1
On the night Alan, my first serious boyfriend, dumped me, I lay awake on the couch I called ours, though he’d been the one to pay for it, waiting for anger or sadness or relief to come. What showed up instead was the suspended feeling that captures me from time to time even now, like flinging myself from a diving board so I’m not rising or falling but still. That weightlessness stayed as I packed everything worth taking into a pair of duffel bags and stole two hundred dollars from the drawer where Alan kept cash. It held steady as I drove to a dealership, its cars’ windshields laced with frost, and sold my own, lingered as I hitchhiked to the bus station where I waited in line behind a woman who took forever at the ticket counter, the clerk’s mustache trembling with annoyance as she asked one question, then another, a custodian next to us smacking a mop up and down. But then another clerk showed up, sharp lines around her mouth and eyes, and said, “Next.” And, as my bags and I made it to the counter and she asked, “Where to?” my descent began, so I said the first and maybe only place that came to mind, one I’d never been to before.
For that daylong bus ride from Minneapolis to New York, stillness switched to falling, though as we passed billboards about all-you-can-eat buffets and abortion, as towns came and went with aluminum-sided sameness, I itched with the excitement of not knowing where I’d land.
Where I finally landed was an apartment in an attic above a garage in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, a job stocking shelves at the Food Land across the street. Car exhaust crept through the apartment’s floor, so I left the windows cracked open and moved the sofa—a pullout, according to the landlord, though its pullout mechanism had rusted itself closed—next to the window. But the apartment was cheap. The landlord hadn’t even asked for a security deposit. This was a sad relief, cheapness my only horizon. As I lay on that sofa each night, light from the Food Land sign searing through my window, I wanted to return to that line in the bus station and name some other city instead. But I would’ve been met with disappointment anywhere, been shocked by it, too. That was me then, surprised by results as inevitable as a math problem’s solution, most due to how easily and often I jumped, with no plan for what I’d do once I’d thrown myself into the air.
At Food Land I stocked shelves and organized inventory under the supervision of a man named Thor. And though the job wasn’t what I’d hoped for, its boring purpose was all I had to hold on to, so I took it seriously. I made sure labels on cans were perfectly straight until the repetition of graphic and word (Baked Beans, Baked Beans, Baked Beans) felt like art. Kept the back area so clean that even Thor, who I sensed didn’t like me, grudgingly said, “You’re making it harder for the mice,” his compliment a warm hand on my cheek.
A few weeks into that job, I asked one of the cashiers a question. She looked shocked.
“I didn’t know,” she said. Her name was Marcy.
“Didn’t know what?” I asked.
Marcy had small features and wore a product in her hair that made it look perpetually wet. She admitted that they’d all thought, with my dark hair and pale skin, clothes a cheap approximation of what was fashionable, that I was from some country that used to be part of Russia and “ended in -stan,” curse words being my only English.
“I know a lot of words,” I answered, then told her I had something to do in the dairy case.
I saw Marcy again an hour later, both of us in the store’s back alley on a cigarette break. The dumpster’s rot perfumed the air.
“I still can’t believe you speak English,” she said.
I answered with a series of complicated English words—onomatopoeia and incumbent and lackadaisical. It had rained earlier that day. Water plinked from a gutter.
“You’re weird,” Marcy said, then asked where I was from. I told her.
“Maybe what’s weird here is normal there,” she said.
“You sound like a philosopher,” I answered.
“You sound like you’re making fun of me.”
“I wasn’t making fun,” I said. I hoped Marcy and I might become friends. I had no friends in New York. Spent days off from work walking until blisters collared my heels, or smoking too much and lying on the couch, wishing the apartment had come with a television. “I was weird in Minnesota, too.”
I returned from my break. Thor saw me and said, “Was looking for you.”
Thor seemed eternally annoyed. He could rest several boxes on his gut and called everything, from a person he didn’t like to a difficult stain, a faggot. This was how he talked, though I also sensed it was his way of letting me know he was onto me. Each time he said that word, I picked up more boxes than was comfortable or deepened my voice. My attempts at passing only made it worse.
“There’s meat,” he said.
Thor spoke in as few words as possible. Whenever I asked for clarification, he said the same words again, sometimes louder.
I walked to the cooler, saw it was low on stew beef, and went into the back to get some.
