Dressed in black

Alia flew into town recently, and we went to see her friend Mick play a show at Fontana's. I believe that Mick and Alia "hung out" in the 1990s, although I do not believe that their relationship was ever really defined by either of them. Relationships are very mysterious to me, and, since the 90s, whenever I have tried to "name" a relationship ("boyfriend," "lover," etc.) I have been swiftly and irrevocably corrected by the party I am referring to.

Mick is my favorite of Alia's "friends." Once, in the 90s, when the three of us (!) were hanging out late-night, and Alia had excused herself to go to the bathroom, Mick looked at me seriously and asked if I would like it if he went with me and Alia to the gay night at Don Hill's, so I could find someone, too. I gazed thoughtfully at Mick, and replied that I had no trouble meeting people (by my estimation, at that point I had bedded 200 men, and I preferred the fellows I encountered at XXX video booths, to be frank) and he said that he hadn't thought so. But I was so touched by his offer! Mick is a rocker, and all the rocker guys I knew before him were complete assholes or so clueless that they didn't even realize I was gay. (Once, at Tonic, I was chatting with the lead singer of Trans Am about recent rumors about Ash Bowie from Polvo when he suddenly offered me the job of playing guitar with Trans Am! I cracked up. How would it have looked if I was suddenly playing, like, the Knitting Factory in a band that people actually cared about? That would have altered my whole world, the trajectory of my life, which is going according to plan and getting more and more myopic and isolated).

I saw Mick play a few shows in the 90s. One was at Irving Plaza, where he covered a Dead Boys song so convincingly that I got over-excited and emotionally congratulated him on his performance afterwards, shaking his hand, even, if I remember correctly, and then burned with embarrassment at my lack of cool. Like, you fucking fanboy. His performance at Fontana's on Saturday night wasn't like the Irving Plaza gig. He wasn't playing a character, really, just playing with some friends he's been playing with for years. I loved it how the other guys in the band sang along with him--it was like they were a band of brothers, attacking the audience with a song. Bananarama was like that for me, too, all of them singing in tandem, without the slightest hint of harmony. Mick's was the loudest gig I'd been to in years, the most rollicking. I think one of them was using a Wizard amp, maybe? They are called The Threads, and if Mick posts their gigs to his Facebook page, I will be attending more of them.

I don't think that Mick would mind if I said that he and I share a problem, which has only endeared him to me over the years. I find myself wondering if Mick and I could help each other with our mutual problem, but in the world of Rock, there is no helping, really, and certainly not between the rocker and the--what am I? WHAT AM I

Mick in this picture has removed the black sunglasses and hat he performed in earlier in the set. To my mind, this was an improvement. I don't trust a man in a hat for some reason. During the set, he gave shout-outs to Alia, her brother David, and to me. When he was finished playing, he came and hung out with us and, when we were saying goodbye, he said to me: "I love you." I fucking love you too, Mick. Hero of my youth. Rocker with his heart on his sleeve. You look the same as you did in the 90s, although that's not saying much, because so do I.

Same-saminess

For some months now, I've been playing a game with my colleagues. I wear the same pair of Levi's to work every day, to see if anyone notices. But no one notices! I suppose this is one area where men have an advantage over women? If a woman wore the same pantsuit to work every day, she would be quickly gathered into a chokehold and escorted noisily out the door by security. But no one cares what I wear, as long as I don't smell. (That's an in-joke for you, Tina and Amy!)

I guess no one really notices jeans. But there was a time when wearing a jean was revolutionary. Jeans have been around since the 1700s, but I believe that in reality they were only fully integrated into our culture post-WWII when factory workers demanded comfort as they inhaled their deadly fumes, enjoyed early mortality rates, and made our Rockefellers rich. And, strange as it may seem, I believe they were only fully cemented into the cultural melange when Ariana Grande was forced by the NFL to wear them instead of her planned super-short skirt, when performing at the Super Bowl a few mere months ago. She ROCKED those jeans. Are you shocked that I, 41, know who Ariana Grande is? You shouldn't be, because the old have...Google...! How else would we know where to search for cheap Boniva and Cialis amongst the pharmacies of Canada?

But, same-saminess is really my thrust here. WHY do I delight in wearing (mostly) the same outfit to work every day, give or take a variation in blouse? Why do I eat exactly the same thing every day during lunch hours for months, and then loathe when I start getting comped (to my great shame) by eateries? Do I have a form of OCD? (Yes. And I have a doctor's note as proof).

