September Song

Saturday, August 31st, 2002, New York City. I'm at the Eagle again. I'm here every Friday and Saturday night, drinking myself into one bad decision after another, trying to forget my apartment in Brooklyn that never quite feels like home. It's crowded and I'm standing next to a guy that I think is very hot, allowing the hairs of my arm to brush up against his, waiting for my chance to introduce myself, or rather, for the courage to say anything to him. While I wait for the never to happen, an interloper appears, a guy I'd met some months earlier during the only threeway I've ever had in my life that was three complete strangers. There were supposed to be more of us that night, but we went in two cabs and one cab got lost, separating us all from our connective tissue, and specifically separating me from everyone I was particularly attracted to, but I'd gone through with it and after it was over, I had breakfast with one of the guys, Thomas, who was not as clever, maybe, as he thought he was, but clever enough to keep my attention despite being emphatically not my "type." So Thomas appears and I am all set to avoid him but he is more interested in Bob, the guy who still stands next to me. Something awkward, profound and painful passes between them and I stand, invisible, observing, and feeling, even if I can't hear what they're saying. Thomas is clearly shaken by the interaction and leaves us without ever so much as noticing me standing right next to him. I thought he had a crush on me but apparently that crush was trumped by his feelings for this other guy. I give up on Bob, for maybe another night, another time, and wander back into the crowd.

Later I run into Thomas. He is as confrontational as I recalled, in his declaration that he is an artist, in whatever else he might have declared in his challenging way, in, perhaps, his need for my attention. I flirt but I am not really interested. Even though he's cut his hair and looks much better than the night we'd fucked around, I've pretty much gotten all I needed to get from him and think he might be pretentious, or worse, clingy. I think an artist doesn't need to tell you that he's an artist in the first three sentences out of his mouth.

Later, still, it's four a.m. or later, and I'm walking towards the subway. I can't afford to always take a cab home, even though the subways are spotty at this hour and it can take me over an hour to get home. I'm walking quickly, as I often do, and I catch up with Thomas and two other guys who I will remember nothing about except that they existed, at one time, in one time and place, to completely unknowingly shift the course of my life with their very presence. He thinks the fact that I've caught him suggests I'm flirting, and maybe he's right, but it's still really my intention to get home. I walk a bit out of my way with them, for the company mostly, but when we get to Thomas' house, some twenty blocks later, he asks me a favor. He needs to go get drugs for these guys, and they can't come with him, so can I sit with them in his apartment while he runs this quick errand? No, I have to get home, I say, but he knows I don't, and if nothing else, he has a charisma that makes it difficult to say no to him. So I sit in a stranger's apartment with two other total strangers and make small talk. It isn't that long before Thomas returns, gives the boys their crack and sends them on their way. He is going to smoke some crystal and he wants me to join him. I say no and he pushes and I decide to submit, as I sometimes do, to my passive nature and pretend that I'm just an observer in all this, and so the next thing I know I am sucking poison out of straw.

I've done crystal before. I've had decent experiences and some monumentally bad ones, but there's that part of me that's a ridiculous optimist, and so I hold out hope that this will be at least decent. I know I'll probably have to fuck him but I'm okay with that. If I'd known what would actually happen I would have rushed home, grateful for my empty bed. It starts out well, though. We sit in the kitchen and smoke cigarettes and talk about art about the nature of it, the process of creating it. He shares things with me and I wish I had things to share with him as well but he has no internet. He has the same computer I have, but no internet. He can barely pay his rent, and I feel grateful for what I have, though I don't stop to think that he clearly has money for drugs. We move into the bedroom, still talking. When I smoke crystal, I usually just want to talk, and find it physically difficult not to. His begins to use his heightened awareness on me, observing things that I do, criticizing my negativity. I see it, too. Practically every adjective I use, and especially the adverbs, is hyperbolic and unnecessarily negative. I start to feel self-conscious. I start to doubt myself. It doesn't occur to me to think that he's high and doesn't know what he's talking about. Now I can't stop talking and can't stop noticing every word I say. He wants me to stop talking and to have sex with him but I can't, I can't do either. Hours go by. He pleads with me to stop talking, but i can't, and now I feel like a burden, I feel like every awful thing I've ever thought about myself is true: I'm endlessly self-absorbed, selfish, negative, pretentious, skinny, ugly, useless, annoying. He wants to try to sleep so I take his keys and wander the city. It's afternoon on Sunday. How did this happen? Why did I do this to myself. I feel the city's heart beating beneath me, and it feels like one huge body made up of all these microorganisms, these people, and I am not one of them, and I don't belong here. I have no friends here. I have people I fuck and people I don't fuck, but no friends. I go back and try to lay with Thomas, try to keep quiet. I hear music that isn't really playing, a Toad the Wet Sprocket song, repeating over and over in my head. I close my eyes and I see places I haven't been, expansive rooms that look like airport lobbies. I can't interact with anything that I see. I try to get Thomas to give me affection, to affirm my bruised ego, but he doesn't, he won't. He's ready to have sex again and now that I've been here eighteen hours, now that I've been broken, I figure I might as well try. My dick doesn't cooperate but I manage to fake it. He wants me to cum but it takes me too long and he loses interest. We order food but I can't eat. We smoke pot and watch a Coen brothers movie. I watch the movie so I won't cry again. By the time I get home, it's Sunday night. Somehow I'm able to sleep, wandering through the shattered stained glass of my broken dreams.

