2006-11-26 - 5:18 a.m.
I can see now that I made a terrible mistake coming here to West Hollywood to work today. Who would write under these conditions? I ask you.
Every few seconds, another boy with a perfect butt walks by. Or another pair of hotties stroll in front of you, and you catch the briefest wisps of tauntingly intriguing conversations – “….was fucking him and then as he was about to cum, he stood up and there was his….” Or “…we were at the party, and it was full of all these stars from the OC: Do you know that in the hot tub, giving oral sex to a donkey was none other than….” Or, “….had a great Thanksgiving and we had dinner at the home of that guy from PROJECT RUNWAY. You know the fella I am talking about, he was the one who….”
It is the Saturday after Thanksgiving – and every queen and his princess is out and about, mincing around the neighborhood and dashing in and out of the various Santa Monica Blvd sportswear and CD shops. At the West Hollywood Starbucks, the hot and handsome beauties are yammering and jabbering with each other, occasionally squeaking and occasionally squawking.
My, they are still beautiful, though, aren’t they? They are beautiful and terrible. You shall never have them. They are not for mere mortals such as we. I am not sure they are for anyone: I tend to think that these impossibly gorgeous, statuesque beauties, shaking their perfectly toned bottoms and shining their veneered, blazing white teeth at their pals, are nothing more than mirages – some wizard has spun a Dibbuk-like enchantment, conjuring up the beautiful boys out of sunlight and sugar.
Meanwhile, at the West Hollywood Starbucks, they have installed these fabulous huge tables that have little Tiffany lamps inlaid in a some kind of a console into which you can plug in your laptop for free electrical power. The place is more convivial than any library – and were it not as antiseptic as every other Starbucks that you have seen, I would say it even tops the dear old Novel Café, which is nowhere near as user friendly as this is.
In the time since I was last here, a few months ago, the generation seems to have changed again. Six months is about right for a total generational turnover in the gay world, as you know. It has to do with college semesters, I suspect. Everyone seems to have dropped another pants size – as well as 10 IQ points – and they are all wearing T-shirts and jeans, like off duty soldiers in some madman’s Queer Army.
Across from me, two cute young men are arguing politics in the most dim bulb way possible, while really sending each other the unspoken message that one of them would rather be slurping on the other’s cock. And who would blame them? Both boys are terribly cute.
And, yet, here I am, a middle aged shlub in his hideous baggy grey sweater with a tear on the shoulder and corduroy slacks from two years ago. My hair’s going slate grey, I am (after the Thanksgiving holiday) more than portly, and I wear coke bottle glasses that are as thick as a stack of hockey pucks. Really, I could not be more invisible if I was wearing a three piece Invisibility Suit. Every few minutes, I expect some doe-eyed twink, his tight blue jeans belted low around his hips, to stop by and drop onto my laptop an official “Permission to Pass – Revoked” card that will force me to board the bus home immediately.
The only avenue open to me seems to be to become a Dirty Old Man, and I am afraid I have made absolute peace with that destiny. It is comforting, after a fashion, to know precisely where you fit in – and the way that you are going to fit in for decades to come, given the pleasure of being alive that long (you can never take anything for granted, you know). As the youngish fellows who occasionally fall into my predatory spider web realize, Dirty Old Men can often get laid – and for free, too. To be especially successful as a dirty old man, though, I am afraid that I need rather more money – but I hope that is a situation that will resolve itself over the next year in one way or another.
Anyway, it is now about an hour later. At this ridiculous computer table, I find myself seated facing the most beautiful man I ever did see. I swear, I wish to marry him and whisk him away from all this. He is clearly some kind of a graduate student, and he appears to be studying a mammoth book of MBA stuff. He has jet black hair and a chisselled chin, as well as a shockingly attractive splash of five o’clock shadow. I’d put him in his mid to late 20s, and I’d say he is of mixed race – possibly half Irish and half Egyptian, I’d guess.
His eyes are a beautiful brown and incredibly penetrating. Every so often, he lifts up his face and we lock glances – but just for a second. Nothing is going to happen – but we are mutually intrigued in what the other is doing, it seems. Unfortunately, he is also sniffling and coughing, and frequently wiping his nose with an increasingly unwholesome looking grey Starbucks napkin. The odds are that the young man will give me his cold, even without speaking to me, though we have shared one or two words, mostly about the discarded newspaper on the table.
By contrast, at the next table, there is a homeless African American man, covered with filth and muck and smelling of sweat and a week of sleeping on the sidewalk. He is about the same age as the beautiful boy, but is sitting there bobbing and nodding, jabbering and muttering, as he looks at a stack of handwritten paranoid jibberish on the table in front of him.
And that is the Alpha and Omega of experience, right there. One man who is so breathtakingly beautiful I wish I could marry him and live with him forever – and one filthy fellow who is so stinky I wish they would toss him right out of the place in nothing flat. And what is the difference between the two men? Are we not all mortal? In God’s eyes are we not the same?
The Starbucks clerk just came over and whispered something to the bum, who heaved himself out of his chair, gathered together his smelly belongings, and limped out of the store. Meanwhile, the cute boy I adore just ejaculated yet another sneeze. And that is the way the world is.