Today, I got emotional with a colleague, and I regret it now. I prefer the same-saminess of placid greetings and pleasant exchanges with work acquaintances. I don't regret at all what was said today (I was merely defending myself--and my colleagues). But I regret the emotion my words were said with. I don't get emotional much. As many people know, my primary battle in life I fought with my mother, and now that I have literally vanquished her, I don't really entertain many other emotional battles. None could really compare. I really wish I could say that I was comfortable living in a world in which I was submissive, where my commitment to my job could be called into question as a matter of course, on a regular basis, but I can't. That's just me.

Wrinkles

I like wearing a wrinkly shirt. Perhaps it's because I've never been able to keep my room clean, and my idea of putting away the laundry is just balling my clothes into my dresser, hoping that my sweat will smooth them out when I wear them.

When I was a kid, my mother sent me to a series of psychologists because I couldn't keep my room clean. For years, I thought it was because I was fond of starting small fires in our backyard, and stabbing kids in my schools with pens (just every now and then, mind you). But no. My sister Maxine, in my adulthood, confirmed to me that the trait of mine that most vexed my mother was my untidiness. She would often send me to my room to clean it, and I remember making a real production out of it, with cobbled-together pulleys that I would transport soiled clothing with, as though I was afraid to touch my own detritus. Assembly line procedures from a boy with a strange fondness for repetitive tasks. Today, when I clean my room, I'm all over the place, using a strange philosophy gleaned from my abortive experiences with 12 step programs. Just clean the next right thing, I tell myself, and as a result, I wash that one dish, I put away that one pair of socks, I wash that next dish, I scoop that one kitty litter thing, I put away that blouse, that top, that simple shell, etc. It's very OCD, and my apartment gets clean very gradually. No one area is completely clean ever, I don't think. It's just on the way there. I wonder sometimes: do I like the disarray? What in it speaks to me???

Once a fellow came over to sample my wares, and as I let him in, he looked around at my messy apartment and said "no," and left. I remember being affected very deeply by this, very ashamed. Today, there is very little that the fellows could do that would affect me deeply, or cause me to think much of anything about it, although I must admit that often when my apartment is going through a dirty phase, I am alarmingly celibate thanks to a certain faint voice somewhere deep inside of me that I suppose you could call shame if you want. I wish the fellows would get apartments of their own that I could visit for our loveless couplings, but in Manhattan, I am apparently the only gay who lives alone.

When I was unemployable in the early aughts, I used to wake up (or, more aptly, come to) at 10 am or so and watch Martha Stewart's show with a strange, delicious horror. Everything was in place with her, as they say, as it never was with me. I watched her show, I went for a brutal, punishing run, I went to the Food Bar for a meat lasagna, and then it was off to the races, as it were. EVERY DAY for, like, two YEARS. Repetitive tasks, repetitive tasks...

For a while in recent years, I employed a cleaning lady with an alarming lack of boundaries, and my room was as clean as it could possibly have been with Gregory living in it. My untidiness, however, extends into my finances, and now I clean my room solo, pining for Olga, pining to be able to afford a put-together look. I often say that my room at times looks like a homeless person lives there. But on some nights, like tonight, when I've been cleaning up a quiet storm, it goes one notch up and looks like a college student lives there.

Jock

Do you know how touching it is when you're dating someone, and they know you like to see them in a jockstrap, and so every time you hang out with them, they wear a jockstrap? Like, a different one each TIME, even. I get so touched when I think about how Elias looks out for me that a tear comes to my eye. Well, okay, maybe not my eye, and maybe not a tear, but you know what I'm saying.

Elias has been leaving things at my apartment for weeks now. Little gay periodicals, an unassuming little packet of cocaine (eww). I leave them in a pile in my kitchen, a little shrine to our burgeoning love. I know he is going to break my heart, and it is going to hurt, because he is so good-looking. And then he can collect his shrine. This is not him in the photo, by the way--he hates for me to photograph him, because I think he thinks I'm going to post the photos on some lurid German porn site, WHICH I WOULD NEVER DO.

Elias likes to fight his lovers, verbally. I have known him for nine years, and during that time, he had epic battles with two longterm boyfriends, he ran down endless alleys at night, screaming at his lovers in Portuguese. I would come pick him up to romp through a game of "Space Invaders" and listen to his tales of love woe. Should I see that as a red flag? That he cheated on his lovers to spend time with me? Spell that out for me: "r-e-d f-l-a-g." What do those words mean? They have no bearing on my life, begone with them. Now I sit in cafes with Elias and effortlessly parry his incessant attempts to bicker with me. And then we go home and he has, like, another fucking jockstrap on. I think he loves me.

