. They were each cut in to a different shape and were meant to be matched up with a carved-out board conveniently placed in front of him. With one swoop, Tommy grabbed the round shaped block and tried placing it in the square hole. Not only was the block the wrong shape but it was also much too big in size. When it didn’t fit he tried again with the same hole. Minutes passed and it was clear the laws of basic geometry did not phase the child. He was not going to give up for all the cheerios in the world and I admired his determination.
Like Tommy, I too had a problem to solve, and could not make the puzzle pieces fit. I knew that Meryl Streep was punishing me for having Breakfast at Tiffany’s but I did not know why. Suddenly, it occurred to me that this was not the first time. Flashing back three years, I realized every other time I have had gay sex I mean Breakfast I have ended up in a hospital waiting room. The revelation hit me like two bottles of red wine on an empty stomach and I began to feel nauseous. It was clear there was a direct correlation between my sexual and medical histories, but I was still unsure what that connection was.
Was Meryl Streep actually punishing me for lying in bed with another man? Or was there something else making me sick all this time?
I knew that if I was ever going to get to the bottom of this I would have to go deeper (tee hee). Massaging my temples, I thought back to what I learned in intro to pysch; but alas it was no use, because every possible answer I came up with was multiple choice. Like Freud’s before me, I was left with no choice but to conduct a case study of myself. If I wanted to know the reason why I got sick whenever I had sex, I was going to have to trace back my homosexual history in detail; and I knew that was not going to be easy. “Sigmund Freud you bitch,” I whispered under my breath, “I’ll show you polymorphously perverse.”
As it happened I did not get off to a good start. I was unable to recall my sexual experiences with other men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one due to the simple fact I was too drunk to remember. During those years, the only time I ever came remotely close to touching another man’s penis was after I successfully blacked out. In order to begin my case study, I would have to skip ahead to the age twenty-two, and the first night I lost my religion.
It was a cold Winnipeg night in February when I first learned what it truly meant to take it like a man. Holding on to the covers for dear life, I lost my virginity to a mister Frederick Davenport. With Paul Walker eyes and a freezer filled with vodka, Frederick was everything I could dream of in a first lover.
The first time we met was at a gay Secret Santa party in December 2008. (Just incase you were wondering, the only difference between a gay Secret Santa and a straight one is the increased number of premium lubricants wrapped as gifts and jokes about sitting on old mens' laps.) The first moment I laid eyes on him I wrote him off as too good looking for me. Except one hour and two bottles of red wine later, I was sucking in my gut and seducing him with my above-average wit. Two weeks later we met for our first date, and a month after that I cooked him breakfast for the first time.
After two bottles of white wine on an empty stomach, I invited Frederick back to my place to validate my sexual orientation as a gay man. It’s amazing how some men refuse to accept you as a homosexual until you complete the physical act. I am well-acquainted with several of these gays and they are seriously like the Donald Trumps of the queer world. Unless you have an official Certificate of Sodomy you might as well forgot about your citizenship to Gomorrah. For these gentlemen, it’s not enough to dress your salad you need to toss it too.
We climbed the three flights of stairs in to my Wolseley apartment and once we were inside, I asked Frederick to pour us a drink while I took off my face in the powder room. Blinded by the fluorescent light I had to steady myself on the bathroom sink before I fell over. For twenty-four hours leading up to this point, I had starved myself as if I was going in to surgery. I was terrified there might be junk in the trunk (if you know what I’m sayin’) and so I skipped my bran muffin that morning and stayed ten feet away from any food group that could’ve been considered a fibre.
My blood sugar was dangerously low while my blood alcohol was deliciously high. I waited until the black splotches cleared from my eyes, before reaching under the bath mat to remove a spectacular piece of lingerie I had hidden the night before. The sultry clothing item in question was a pair of white CK briefs that featured a totally flattering pouch in the front. Careful not to lean too far forward as to fall in the claw-foot tub, I removed my Joe Boxers and slipped on the Calvin Klein’s.
Frederick was waiting for me on the couch in the living room when I finally opened up the door to reveal my scantily clad body.
