haunted houses

A weekend for me started on Thursday night, the idea of a weekend did, the idea of some contrast to what had seemed like a boring week wherein all I really did was work. The weekend would be committed to the idea of reckless fun, of overconsumption of substances, and of having casual sex. That was the idea. We are still in the midst of this weekend, halfway through.

That first night of this idea I went to Eastern Bloc where I consumed numerous whiskey cocktails, where I smoked a spliff outside, and where I expounded on my ideas about place and cycles and loneliness and all sorts of nonsense to a patient Adrian. When I went outside to smoke this weed, I soon found myself too overwhelmed with emotions, with an inability to be able to translate these things to other people, found myself anxious about going back into a bar and having to be social and so I went on a walk, circled the block, west on 6th Street, north on A, east on 7th, and during this walk, this time to collect myself before heading back into conversation and a bar, a place where there are expectations of being able to hold a conversation and where it is generally not okay to just be a stoned awkward person in a corner - during this time I began to think a lot about Halloween, this day that it currently is, but at which time was still approaching and I felt tremendous grief in the presence of ghosts. I began to think about the past year, about where I was last Halloween and about the things that have died since that time. I thought about Niki and about Gabriel, whose birthday it is on this day, and about Diego. It was a year ago that Niki kicked me out of our home on Suydam Street and which put into motion my year of feeling homeless and lonely, really just the beginning of what would be many losses. I would soon stop talking to Diego, and then a few months later, stop talking to Gabriel. These were the ghosts that were haunting me on this walk, thinking through all these things, these changes that have occurred in the last year and I thought about that terrible gay boardinghouse that I lived in on 7th Street between B and C.

I was approaching the place. It was past the circumference of the circle I had intended to make and the idea of continuing east on 7th past Avenue B really frightened me. I knew that I should confront the place, view this place, see if for what it is, what it may have been, and to show myself that I didn’t live there anymore, to know that I had moved on, grown, become better. And I hesitated on the corner of 7 and B for a long time, not sure if I wanted to continue, not sure if I could handle seeing the house. I was stoned, okay, and so the house was taking on a perhaps outsized significance in my thoughts about grief and life, mine, and of Halloween. A haunted house.

I finally crossed the street and made my way to in front of the house, looked up to the fourth floor window that used to be my bedroom, tiny thing, wondered about who was now residing there and was so happy it was not me. There was a great deal of grief about my life at that time and the things that led to me being there. I felt better though, seeing it, staring it down, and being able to walk away. I rejoined the circle I was making and looped around back into Eastern Bloc, where I told these thoughts to the bewildered Adrian, who really only seemed to be interested in making out with me and not my depressing stories about lost friends and gay boardinghouses. Matt, at some point, cut me off from drinking more. I left. I had to stay committed to the project, enact the idea.

I went to the Hose where I could order more drinks and flirt with unknown boys, boys without history, without names. Street Hero performed and I danced like a crazy person – the idea of the weekend enacted, lost in dance. After their show, these two boys touched me, told me they liked my moves, asked my name. I told them my name, asked them theirs. I was outside smoking a cigarette with one of them, the one I was least attracted to. He told me they were a couple, a threesome was discussed, whose apartment we should go to was discussed. He mentioned something about how there’s no such thing as new music, how it all sounds like earlier stuff. I didn’t like this statement, its jadedness, its failure to approach things freshly. I was also belligerently drunk and easily annoyed. I started to kiss him. We talked more. I kissed him again because I was done with talking and wanted to get this threesome on the road. He said no when I kissed him this next time, said it had to come from something we were both feeling. I was wasted, said okay, and made motions to leave this conversation, to seek out other people. I imagine now that my moves were not suave as drunk as I was, as cigarette and pizza and whiskey smelling as my breath must have been. He asked if I wanted to exchange numbers so we could all hang out, coded talk I believe for having a threesome, but I was annoyed about his no, about his comments about music, and about how really I would just rather have sex with his boyfriend, and I said No, I don’t. I left and talked to other smokers, these people that hang outside of bars. His boyfriend came out and asked him what happened and they left. I got a BLT at the corner deli, a candy bar of some kind, and got into a cab home.

Yesterday, the weekend continued, this idea refusing to die. I went over to Diego’s in the daytime and he made my costume for me, this beautiful harlequin outfit that I cannot wait to put on shortly. We had sex afterwards in his bed, collapsing afterwards on top of each other, semen smearing between our bellies, a pleasant mess. I went home, napped off some of the hangover I was still feeling from my attempt at a weekend the night before. I woke up and was ready to continue the narrative, met up with Bob and went to some gay bowling party with an open bar and free bowling and too much dry ice. The open bar ended and we moved on to another one, cattle grazing, moving from field to field once one is exhausted. We went to the Hose and I am really starting to get sick of that bar, of every party being there, of the feeling that there is this one gay bar for some reason in this large city we live in. But there was free booze and I drank some it before that was over and I realized that the party really sucked. The fog machine could not hide this fact.

I left and went to Eastern Bloc, the same sites revisited again and again, pagan rituals performed on these altars, Halloween practices. There I started talking to this sexy gentleman, Jed, who had felt up my spandex-clad legs, had had flirty conversation with him, sexually charged from the get-go with his feeling of my legs. He said he was going to go pee on the street. I told him he should pee on my face instead. He went out on the street to pee.

There was this other person there, nameless last night, despite his name somewhere in my phone, who I have made out with at bars before, who looks like Diego, and who I made out with last night. He kept biting my lip though, this vampire, biting it really hard in a way that was not at all sexy, that would continually kill whatever feelings of sexiness I was feeling. I screamed each time he did so, afraid he was going to bite off my lip, and he would whether I liked that. I would tell him no, that I did not like that, and minutes later again it would occur, this terrible kissing habit of his. At some point, I had enough, and slipped out from under him into the crowd. I found Jed. He commented on my smeared makeup, joked that everyone wanted to make out with me. I was that slut. At that moment, on cue, some intoxicated lady came up to kiss me. Proof of his statement.

He, this Jed fellow, asked me where I lived. I told him and he curled his face at how far Bushwick sounded. I asked him where he lived. He lives in the West Village. He said he likes to take boys home there and fuck them. I was turned on by this, ready to leave with him. He told me though that he doesn’t take home boys with makeup on and that I needed to wipe my face, that it was all smeared. I told him no, turned off by the pushiness of the demand, that probably I would have washed the zebra stripes off my face at his apartment, but to tell me to do so here, at this bar, as a condition of going home with him, was something my belligerent self was not going to tolerate. He tried to hand me cocktail napkins to wipe it off. I turned away.

I had to leave, had to escape the vampire kisser and also the presence of this makeup hater, this person trying to wipe me clean, erase something about me. I fled, got some pizza and got into a cab, wanted to be home quickly, to some idea of home, running from one projected idea to the next.