I went with Kateri and Kayleigh this week to see the movie "Obvious Child." Go. I swear, you'll thank me later. I cried laughing, and the love interest was soooo SWEET. Like, he warmed Jenny Slate's butter before passing it to her. I immediately thought, "I want to be that sweet! I want to be that guy. I will warm someone's butter." And what perfect timing--I'm dating again. Now I get to warm the butter.

Elias is working tonight at Posh. We texted earlier and now I'm home cleaning my apartment (my cleaning lady is coming tomorrow, and I would be ashamed if she actually had to do any real cleaning, which tells you a lot about my complicated feelings about class and my being a slob). I move around my apartment for two hours, doing the next right thing, and things get better, gradually. I know this feeling I'm having, this feeling of not wanting to see someone less, and being comfortable with not seeing them more. Some people call it love.

The Minor Alps

I took Steven to see the Minor Alps play at the Bowery Ballroom. Steven is the young man I was "falling in love with" last summer. It didn't work out, but I expected it not to, and anyway, I was never really falling in love with Steven, so it's okay. He was sort of dumb when I really think about it, but that's my type, after all. I felt bad when our affair ended, but only for two weeks, and then I was myself again. Whatever that is.

Steven got back in touch with me a few weeks ago, down on his luck. He'd quit one job and then was fired from the next. He honestly seemed confused about how to be. I am super-familiar with this kind of fellow, so I was unperturbed. I got him an interview at the company I work for, and I coached him on how to look for a job. I coached him on how to look at the world, at life itself. I took him out for dinner a couple of times, because I knew he was broke. We ended up at the Minor Alps show.

OMG, I loved this show, which I wasn't expecting. I had streamed the album and it sort of left me cold, but hearing the music live was different. The sunny boy-girl melodies were so sweet and sad that I found myself in my least favorite situation: yearning for human connection. I made the fateful decision to put my arm around Steven's shoulder, as one would with a friend. Steven immediately shrugged my arm off.

"Um, did you really just push me away?" I asked him, incredulous.

"I just don't want you to get the wrong idea, man," he replied.

The sunny boy-girl melodies reached a crescendo. Words fell. I explained to Steven exactly what I thought of him for a good few minutes, while he stood there looking at me. His face's arrogant quality (not an arrogance purely his own, but merely the arrogance of any 25-year-old) faltered a bit. As I methodically spoke my awful, awful sentences about his character, I could see a thought dawning on his face: Maybe ... I am not who I think I am. I'm sure my attack was a complete surprise. I played a passive role in our relationship - whatever he wanted to do, I would do. Even (shudder) in bed. I'm sure he had no inkling of the mild hatred I harbored towards him, the mild hatred I harbor toward anyone I sleep with, lurking under the surface like a cyst.

No matter! When one pushes a Scorpio away, one must prepare oneself for a retaliation totally out of proportion to the initial slight. As I rode home alone in a cab that night, I thought how strange it was that sometimes I forget how frighteningly mean I can be. But then I start dating again.

Lonsdale

After visiting a friend one evening in the East Village, I stopped by a restaurant and sat at the bar to order a solo meal and read my book. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed an attractive young lad looking at me intently. Eventually, I glanced in his direction and he came over to talk. Immediately, I noticed his very strong London accent, and I thought what I thought about that.

"Are you enjoying the music?" he asked, smiling.

"I guess," I replied. "Mostly just trying to read."

"How," he asked, "can you read while the Beatles are playing?"

"Oh, I'm not a tremendous fan of the Beatles, although I do like 'Paperback Writer.'"

"What?!" He seemed incredulous. "Well, can you at least admit that British music is the best? British everything is the best. I mean, the Beatles! The Rolling Stones!"

"Well," I replied sensibly, "there would have been no Rollings Stones without Muddy Waters, and there would have been no Beatles without Chuck Berry. I can appreciate that the Rolling Stones mixed elements of American blues music with elements of American rock 'n' roll and got some interesting songs out of it, but I'd say that their music was a synthesis of what other people had already created."

The cute London man glared at me with great pathos.

"Why," he asked, "are you so anti-British?"

"I'm from Antigua," I replied.

"Oh!" He brightened. "Do you know who the greatest Antiguan ever was?"

