The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

‘My own clique – Noah, Henry Reed, John Rubin, Frank Diamond – sometimes went out just to watch those young guys do their mating dances. We didn’t drool, but we watched. We weren’t so different from the middle-aged hetero golfing buddies who go to Hooters once a week just to watch the waitresses bend over. That sort of behavior may be slightly pitiful, but it’s not unnatural. Or do you disagree?’

Dave shook his head.

‘One night four or five of us dropped by a dance club called Highpockets. I think we had just about decided to call it a night when this kid walked in on his own. Looked a little like David Bowie. He was tall, wearing tight white bike shorts and a blue tee with cut-off sleeves. Long blond hair, combed up in a high pompadour that was funny and sexy at the same time. High color – natural, not rouge – in his cheeks, along with a spangle of silvery stuff. A Cupid’s bow of a mouth. Every eye in the place turned to look at him. Noah grabbed my arm and said, “That’s him. That’s Mister Yummy. I’d give a thousand dollars to take him home.”

‘I laughed and said a thousand dollars wouldn’t buy him. At that age, and with those looks, all he wanted was to be admired and desired. Also to have great sex as often as possible. And when you’re twenty-two, that’s often.

‘Pretty soon he was part of a group of good-looking guys – although none as good-looking as he was – all of them laughing and drinking and dancing whatever dance was in back then. None of them sparing a glance for the quartet of middle-aged men sitting at a table far back from the dance floor and drinking wine. Middle-aged men still five or ten years from quitting their efforts to look younger than their age. Why would he look at us with all those lovely young men vying for his attention?

‘And Frank Diamond said, “He’ll be dead in a year. See how pretty he is then.” Only he didn’t just say it; he spit it out. Like that was some kind of weird … I don’t know … consolation prize.’

Ollie, who had survived the age of the deep closet to live in one where gay marriage was legal in most states, once more shrugged his thin shoulders. As if to say it was all water under the bridge.

‘So that was our Mister Yummy, a summation of all that was beautiful and desirable and out of reach. I never saw him again until two weeks ago. Not at Highpockets, not at Peter Pepper’s or the Tall Glass, not at any of the other clubs I went to … although I went to those places less and less frequently as the so-called Reagan Era wore on. By the late eighties, going to the gay clubs was too weird. Like attending the masquerade ball in Poe’s story about the Red Death. You know, “Come on, everybody! Kick out the jams, have another glass of champagne, and ignore all those people dropping like flies.” There was no fun in that unless you were twenty-two and still under the impression that you were bulletproof.’

‘It must have been hard.’

Ollie raised the hand not wedded to his cane and waggled it in a comme ci, comme ça gesture. ‘Was and wasn’t. It was what the recovering alkies call life on life’s terms.’

Dave considered letting it go at that, and decided he couldn’t. The gift of the watch was too dismaying. ‘Listen to your Uncle Dave, Ollie. Words of one syllable: you did not see that kid. You might have seen someone who looked a little like him, but if your Mister Yummy was twenty-two back then, he’d be in his fifties himself by now. If he avoided AIDS, that is. It was just a trick your brain played on you.’

‘My elderly brain,’ Ollie said, smiling. ‘My going-on-senile brain.’

‘I never said senile. You’re not that. But your brain is elderly.’

‘Undoubtedly, but it was him. It was. The first time I saw him, he was on Maryland Avenue, at the foot of the main drive. A few days later he was lounging on the porch steps below the main entrance, smoking a clove cigarette. Two days ago he was sitting on a bench outside the admission office. Still wearing that blue sleeveless tee and those blinding white shorts. He should have stopped traffic, but nobody saw him. Except for me, that is.’

I refuse to humor him, Dave thought. He deserves better.

‘You’re hallucinating, pal.’

Ollie was unfazed. ‘Just now he was in the common room, watching TV with the rest of the early birds. I waved to him, and he waved back.’ A grin, startlingly youthful, broke on Ollie’s face. ‘He also tipped me a wink.’

‘White bike shorts? Sleeveless tee? Twenty-two and good-looking? I may be straight, but I think I would have noticed that.’

‘He’s here for me, so I’m the only one who can see him. QED.’ He hoisted himself to his feet. ‘Shall we go back? I’m ready for coffee.’

They walked toward the patio, where they would climb the steps as carefully as they had descended them. Once they had lived in the Reagan Era; now they lived in the Era of Glass Hips.