the way home

I did that thing that I do when I am feeling awkward at a bar by myself. I downed drink after drink, gulping them down quickly, both to ease whatever feeling of awkwardness I had, to wash it away in a flood of vodka, and also to have something to do with my hands, with my mouth, a way to occupy myself. I was at Westway last night to see Jinkx Monsoon perform and was waiting for friends to arrive. As I downed these drinks, I stood off to the side and watched the insanely beautiful gogo boys at Westgay do their thing on the runway in the center of the floor. Immediately, there was one who I became totally smitten with, a beautiful bearded man with an absolutely insane body. He was a terrible dancer but that didn't matter, or maybe it did, maybe was what made him all the more attractive, that there were no impressive dance moves or booty-popping skills to marvel at, rather just a beautiful body that I was already trying my best to remember the details of, knowing that the night would end with me drunk in my bed alone and recalling these sights, this body.

Friends arrived. I talked to them, mostly about these gogo boys. Jinkx performed. Having ordered all those drinks earlier, my wallet was full of singles from the change given. I put these to great use. It's amazing what you can buy with a dollar. You can buy a lotto ticket and for an evening have dreams of what you would do with countless millions of dollars, what neighborhood you would buy an apartment in, the various cities you would travel to on your endless vacation of a life. Or, alternately, when you are at a gay bar, drunk and horny on a Tuesday night, you can put a dollar in a gogo boy's jockstrap and rub your hand against his chest, physical contact that you never would have had with a person this sexy outside this setting. You can put that hand that touched his sweaty chest against your face afterwards, see if there is any smell on your hand, feel that little bit of moisture on your face, your lips, and fantasize about what it would be like to have sex with this person. The fantasy is a little bit more real that it would otherwise be. This, for only a dollar. I kept on dreaming, putting dollar after dollar into his jockstrap.

My friends had left at some point but I stayed, watching this gogo boy until he was on stage no longer, until it was three something in this morning. I took a taxi home to Bushwick, looked at pictures of this guy's gorgeous ass that I had taken on my phone, and talked to my taxi driver about tolls, about overnight shifts, about Turkey, and about how he talks to other taxi drivers all night long on his cellphone, other guys working the overnight hours, bored, lonely, and trying to stay awake. I was flipping back and forth between a map to give the driver directions to my house and in between the photos of this gogo boy, toggling back and forth between real and imagined directions to beds in this city.