Is it a function of getting older that people just annoy you all the time, or were they always annoying and as the rest of your senses dull it just becomes more acutely obvious? It’s like when you get older and you go to a bar and suddenly the music is always too loud. You would think that a person who has a hard time hearing would never think anything is too loud, but the fact remains that it is. It is probably because we have stopped listening to the music and started trying to have a real conversation just at the moment when our bodies no longer allow us to do so. I guess people are like the club. Just at the moment you want to get serious about knowing them, the noise they generate around themselves is overwhelming.
When my mother turned forty, she said, “I never thought I’d live this long” as she blew out the candles. My sister and I still being teenagers at the time, it seemed strange to think at the time that she would embark on that most important journey of parenthood with no real expectation of seeing it through to the end. But now that I am blowing out similar numbers of candles, I see what she meant. It all went by so fast but at the same time, we’ve been here a long time and we are still here, with a lot more time to go. It is like running a marathon where you ran your heart out for the first ten miles only to discover as you are gasping for air that there are another sixteen miles to go. Everyone is standing around on the sidelines cheering, but all you want to do is sit down for a minute.
Most of the people I hang out with are younger than I am. I don’t know how this happened. I used to be the youngest of my friends, but then slowly over time, I turned around and then I was the oldest one left. I feel as inexplicably lost in the moment and disoriented as Lady Gaga in “Just Dance.” I was so worried before I turned forty what would happen to me because there are no gay men in their 40s. Or at least that is what I thought. I never saw them! Did they all die or just stop wanting to ever leave the house? But now I have my answer.
Tonight I went to Ben Harvey’s GUMBO party way out in Brooklyn. Except that it isn’t way out. It is a short walk from the first subway stop in the borough. I can probably get there faster from my office than my old apartment in Harlem. But now everything feels far. When I arrived with 26 year old Chris, who is visiting spontaneously from Pittsburgh, there was a massive coat check line, which like the people in the coats in the line, only served instantly to annoy me. While waiting there I saw an older guy I have seen at GUMBO before. He is not old, probably just a few years older than I am. But the crowd at GUMBO is young and artsy and preppy and ultra suede and brazenly faggy and all those things and he, like me, is none of those things. And tonight for the first time, instead of seeing him as someone who was not like everyone us at the party, I saw the two of us together as not like everyone else at the party.
I talked to Martin’s brother who is visiting from Chicago where he teaches Middle Eastern studies. Naturally, while the gays twirled around in their Christmas cardigans and tight, plunging v-neck shirts, I cornered him for his opinion about the Wikileaks cables and what everyone really thinks of Iran. This is not the kind of cocktail chatter that leads one to cock or tail. But then, getting laid isn’t my primary motivation. This begs the ultimate question: if I am not here to get laid, then what I am doing here?
This I think is the essential issue as gay men get older. You can hear these songs at home, on a really expensive surround sound system you paid good money for. Booze is dirt cheap when you mix it up yourself in that fabulous shaker that holds about a gallon you picked up at Williams Sonoma. And more than likely, by now you have a boyfriend and after working all week, why would you want to go out to a bar filled with guys a decade younger with music too loud to hear each other over. You can just talk at home and then be in bed at a reasonable hour.
But I don’t have a boyfriend, not even the real prospect of one on the far horizon. I really like being single. Because as annoying as a guy keeping me waiting in the coat check line is, he is infinitely more annoying to me when he is in my way at home and he won’t leave and I can’t get away from him. So being alone really works for me… most of the time. But then it is my birthday and I am alone at dinner with four couples at a table for ten, or hosting Thanksgiving alone with three couples. Those are the moments when I feel alone but more importantly, I feel like every other paired up thing from the homos to the candlesticks is looking at me like a sad isolated thing. ALL. ALONE.
Chris was understandably bored beyond tears by my Iranian confab with Martin’s brother and, as young people so casually do, sent me a text message while we were talking that he wanted to leave. So I excused myself from Martin’s brother who took it upon himself to explain as I was running from him like the sleeve of my shirt was on fire that Martin had warned him about not talking politics in gay bars. I felt terrible. That was the conversation I wanted to have, but the evening wasn’t entirely my own. This is why I like being alone!
Chris and I wandered around a little more and he got more drinks and talked to a cute guy who was not tall but with lumberjack arms in a v-neck shirt that made his mildly caramel exposed chest look like a wedge of sweet potato pie surrounded by a fluffy bed of whipped cream. I went over to talk to Ben Harvey who was engaged in conversation with Blake, who I thought I met on one of my first GUMBO nights (I didn't. It was a guy named Tim I was thinking of). He said the same thing to me, but maybe he was just being polite. Whatever. All the gays start looking alike after a while with their unbuttoned, ribbed henley shirts and skinny jeans and exhaustively tussled hair. My roommate insists that I have a type and retrospectively looking at Blake’s photos online, I believe that he is right. So Blake has a delicious swirl of blond hair and dashing features, but he is also a guy to make small talk with in a bar while the friend you came with is trying to get laid. If the music isn’t too loud.
As much as Blake may or may not enjoy chatting politely with strangers about television, tonight he was just plain, old-fashioned red-blooded American horny. As he looked past me like a doctor lifting up an X-ray to the light, I realized that I should probably leave him to his search since he clearly did not intend for it to end here with me. Would I have liked finding his blond hair on the pillow next to mine in the morning? Probably. But then he would be there and I want to sleep until noon and then have coffee and read the Times and then do nothing, all of which he would instantly be in the way of. Also, he wants - - wait, what?, oh okay, well good bye then Blake, nice -- And he's gone.
On my way out, I said good bye to Ben and Dave Rubin and saw once again Young David who is adorable and working on their show now. “You look very familiar,” he said to me with the kind of twinkle in his eye that is a permanent fixture in young twenty-somethings and Santas, “Haven’t we met before?” I assured him that it was so meaningfully yesterday, but as he corrected, it was really Wednesday. Close enough. At my age, yesterday and the day before yesterday are practically one. There are so many past days piled up in the sale bin of your brain waiting to be picked over for sudden joyous bargains, what difference is one from another really?
Young David has a smile to melt Frosty prematurely, but since he just graduated from college, he was probably born while I was in college and well, let’s just put him back in the bin and leave that right where we found it. Besides, I have a second crack at the ridiculous coat check line to make. Ben told me gleefully that the bar was at capacity, which is an amazing accomplishment. But the gays in line announced that coat check was out of hangers with the kind of panic usually reserved for locked fire doors in an emergency. In that moment, I charged past them to the front of the line with a brand of purpose most of them won’t even think about wearing for another decade. After all, I needed to get my coat and, as I reasoned, by doing so I will be freeing up two hangers . After all, just because they are annoying to me, it doesn’t mean that I can’t, in my own selfish haste, happen to do something that helps them in the end. And in the meantime, I get to help myself out the door to a place I truly belong: Home.
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