M4M
Tales of love, joy and loss between men
Philipe walked out onto the Castro sidewalk, and was instantly drenched in late-summer San Franciscan sun. The air buzzed around him as he moved through the lingering throngs of pedestrians. He entered the café around the corner and walked up to a tattooed barista. He goes to speak, but realizes there’s no urgency, no gap to fill. Instead, he just looks. The barista hands him an espresso shot, he holds it in his hands, and feels the warmth, “I moved from Kentucky, just last week, to an apartment here, on the corner; I moved because the life I thought I had went awry, and now I’m here, two plants and a suitcase” he said, before he knew he was going to, still holding the gaze of the barista. “Well, two plants and a suitcase, I’m Alex and that was a gift”.
Alejandro sat on his couch and heard a freight train go by. “Sex was alright, but this apartment is crappy; this can never work” was not exactly what his Grindr date said, but was everything their expression was saying. Alej didn’t even flinch.
There comes a time in life, he thought, when life ceases to be about conquering new things or striving for better, instead it’s a continuation of the same things. This might be called finding peace, but Alej was twenty-four and felt this was possibly premature. He stared out the window into the final frost of Spring.
Sam and Jo met at Frisbee. They both bonded over pronouns — They — and then later over how all the ways they didn’t fit the world fitted each-other perfectly. “You’re the key to my weirdo lock” Sam put it, in bashful dad-joke manner. Later they grabbed sushi, and agreed to swap hair-styles.
Later that month, Sam with a bob and Jo trying to grow “scraggy surfer hair”, realizing that they’d got the short end of the bargain as it’d take all year to acquire said look, the two began to plan a roadtrip.
“We’ll need a van that opens on the side so we can watch the sun set each night over the ocean”, “and enough space for a dog bed”, “you have a dog?”, “Terrier -mutt”, “gross”, “you are totally dead to me”.
One night, after the borrowing of said van, and the driving of said van two hundred miles south along the coastline, Jo held Sam in their arms and both sipped rosé, the final rays of the sun caught in the sparkling amber. Jo took in the wide horizon, and looked Sam in the eyes, “I’ve totally no idea where all of this will go, but I’ll be there for you”.
Jason looked out through the glass at the dark crowd walking beneath him, the angular bright lights of the architecture around him like the exoskeleton of a vast spaceship. He picked up a glass from the table beside him and threw its clear contents back, registering with gravity what he’d done as the glass banged the table. He sat down.
As the walls around him began to shift, he felt the euphoria in his chest build, lifting the fog of depression that followed him all week, followed him down into the bowels of the subway, and up into the crystalline towers of his work. He turned the music up and stood against the glass, tracing the lines of buildings with his finger.
He began to sway. His steps were heavy beneath him and nausea filled his chest until hot liquid forced itself out of his mouth. Amidst the vomit he tangled his feet and slammed into the glass, blood from his nose painting the city red before him.
Minutes or hours later, he came to and felt suffocated. He pulled the sliding glass open and slumped onto the balcony, gasping through acidity and blood, the streetlights and bollards spinning beneath him. He strained for fresh air and gently rolled over the railing, falling through vertical space.
Jake and Dan have nice things. It’s universally acknowledged. Their friends come over, share tasteful bottles of wine, eat dinner, discuss real-estate, possibly unclothe and soak in the hot tub, possibly drink some more, possibly one of their tastefully toned bodies finds its way into Jake and Dan’s bed (though not usually) and at some point people decide it is a Thursday night and it’s time to wind it down. Jake and Dan walk through the emptied house in a quiet air, a patrician’s formal walk of closing.
As they ready for bed, Dan drinks in Jake’s figure in the mirror, as Jake bares his teeth looking for imperfections. Jake scrapes at a wine stain and Dan retreats to bed, neatly taking up less than half.
“Wouldn’t it be nice”, Dan opens, momentarily gating himself, “wouldn’t it be nice to move to the countryside”, his eyes searching, “and have a simpler life?” He was never greeted with a reply, but he’d already drifted off to a meadow, a prairie house, mornings on the porch, the sun setting in solitude briefly crowning the trees with alpine fire. And then to eating in silence at their marble table, holding himself at a distance he hated, watching parts of life walk by him as he tried to be someone he wasn’t.