Monday, September 2nd, 2002. I wake alone. I was gone a full day and no one noticed. Not even my cats seem to care. My spirit still aches from all the self-doubt I'd been sucking through a straw. I get on the computer because it's my doorway to the world, to world outside my apartment door. A guy in California that I'd been trying to connect with in chat catches me as I sign on to yahoo. The conversation starts out surface enough, but quickly runs deeper, then deeper still, and as Thomas had torn me down, Barton is building me up. Barton. Later I'll realize that Barton is also Thomas' last name, but I haven't put that together yet.

barton: you are inspired charlie
barton: do you know what it means to inspire?

We chat all day. Literally, all day. It's Labor day and he and his boyfriend have the day off. I look at his photos and I feel like I already know him, like I know him from somewhere, like we've met before, though we haven't. He sees something different, something equally powerful and intense, when he looks at mine. We connect our webcams and smoke together, and I meet his boyfriend and I meet his cats and I watch him cook. It feels like I've been crawling on my belly in a dark hole and now I'm somewhere clean and warm and safe. I don't want to let him go. He offers to bring me out to San Francisco for a visit and I decide to do it, against all common wisdom to the contrary.

September 19th, 2002, San Francisco. I walk down the long hallway after getting off my plane, and in the distance, I see Barton waiting for me. I will be a new person now. I will cut out my negativity like a cancer and I will start a new life here, a new me. I arrive in San Francisco and I never leave, except two short and painful trips back to New York to settle my affairs, or what has passed for them. My last night at the Eagle, two people tell me that I am the nicest person they have ever met in New York, and a former friend who I have not seen since March tells me that he was, and maybe still is, in love with me. I will never see him again. New York isn't going to let me go so easily, and San Francisco isn't going to accept me so easily once I decide to move. It turns out the broken Charlie isn't dead, only sleeping, and my attempt at a relationship with Barton and his boyfriend goes predictably sour. But Barton and I stay close, so close, intertwined, on the rollercoaster, our hands in the air.

September 1st, 2008, San Francisco. "You are bad for me Charlie Rogers. Please keep your distance," Barton's email says. I'd run into him and his new boyfriend at the Harrison St. Fair and I'd come home, slightly buzzed, and filled with emotion and love for the world, I'd tried reaching out to him. This is his response. It arrives on the anniversary, six years, of that horrendous day that I spent in Thomas' cramped and cluttered apartment. I have another boyfriend now, and so does Barton. Everything has changed, in the way that it always does and always will. I don't even know how to feel sad about it, except that I tortured him for years with my inability to emotionally commit, and if nothing else, he found a broken dirty doll of a boy and brought him to warm clean place where the boy could heal, and I was that doll, that boy, and I have finally started to find a way to become the person I was always meant to be. Barton should be around to see it, and he won't, and I'm not sure I would even want him to be.

I never did crystal again, and never saw Thomas again. I have no memory of who those two guys were, but I did end up introducing myself to Bob, eventually, years later. None of them know how they inadvertently sent me on this path, and it makes me wonder if I've ever sent anyone spinning in a new direction without knowing it.