“What happened to your clothes?” he asked with a smirk on his face that indicated he was trying to be funny.
“Take me as I am,” I proclaimed, reciting a lyric from my favourite song in Rent while itsy-bitsy-spidering my right fingers up the wall.
He stood up from the couch and walked over to the space in front of me. Placing his moisturized hands around my waist, he smiled and kissed me on the lips.
“You are the most beautiful redhead I have ever laid my gorgeous blue eyes upon,” he kissed me one more time. “And your biceps, so strong and powerful, remind me of the Rocky Mountains from where I used to live. I can barely wrap my fingers around them.”
trust me, i was not smiling nearly this big when i was the one about to get stung.I was so weak in the knees I almost fell over, literally. I lost my balance and Frederick had to carry me over to the couch. I played off the incident like he had seduced me but really I just need a cheese sandwich before I ended up in the hospital. I imagined myself to be irresistible in this moment except instead I looked like a comatose alcoholic with an eating disorder.
“Sweet heart,” I gasped, “would you mind getting me something to eat? A swiss gruyere sandwich perhaps, on a multigrain baguette with a dash of Dijon, a dollop of mayo and a sprinkle of thyme?”
“Is a Twix bar ok?” he said, removing the only item of food in my refrigerator.
“I suppose that will do.”
He returned to the couch with the chocolate bar and spread out a blanket over the two of us.
“You’re freezing” he said, taking note off the fact I was shaking.
It was true, I felt like a ginger popsicle and looked like one too. The temperature outside my apartment was minus nine-hundred thousand degrees and inside it was not much warmer. When the landlord first told me my one-bedroom had character, she never told me it was a right bitch. Depending on my apartment’s mood, it would either stab you in the foot with a rogue nail from the disintegrating hardwood floor or freeze you out with its manic set of radiators. At one point I thought my rental was actually trying to kill me with black mould hiding behind the walls; but after a visit from the health inspector and a referral for a good therapist, I learned I was just being paranoid.
Cold I was yes, but I was also shivering because I was terrified. My eggs were about to be scrambled and I preferred them sunny-side up. I had seen the gang-bang shower scene in American History X, and still had trouble reconciling my boyish love for Frederick with Edward Norton’s untimely drop of the soap. The black and white scene had scarred me so much I switched from bar soap to liquid the next day and never went back. As I sat there in my lover’s arms, I was more nervous than a Liberal Party candidate in the last Federal election.
“Do you have a lighter?” Frederick asked.
“In my jacket,” I stuttered, sacrificing my cover as a non-smoker.
Taking the empty candy bar wrapped from my hand, he got up from the couch and wrapped the blanket around me. I closed my eyes and re-opened them to find him in my boudoir lighting candles. Since I didn’t have a set of curtains to cover the window, he ripped down my Y Tu Mama Tambien poster off the wall and taped it over the frozen glass. He took off his sweat-shirt and dropped his pants to the floor before sitting on the bed to take his socks off. When he returned to the living room he hit play on the CD player before crawling under the blanket with me.
“It’s Britney bitch,” played the first track on the album in my stereo.
We both broke out in laughter and for the first time I felt my nerves let up. I quickly bounced off the couch and shuffled through the stack of CD’s piled on my bookcase. Frederick got up behind me and as I exchanged discs I felt his hand trace down the small of my back.
“S’ wonderful, s’ marvelous, that you should care for me,” lit up the voice of Mrs. Diana Krall.
Ever so gently, he took my hand and led in to my bedroom - and well, I am sure you can find another free website if you cannot imagine the rest.
So I know what you’re thinking right? Did it hurt? Of course it did. There is not enough lubricant in the world that could make a boy’s first time as fun as an afternoon game of slip ‘n’ slide. That said, I was with someone I loved and who respected me the same.
The next morning I woke up with a sore throat that lasted the duration of our relationship. As I searched for a cure in the time we were together, I was tested for every sexually transmitted infection under the sun. In between two rounds of antibiotics for possible strep, I drew blood for three HIV tests and swallowed pills for Gonorrhea, Chlamydia and Herpes. Thanks to Western medicine, every time I walked in to a clinic and answered yes to the question, “are you sexually active?” I was treated like a venereal leper, who had bent over in front of every man in the province.