Days later, whilst their bodies intertwined and he felt the warmth of penetration, Dan drifted off again. “I can’t do this. I don’t know what we are. I’m sorry”. The silence settled and arranged itself. They exchanged looks through watered eyes and Jake replied curtly “I know”. They both lay unmoved, letting the cold and silence encase them.
Philipe awoke with his duvet crumpled around him, Alex sprawled half out of it, all under the big moon-shaped window. He stretched out all four limbs, feeling the fresh air ignite his lungs. He traced out the black lines of panthers and vines wrapping around Alex’s arm and gently stroked his face. Alex grew a smile and Philipe submerged into his arms.
“My parents kicked me out at sixteen”, Alex said, “I didn’t even have time to pack. I just walked down to the main street and started washing dishes. I tried working the streets, it seemed fun for a while, but then I got robbed and that was that. I never spoke to my parents and I spent three years getting my ass over to this town”. Alex inhaled a cigarette, its smoke making wispy spirals in the sunlight. “And I’m half broke and I wouldn’t live anywhere else. This city saved me.”
Tyler sits at his desk, enjoying the outline of the boy in front of him. He charts how his polo-top stretches around his trapezoids, he looks at his neat clipped hair and the profile that draws. Tyler has a secret that nobody in the world knows, it’s his secret alone to have. Tyler is gay, and it’s just starting to dawn on him that there’s a whole life for him to live after that secret.
Sitting at home he looks at his mother and feels a weighty nausea at his imagined conversations with her. He cannot even see the entry point for the conversation, there’s no logical moment to interrupt her day and explain that he likes other boys, he’s not going to make a normal family, he’s not sure if they should tell granny, he’s known this for the last three years and he constantly thinks about the sex he’s never had.
He watches his mother, her watching TV, and the victorious finish-line of his imagined coming-out ebbs away. He starts to tense up as the awkward silences and stuck words surround him. He chews on his own failed beginning.
His mother notices something and asks him if he is alright, “I’m fine mom” Tyler says, the topic pushed deep down within him.
Jesse relished his sexual ambiguity. Dancing, alone, eye-gazing dreamily around him, he’d felt a mounting sense of liberation over the last few years. Two years ago he slept with a star-child like himself, camping after a rave, and the two felt everything melt between them. They drifted through swirling possibilities, time as expansive as the meadow they slept in, dawn barely registering its presence. Rising that afternoon, Jesse felt as though a window was now open, the distance of its glass no longer between him and the people passing by him.
He walked up to a man in a purple leotard, “We are both here, we’re truly here” he said, half crying through a smile, and kissed him on the lips.
Oliver woke up and faintly smelt stale alcohol on Henry’s breath. He looked at him, fuzzy and uncomposed, an ungainly pile of limbs lying happily beside him, and Oliver recalled the previous night, Henry’s muscular body, how he held Oliver and powerfully moved him, how the night had surprised him with a flair of lust between them. Oliver thought Henry seemed to be the sort of easy-going person that you could wake up to and share breakfast with for as many days as would make a decent lifetime. In short, Oliver was single, and the prospect of a partner was pleasing, and yet both men proceeded through their day without a shred of romance, barely expressing anything greater than acquaintance. It was of course just sleeping with someone, and they were both too old and wise to pay much attention to that.
Dan invites another man over to his apartment, handing him a vodka soda as he enters. They quickly undress and the man gets down on his knees and gets to work on him. Dan thinks of the men in the porn he watched that morning, the men humping and flopping around with like deranged smiling mannequins, and he dismayed at his own tepidity.
He looked at the man — the lack of familiarity, the eye of a stranger with no ties to him, no onus to take care of him, no world traveled together, no shared credit card, no family rituals. He looked at the gulf of what he once had, and the long road to get back there.
“I don’t feel right” he begins, committing to an inevitable crash, “I just.. I can’t do this. Sorry. It’s not you”, the cliché pinching them both, “I…”, he stumbled, searching for what he needed, “I need to go to Ecuador”, the plan crystalizing as he said it.
Alejandro opened Grindr and scrolled through the little square photos. “Like an advent calendar” he thought to himself, peering into the mysteries of what lives lay hidden behind the profiles, “NO FEM. NO TAPS” one read, its owner forgetting to mention what they were looking for. He received a photo of the genitals of a middle aged man passing through town. He closed the app and returned to Netflix.