"J. Rowan Henry," I said.

"Who?"

I began to describe some of my late father's activism as head of the Labour movement in Antigua, activism that eventually led to Antigua's independence from Britain and would have meant he would have been overwhelmingly elected as its first President. Until, of course, his untimely demise ...

"Oh, no," he said, dismissively. "The greatest Antiguan is Viv Richards," and then he walked back over to chat with his friend.

I sort of smiled at this exchange, but I gamely googled Viv Richards and saw that he was a cricket player. Immediately realizing that the London fellow was insane, I literally picked up my plate and walked to the other end of the bar, completely out of sight of the young man. But about five minutes later, he found me.

"Did you google Viv Richards?"

"Yes. That's why I moved over here."

"Oh, why, because he was an athlete?"

"I suppose."

He snorted with disgust and left me again. I hurriedly paid for my dinner and left the restaurant. Unfortunately, he was outside smoking with his friend.

"You," he said. "What do you have against the British?"

"Um, because they're usually people like you. People who have never even visited Antigua, but who try to tell me who the greatest Antiguan was. I was born there. My family lives there. I've read dozens of books about the island. And I'm certainly..." (here's where I jumped the shark!) "...not going to stand here and listen to some youth of a country that oppressed my ancestors..."

"You know what?" he said. "Fuck you! Just ... just fuck you!"

I was going to say, Ah, some of that legendary British wit! But I wisely kept my own counsel, especially since his friend had at that point had to restrain him from physically attacking me. I walked home, burning with the shame of letting some drunkard get me angry.

In my adulthood, I've had to do serious work around my prejudice against British people, along with people of other ... groups. A sane person shouldn't be prejudiced against anyone - or, at least, they should not reveal their own stupidity by discussing it in public. Two of my own authors, the amazing Caitlin Moran and Simon Van Booy, have taught me that British people can be cool, and kind, and down-to-earth, and incredibly smart. (Smarter - shocker! - than even me). It's a wonder it took me so long to learn such an obvious, elementary lesson: all people from a country do not act the same. Why did I spew such vitriol against this dolt?

In my adulthood, my anger towards the British led me to eschew certain fashion labels. I turned up my nose at Penguin, at Paul Smith, at Burton. I made an exception for Burberry in the 90s because I was highly amused by how American rappers had appropriated the brand as a symbol of excess. They lampooned it, even though the joke quickly became real and now, I think, that joke is on the young people of today, who listen to this materialistic music and grow angry that they do not have Louboutins and Cristal. I love the semiotics of clothing choices.

Long story short: I saw these briefs on a model on L'Internet. They're from Lonsdale, a British sporting goods company. So I ordered them and they arrived looking, ahem, a little skimpier than they were depicted on the site. No matter! I made my 30 euro purchase, and now that night, that unfortunate blip on my evolution towards enlightenment, has been absolved. Observe! The power of fashion. 

Toggle coat

I went to 192 Books to hear a reading by Hilton Als, one of my new favorite writers. I had interviewed him over the phone a few weeks before for Bookforum.com, and I had asked him some pretty semi-intense questions and was satisfied with the outcome. His collection White Girls is a book of essays - supposedly non-fiction - but it was clear to me that he bent the truth a little bit in some of them, quite purposefully. I was fascinated to read these essays, and they made me wonder why my own non-fiction is so rigidly literal. The questions I asked him in the interview were meant to explore the idea of fiction/non-fiction - and they were also meant to provoke Hilton a little bit, just as his essays are meant to provoke the reader. I think I succeeded.

I used to bend the truth quite a bit, as a child. My lying to my family got so bad that they eventually learned to assume everything I said was a lie. There was, I found, a certain joyless freedom in that. And then there was my experiment with telling only the truth, somewhere between my senior year in high school and my first year of college. Needless to say, neither phase won me many admirers. Even today, certain people see me as being a little too blunt at times, mostly people at work. Ah, but, certain people, I am merely a harmless eccentric ...

I predict that my next few non-fiction pieces will stretch the truth a bit. Okay, my next two pieces. Here I am with Hilton, wearing some sort of toggle coat from Cole Haan and a button up shirt from Shirts by AG. What a glassy, somewhat sinister look my eyes have in this photo. I am going to assume that's because of the flash. Hilton is looking askance in the picture, as if to imply a sense of wariness with me standing a little behind him. You have nothing to fear from me, Hilton Als! I am merely a harmless eccentric ...