In the waiting room, I opened my eyes to see the young boy Tommy still trying to fit the square block into the round hole. For the first time I wondered whether this was the reason his mother had brought him in to the clinic in the first place.
I was beginning to doubt Meryl Streep had anything to do with the boils bubbling on top of my chest. My memory about Frederick led me to believe my physical ailments were not so much spiritual as they were psychological. After all these years, I was still terrified about Breakfast at Tiffany’s and still didn’t have a clue why. And now here I was again, sitting in the waiting room no closer to seeing a doctor then I was to figuring out I was back in purgatory. If I was going to find the root of my fear I was going to have to go back further - to first day I came out of the closet.
Behind my seat in the waiting room the cars sped down Broadway while the ocean poured out from the sky. It had been thirty minutes since the last patient was called and you could feel the anxiety boiling in the room. Everyone, including myself, was searching for someone to tell them that everything was going to be alright; except judging from the time on my Blackberry, it appeared that someone was undeniably out to lunch.
While the receptionist popped the foil on another pack of Dentyne Ice, I distracted myself with the latest issue of Details. Mark Ruffalo was on the cover and I was quite beside myself about it. Apart from a killer summer style section that featured an expose on faded denim and light blue polos, the issue also produced a controversial article entitled “Is Skim Milk Making you Fat?” The answer is much too troubling for me to reiterate here, but needless to say I did not finish the last sip on my non-fat caramel macchiato.
I sensed I was getting closer to digging up the root of my anxiety about Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but I still had a ways to go. Thanks to my cheese sandwich experience with Frederick Davenport, I had ruled out Meryl Streep as a primary suspect for the boils across my neck. The truth was that my fear of Breakfast with another man started long before I ever met the likes of Mr. Davenport. On our first date and subsequently the first time we went to third base, I remember the anxiety-ridden conversation that took place between us just as my jeans were about to pop:
“Do you think I should get tested before we throw the hot dogs on the barbeque?” I asked Frederick, hot and no doubt bothered.
“How many men have you slept with?”
“Zero I guess. But do hand jobs count?”
“You're telling me that you think you should get tested for giving another guy a five knuckle shuffle?”
“Well I didn’t use a glove.”
Why was I so terrified of sex? I was beginning to tire of this routine of going downtown with a boy only to wake up the next day and get on a bus downtown to the clinic. My other friends (gay, straight, imaginary) did not have this problem. They occupied their free time with all kinds of casual and pre-marital sex, and unlike me, did not wake up in the middle of the night convinced they were terminally ill. I was exhausted with myself and furious that I was still sitting here, in the exact same spot I was five years ago.
I smashed the copy of Details on to the floor and aroused the attention of everyone coughing around me. For a split second the room stopped as every patients' eyes fell on me. Silence ensued. The receptionist stopped chewing her gum, the Kerrisdale housewife stopped beating her knees and little Tommy stopped beating his block. The only person who didn’t flinch was the boy’s mother, who was in the seat beside me. I started to see a tear form in Tommy’s eyes and with a great big smile reached down to get the magazine on the floor. Rather than apologizing I pretended like nothing ever happened and carried on reading in silence.
It was then I realized that ever since I checked in, I had been asking myself the wrong question. All this time I was asking why I was so afraid of sex when really I should have been trying to figure out where I got this fear in the first place. It then dawned on me the answer was sitting right in my lap.
;)
The fact there is a closet behind this photo is telling.I learned my sexual identity like everyone else. Except my education didn’t come from textbooks, parents, teachers, movie stars or close family friends. Long before I ever saw an episode of Queer as Folk or read between the lines of Oscar Wilde, I went to school to become a gay man with a single magazine: Out.
It was a sunny afternoon in September 2004 when I purchased my first copy of the gay lifestyle magazine. I can remember the transaction like it took place yesterday. I was nineteen years old and living in the nation’s capitol. I had accepted a full-time position packing gourmet fudge for my aunt’s dessert company, and jumped at the chance to get off the prairies. I went from bisexual to flaming as soon as I crossed the Manitoba border and never stepped foot in a box again (well almost).