Joel kissed his wife on the cheek and rolled his car down the driveway, knowing that that evening he’d meet a man in a motel, a stranger he did not know, a faceless married man in the same predicament as him, and strangely, it all seemed straightforward. Joel loved his wife, Melissa, and liked their life, their photos, the little getaways and dinners, and he had not had sex with her for four months and that was a source of tension for them. Joel watched the bushes beside him grow into a blur as he accelerated into the increasingly darkening express-way and the motion helped settle him into his seat.
He arrived at a Motel and found Shawn already waiting there. They walked, almost wordlessly into the room and both followed an unseen script. Shawn got down onto his front with his belt unbuckled, and Joel climbed onto his back.
Joel’s meetups always bookended actual trips back to head-office, and this afforded him to stay the night and sometimes wake up next to another man. He used to fantasize about this sliver of gay domesticity, but the mornings were always flat, or rushed, or awkward. Neither party had figured out how to tenderly say “thanks for the night of perfunctory sex behind my wife’s back”.
In the late morning, Joel idly stirred the coffee in his mug, relaxing into the dark little vortex. He sometimes felt there were two people inside of him, both squeezed into a Joel suit together, trying to get past each-other like morning commuters on a subway, neither making much headway. He felt which ever way he went, he’d trip over himself and land back where he started.
Joel usually only saw somebody once. Twice was practically romance.
He watched Brokeback Mountain one night on cable with incredulity; he felt himself caught between laughter and irritation. As the cowboys got emotional he scoffed and turned it off. And lay all night thinking.
Melissa’s pregnant now. It’ll keep him busy.
Jason woke up in a hospital bed, one eye stuck shut. He felt hunger and nausea all at once and as he called out nothing happened. He tried to lift an arm and fell back into a medicated sleep.
“Another banker fell down from heaven to join the rats” said the visiting ward nurse, seeing Jason stir. “So, my dear, now we got to put you back together”.
James sat at the bar, distantly watching the Spartan themed porno playing above. He pulls his leather jock down a bit, and sips some more vodka. The bass of techno reverberates in his glass.
Two guys spill in from the street and splay up against the wall beside him. They’re young, trim, and running their hands over each-others’ bodies. James hears fasteners unpop and watches an erection get unvieled. The guys’ hands and bodies roll together, blissfully entranced in their own reality, and James feels how close yet separate they are from him. He hears the rising pulse of the music. He hears the metalic claps. He wishes he was magnetic, that he could get up and draw into motion some scene around him, that the music could erupt he would just dance, that the pulse of the music would be the pulse in his neck and hands around him would pull the leather off his body.
Jason finally got his throat to speak. The ward nurse was checking his charts and Jason rasped “I didn’t mean to”. “What’s that dear?” the nurse, Brayton, turned to him. “I didn’t mean to”, each word an effort, “an accident — too high”. Brayton studied his face. Jason realized he’d no cards to hide; “I’m depressed” he squeaked.
Brayton’s catty demeanor lowered. “Honey, I don’t want to end up like you — no offense — and I know I might”. He adjusted Jason’s sheets and increased his pain meds.
Slowly, weeks taking the place of days, Jason regained some strength, his mind starting to find streams of thought amidst a thick white haze, his hours spent thoughtlessly watching the details of the ceiling. Brayton checked in on him from time to time, “Honey you still look like shit”, “Thanks mate”.
Jason’s mornings began to focus on swallowing sad looking corn flakes. He didn’t mind. “I have to make a new life” Jason said slowly, the thought dawning on him, “… and I almost feel hopeful”. “That’s the opioids, my dear”, Brayton smiled, “but, um, I get you”.
On the day Joel’s son, Nico, graduated college, he asked his father if he was homosexual. Joel felt swirling anger within him. Nico didn’t know the sacrifices he’d made for him. Joel gathered all the times he’d loathed himself. He felt the snarling start to twist up inside him. He looked at Nico, the confluence of innocence and independence, he looked at the boy’s features that were now blossoming into prominence. He looked at this strange mirror of himself, the decisions he’d made and failed to make. In moments of penetrating honesty, he didn’t think he’d lived his life well. He looked at his son. He loved him. The two sat poised, wordlessly piecing together how to respond.
Melissa called, she was minutes away. In a rush, at a precipice, Joel grabbed his son and began to cry into his neck. Amidst tremors he feebly told him yes.
“Thanks Dad” Nico said, pulling the scene together as his mom carried over a cake for later. Joel staggered back, poorly dumb-acting his new role. Slowly, they drifted to discuss dinner, and where his friends would be that night, and what parts did he want for his car-build. Joel had never before come out to anyone.
