“I’m beginning to realize something else really happened.” I could hear Brian, whoever he was, saying that to Eric. Perhaps the UFO story amounted to nothing but bullshit. Perhaps he’d already told Eric about Coach, and they’d agreed to pull my leg all the way from Kansas, to see what I’d say. Perhaps, and perhaps not. I didn’t want to think about it.
I considered telephoning Eric, but I couldn’t. Only one other person knew about Coach-Wendy-and even she didn’t fully understand the story. She couldn’t know the privacy and the bliss I felt when he held me, and yes, the love. Coach existed in my past, my most special and unblemished memory. Eric could never know about him; Mom could never know. Whatever recollections Eric’s new friend held, I couldn’t allow them to interfere with mine.
But even as I thought this-as I fell back on the floor and tossed aside Eric’s letter-I had the weird idea that I knew Brian, or at least understood him, as if I’d been burdened with the sort of ESP that Eric could only fantasize having. It was a confident knowledge, and it scared me.
Money dwindled fast. There one day, gone the next. Evenings, I wasted time with Wendy and her friends, drinking in smoky East Village bars. We alternated between straight and queer hangouts. I slept around; sex was nothing spectacular, nothing too different from what I’d had in Kansas. I wanted something more.
One night, in a place with the ingenious name of The Bar, a bartender asked where I hailed from. I told him; he smiled, thought a minute, and said, “You’re not in Kansas anymore.” He hadn’t been the first to say that. Everyone thought the Oz references hilarious-bartenders, Wendy’s pals, and an old dude whose eyes flashed with the leery optimism that yes, I was his for the night.
After the bartender said the line, I turned to Wendy, my face blazing with drunkenness and anger. “I hate Dorothy and Toto,” I said. We ferreted our way around the place and sat on a bench beside the pool table. White ball collided with blue, knocking it into a corner pocket.
Wendy removed the rubber band from the ponytail that trailed in a long strip down her head’s median. Her dyed-scarlet hair tumbled everywhere, so gorgeous I had to plunge my face and hands into it. It smelled like flowers-honeysuckle, I guessed. “Braid it,” Wendy said.
I didn’t know how. She shrugged and combed her hand through her hair. “It’s like tying knots in rope, only with three ropes instead of two.” I started tying, making a mess of it, until finished.
When Wendy got up to check her hair in the bathroom mirror, I headed over for another beer. The bartender was engaged in a hushed conversation with a friend, and he wiggled one finger to signal he’d be right with me. I heard the words “hustler bar.” What? I leaned forward, inconspicuously trying to catch as much as possible about Ninth Circle. But the bartender and his friend weren’t discussing the West Village. They whispered about a place on the Upper East Side, a bar called Rounds (What a stupid fucking name, I remember thinking). I couldn’t hear everything-something about how the bartender and another friend had gone “as a joke” to Rounds, how the friend had caught a recent ex hustling there.
I couldn’t have cared less about this melodrama; I just wanted to know where, when, and how. I shuffled over and ordered a beer, giving the bartender my best crooked smile. “Oh yeah, I’ve been to that place,” I said. He appeared miffed that I’d heard his supposed secret, but I continued. “What street is that again?”
Before Wendy returned, the bartender had told me all I needed to know, vindicating himself of his earlier Oz remark. I learned that Rounds was located on East Fifty-third off Second Avenue, stayed open seven nights a week, sometimes enforced a vague dress code-no hats or tennis shoes, the bartender explained.
Wendy and I returned to our bench. She had brushed a wet hand over her knotted strip of hair, and water beads gleamed red on the closely cropped bristles at the sides of her head. She jerked her thumb to the right to indicate the bar. “More Kansas jokes?”
“No,” I said. “He was just getting friendly.” I handed her the beer. She tipped it, swallowing in heavy gulps until it was gone.
That following Friday, 8 P.M., Wendy hurried out to meet her friends for a speed-metal concert. I parted my hair on the side, combed back my bangs, replaced my shirt with a white button-down, and slipped on the ten-dollar pair of wing tips I’d bargained from a First Avenue thrift store. I snuffed the candle from the hollowed carcass of Wendy’s jack-o’-lantern. “Here I go,” I said, and stuck my tongue into its toothless grin. On the way to the subway, I checked my reflection in nearly every window I passed.
As I strode the avenues toward Rounds, I contemplated Eric’s letter. The UFO bunk still confused me, but by now I’d cemented my certainty that this “Brian” was another kid from Coach’s history, a boy he’d selected from the Little League lineup. If that were indeed true, then I’d had some form of prepubescent sex with him-a tidbit he’d either (a) disremembered, or (b) hadn’t chosen to tell Eric. The three separate occasions when Coach suckered another kid into our afternoons still floated around in my head somewhere. I could remember Coach’s voice, hissing instructions. “Suck his dick, Neil.” “Put your hand farther inside me.” I tried to imagine Coach saying something to the effect of “Let him fuck you, Brian.” His voice remained, as lucid as crystal, as crisp as the five-dollar bills he’d hand to me and anyone else after we’d satiated him. In my head I envisioned a Forty-second Street marquee, strobes pulsing with NEIL AND BRIAN MEET THE LITTLE LEAGUE COACH. Yes, it was entirely possible.
I reached the doorway to Rounds, and I tucked these thoughts away. After all, how could I successfully hustle wearing a face distorted with complicated memory? “I’ll think about it later.”
Chilly, carpeted, low-lit: the place’s appearance seemed as far from the East Village bars as, say, a funeral parlor from an amusement park. Piano music tinkled through the air; an octogenarian blond woman sat before the keys, crooning a song called “Love for Sale.” Fat queens huddled beside her, some mouthing the lyrics, periodically dropping bills into a glass vase on the piano. I stared at the singer, then looked around me. The distinctions between hustlers and johns were embarrassingly obvious. Everyone stood around, watching one another. The hustlers sipped at mugs of beer; the johns, fruity drinks with floating wedges of lime, lemon, or toothpick-speared olives. I took my place against the wall, one in a line of other teenaged or early-twentyish guys, most of whom didn’t seem all that attractive. I stuffed thumbs in pockets and tried to force my features into whatever innocent expression it kept among its ranks.
The johns stared, stared, stared. Their eyes were the beady, slothful eyes of anteaters or vultures. Neil McCormick, the new commodity. I thought: I have them all in my grubby little hands, and I’m going to pierce them with pins, like butterflies.
After a five-dollar beer and some horrendous, nonprofit small talk with two johns, a guy approached who didn’t look half-bad. “What’s your name?” he asked, his tongue pink in the gap between his teeth. I told him, and he repeated it. “You’re kidding, because my name’s Neil, too.” I mocked astonishment. The singer broke into “Just a Gigolo,” her head bobbing, her eye winking lewdly at the surrounding johns.
The following minutes filled with standard john/hustler dialogue. “Can I buy you a drink?” “Sure.” “What do you like to do?” “Just about anything, as long as it’s safe.” “I usually pay a hundred and twenty.” (I tried to suppress a gasp; still, as I’d soon discover, he’d quoted an average price.) “That sounds good.” “Whenever you’re ready to go, just say the word.” “How about now?”