That day I bought the magazine at the local bookstore I was nothing more than a gay baby, and my outfit was screaming proof. With a clearance-bin pashmina and polyester pants so tight they cut off any circulation below my waist, I made a b-line for the magazine rack. I was a bitch on a mission and nothing was going to stop me from learning how to be a succesful gay man. For years in Winnipeg, life in the closet had kept me miles away from any picture of a half-naked man that wasn’t on the cover of Men’s Health. But now that I was free, Meryl Streep knows I had to make up for lost time.
I flew passed the home and garden section before making a brief pit stop at fashion and finally reaching my final destination at gay and lesbian. There it was, standing eleven-inches tall and forty-eight pages wide, the magazine I had waited my entire adolescent life for. Its glossy cover shined in the flourescent light and blinded me from any other publication on the shelf. By force of habit I checked both ways and took a deep breath before I stepped closer to it. Slowly and with infinite grace, I lifted up my right hand and extended my index finger to touch it; but there was one major problem, I couldn't reach it.
I felt like Adam in Michelangelo’s painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; except with less muscle definition and a substantially bigger package. My Holy Grail was inconveniently displayed at the very back of the very top shelf and I was one pair of five-inch platforms short of getting my hands on it. I tried everything I could to get it down. I jumped, danced on my tippy-toes, and even tried using my pashmina as a lasso to wrangle it off the shelf. For a moment I even debated asking the sales-girl with the step ladder in the next aisle for help, but figured it was much more dramatic if I struggled to get it down myself. Just when I thought all hope was gone, an angel appeared in the form of six-foot tall woman with two inch heels and a neck like a giraffe.
“Oh my God I love your shoes!” I harked in front of her, which translated in gay morse code as “SOS!”
“Whatever,” she said.
Alright so maybe she wasn’t an angel as much as a total bitch except that didn’t matter because she was tall.
“I was wondering if you could get that magazine up there for me, the one with Billy Crudup on the cover?”
“Do I look like I work here?”
“No…but-
“Listen Nancy, I’ll get Billy up there for you on one condition.”
“What is that?” I gulped. There was no question this bitch was fierce.
“That terrible excuse for a scarf never finds its way wrapped around your neck again.”
With one tug, I unraveled the acrylic from around my neck while she brought the magazine down and placed it in my hand.
I was more excited than an eleven-year-old boy who'd just got his dirty fingernails on a stolen copy of Playboy. I looked up to thank the giant lady but she was already gone. Standing in the aisle, I tore through the pages of the magazine and soaked up every new bit of information I could. From designer watches to premium vodkas and weekend trips to Buenos Aires, it dawned on me that I was going to have to increase my credit limit before I could ever be like one of these men.
I was half-way through the issue when my fingers stopped on and advertisement that I had never seen before. It was laid out next to a five-page spread for Dolce & Gabanna and featured a photograph of a man on his mountain bike that looked like it was ripped out of a catalogue for J-Crew. The two pages that followed the photo were back-dropped by white and filled to the brim with small print. Unlike the other ads for sports cars and expensive colognes I was unsure what this company was trying to sell me that required such a high word count. Zooming in for a closer look, I panned my eyes across a compound word I had never seen before: anti-retroviral. The ad was for HIV medication.
“Oh yeah,” I said to myself, as if it just occurred to me I signed the lease on an apartment I couldn’t afford.
It was at that moment, I realized my life outside the closet was going to be just as fearful as it was fashionable. In every queer magazine I read after that (and wrote for) I became more and more afraid. Laid out next to every ad for a cruise-line or dating site, there was an even bigger public health warning. Whether it was for syphylis, chlamydia or HIV, it seemed there was a special infection for every man you could possibly go for coffee with. Seven years later, it is clearer to me now, in that first year out of the closet I learned how to fear sex before I ever knew what it meant to celebrate it.