Reports of his condition slowly started to assimilate. He’d broken more bones than he knew he had. A vertebrae had been pulverised. His ribs were practically articulated now. One eye was still purple. Walking was fifty-fifty. His overall prognosis was like an alphabet soup he felt himself slowly drifting in.
Jason started to think about his future. He thought if he was going to be in a wheelchair, he sure as hell wasn’t also going to be a banker. He catalogued all his neglected hobbies looking for something to build on, and spent a day recalling where his twenties had gone. “I’m going to teach mathematics”, he told Brayton one afternoon, “to school children”. “You have experience with children?” Brayton quizzed. “No, but they can’t be worse than my clients” Jason retorted.
During another corn flakes session, Jason asked “you know I’m gay, right?”. “Honey, no girlfriends ever came to visit” Brayton smirked. Jason laughed, dribbling milk.
Alexander was going to have a party. A Rachmaninoff cello sonata reverberated through the cavernous rooms of his house and Alex spun his arms around, trailing pale silk through the air. He entered the long room where a tapestry of roses was being assembled on a table and watched the silver canteens being put into place.
Alex was the last scion of a Venetian banking family, a shrewd, effeminate aesthete. He carefully walked down the wide stairs, watching crystal ornaments being hung on a cherry blossom tree below.
In the late afternoon, people flowed in. Dinner jackets, summer dresses, pinstripes, catsuits and ball-gowns, every color and occasion was present. Each had a ribbon added to their hair as they passed under the tree.
As the sun neared the horizon, illuminating the hovering crystals, Alex spoke in a delicate, haunting lisp “My dearest friends, my fabulous family, thank you for coming to my last summer soirée. As you all know, I am sick”, he looked up into the domed ceiling, the room absolutely silent, “and as I lived on my terms, so shall I leave. It is so very important to me that I say goodbye to each and every one of you tonight”. The room raised their flutes and drank together in silence.
Jason’s days changed their focus from corn flakes to physio. He graduated from the ward and became an out-patient, coaxing life back into his muscles.
His days became dedicated to regaining independence. He strong-armed a severance, threatening HR with all the cold tricks the firm had taught him. He set up a bungalow for himself, near a school in his parents’ town. He even installed a two-person shower, just in case.
Returning to the ward, in a sleek black wheelchair, he spun wrecklessly fast in search of Brayton. He found him, clocking off. “I brought this for you”, handing him an envelope. Brayton pulled out a printed sheet “What is this?”, “Two tickets to fly wherever you want”. “Who do I take? … do you want to come with me?”, “No. Take someone who’ll appreciate it. Thanks for putting this banker back together” Jason smiled, crying. Brayton kissed him on the forehead, and watched him head out, flashing through the panels of afternoon sunlight. Brayton had never seen him move so well.
Dan arrived at Ecuadorian surf camp at the end of the season. His classmates consisted of backpackers, him standing out by being pale and clean. He judged himself the worst beginner-surfer, inadvertently flinging himself off the board long before catching any of the waves. The sea water and sun agreed with him, lightening his hair and giving him a glow.
Cooking little fish on sticks around a fire, he heard the stories of others. Some had just finished college. Others had quit jobs, or run away from lives that felt stuck. Someone handed him a gourd, and it was his turn to speak.
“I decided to come here during a crappy hookup” he said unevenly, to a mixed reception, “em, no, I was deeply in love, and it was killing me, and I’d no idea what to do, and nothing in my life felt right, so I came here”, his voice warbling through rising emotion, “as far away as I could imagine, to sit on this sand with you. And I still have no idea how to fix my life, but I’m glad be here”, he tailed off, meekly smiling at the fire in front of him.
Later that night Lara, nursing a hot cinnamon drink, draped her arms around Dan. “My heart’s broken too, Danny-boy, my piece-of-shit husband was fucking everyone and I’d no idea.” she said, numbly. “SF is no good for you. We stay until we’re both fixed. Deal?”. Dan thought of his dwindling savings, then thought of the void waiting for him back home, “Fuck it. Deal”.
Dan slept out on the beach, watching the colors of day-break slowly emerge from the darkness. He felt the morning cleanse him. He felt some distant sense of belonging.
Dearest reader, this is the end of this installment. Thanks for reading this far. If you want to hear more of any characters’ stories, leave a comment or tweet me.