I was brought back to reality by the site of Tommy’s father walking through the door. He couldn’t have been a day over twenty-seven and had the exact same face as his son. He leaned over to give his wife a kiss and it occurred to me that it was her all this time, and not her son, who was sick. I began to wonder whether she had a mental illness and if that was the reason she had not bothered to help her son match the wooden block to the correct hole.
The father kneeled down on the floor beside his son and with one soft movement, guided Tommy’s hand with the square block over to the right spot on the board. In an instant Tommy’s tiny fingers released their grip, and the wooden cube slid perfectly in to its home.
Returning home from Ottawa for the holidays. This was the last time I was ever in a box.I suddenly heard a man’s voice in my head and looked around the room to see who it could be. It played again and before I knew it I was sitting in the passenger seat of my father’s silver Hyundai Elantra. It was Christmas Eve and the two of us were driving to my Aunt’s house for dinner. Just days before I had returned home from Ottawa for the holidays and had come out to my parents the previous night. Bundled up for the cold in parkas and neck warmers the two of us sat in complete silence. The only sound in the car came from the hot air blasting through the vents. We stopped at a red light and with one line, my father gave me a birds and bees talk that I had blocked out of my mind until now.
“Whatever you do, Fox,” he said, “just don’t get AIDS.”
Suddenly it struck me I had reached the bottom of my fear.
Reaching this conclusion, I do not wish to say that it was ultimately a magazine or my father that was responsible for each one of my trips to the walk-in clinic. As much as there is a certain degree of logic to stress, for the most part anxiety is irrational. However, I do wish to suggest that be it religion, history, politics or culture itself - the formation of a healthy sexual identity for anyone in this day and age requires some degree of work. And in my case, several bottles of wine and years of healing.
“Rugged Fox,” the receptionist repeated, smacking her lips. "RUGGED FOX."
“Right here,” I said, putting myself back together long enough to follow her to another waiting room.
Ten minutes later the door knob sounded and Neil Patrick Harris walked through the door in Billabong shorts and a stethoscope.
“Well Mr. Fox,” he said, reviewing my chart. “What seems to be the problem?”
“Well Dr. Howser, I don’t know if you can help me. You see when I arrived here this morning I was convinced that Meryl Streep was punishing me for having Breakfast at Tiffany’s. As it went down last Monday night, I took home the Good Samaritan from the bar and woke up the next morning covered in boils. All was good until I started thinking really hard in the waiting room and realized Miss Streep was the least of my problems. Unless you have a couch I could lie on it would take like way too long for me to explain it to you here; but I’m afraid the rash on my neck is nothing a prescription for antibiotics could help. My unfortunate skin condition is the physical manifestation of latent sexual anxiety incurred by years of fabulous magazine subscriptions and my father’s untimely destruction of the birds and the bees. So, unless you can refer me to a good psychiatrist or prescribe me a lifetime’s worth of diazepam, I suggest we both go our separate ways and I will see you the next time I have my eggs scrambled by another man.”
“Could I at least take a look?” he said, putting my file folder down on the desk in the corner. I noticed that he stopped taking notes as soon as I mentioned Meryl Streep.
“Sure, but I don’t see how it could help.”
I pulled down my turtle neck so he could get a closer look and ten seconds later he whipped out a white pad of paper from his pocket.
“You have contact dermatitis and a possible staph infection,” he said.
“I what?”
“This Good Samaritan you spoke of, do you remember him having any kind of rash you may have come in contact with?”
“Well I was several Bombays in at the time, but I guess he may have had something on his chin... but he swore to me it wasn’t contagious.”
“Take this four times a day for the next ten days and it should clear up.”
I took the folded piece of paper from his hand and refused to believe that my problem was not as complicated as I thought.
"You mean to say that I am not psychologically damaged beyond repair?"
"Well I just met you but I don't think it would hurt to get outside your head for a little bit. You're on the Coast now, go spend day on the beach or something, relax."
I walked outside the clinic on to the sidewalk and opened up my umbrella. At Shoppers, I handed my prescription over to the pharmacist and breathed a deep sigh of relief. It was nice to know my problem could be solved with $55 and not a lifetime of psychotherapy.