At home that night, I was unsure if I wanted to jerk off or cry. I did both, half-heartedly, waking up hours later to a shivering light. The L in the Food Land sign was beginning to go. The next day, I saw Marcy and said, “Welcome to Food And.” She looked at me like I had something stuck in my teeth and was deciding whether or not to tell me.
* * *
One night after work, I took the subway to Prospect Park. I walked into the woods where men met for sex, one of the few things then that offered me a break from failure’s blunt noise. If I found someone who was game, it was usually rough and fast, the men haggard-looking or so masked by hoodies and baseball caps that I felt more than saw them. That night, I met a man with sunglasses on. I began to hum a song about wearing sunglasses at night but he squeezed my jaw with one hand, used the other to lower me to my knees. His dick filled my mouth. Small stones knifed my shins. He came and stepped away, dick bobbing in front of him. “Thank you,” I said, but he didn’t answer.
As I walked out of the park past half-empty bars and brownstones with bikes chained to their fences, it hit me how dangerous what I’d just done was, even more that I didn’t care. I got on the subway, my throat sore from the way it had been used, and said—I did an inordinate amount of talking to myself then—“Well, that got the job done,” though a few minutes later, the train stuck between stops, its bald fluorescents giving everyone a jaundiced hue, I added, “What job is that?” and a man across from me looked up with such disgust that I wondered if I’d been talking for longer. For the rest of the ride I gorged myself on the self-pity I’d grown up with, one I’d first mimicked, then made my own. “It was my special skill,” I told a boyfriend years later. He’d smiled with polite embarrassment, then changed the subject.
* * *
A few weeks later, Marcy pulled me aside. I’d been in the freezer for an hour, my toes and ears numb. Her hair product smelled like synthetic watermelon.
“His real name’s Vince,” she said. “He thinks the Thor thing is funny.”
“I don’t get it,” I answered, though I did, impressed he’d kept the ruse going for so long.
I went to check in with him, calling him Thor several times in our conversation. Each time I said it, his annoyance rose a notch and I wondered if he’d hit me, wanting it almost, a sign that I’d rankled myself into importance.
“Thor,” I went on. “I’m finished in the freezer. Wondering if you have anything else for me to do, Thor.” Messing with him was so enjoyable that for a moment everything grim about my life loosened its grip.
“Why are you talking that way?” he asked.
“The way I talk, Thor,” I answered, then told him I’d be out back, breaking down boxes, which I did while smoking. That made me feel dismissive and sexy with an edge I’d always wanted, just as some people dream of being taller, how others want only to live with an ocean view.
* * *
But then the heaviness that sometimes got me returned. At work, I moved slowly. I hid in the staff bathroom, washing my face with frigid water until it ached. On days off, I slept until it was dark. When I was awake, I’d smoke and eat toast, lying on the sofa I pretended was a bed. There was crying sometimes, even more the wish that I could weep, for catharsis to move me past the dullness that made it hard to open my eyes all the way, the sense I’d been dumb to have expected more than this job, this apartment. I thought to go back to the park’s woods, but that felt as stupid as Food Land and the emails I wrote to friends back in Minnesota filled with lies about my job and apartment, about the way I felt when I moved down city streets. One night, a trucker dropping off pallets of frozen food offered to sell me some weed and I bought it, smoking it until sleep bludgeoned me and I had a dream I vaguely remembered where Alan and my father were eating sandwiches together. I woke up to a knock at my door. It was Marcy, telling me I was late for work, asking if I’d quit.
“I didn’t quit,” I said.
I showed up at Food Land a few minutes later, eyes still crusty from sleep. I waited for Thor/Vince to tell me to wash my face, but he moved around me nervously and my indifference turned powerful, a spill that managed to get everywhere.
Halfway through my shift I said to him, “I know your name isn’t Thor.”
“Good for you,” he answered. “Cantaloupe.”
“Good for you,” I said to the cantaloupe as I stacked it. I said it to Marcy, too, when she told me she was heading home. “Good for you,” I told a lady who saw me pick up several boxes and said I was stronger than I looked.
I went behind the store to smoke, listened to the squeaking traffic of rats nosing through the trash.
“Good for you,” I said, kicking the dumpster and walking back inside.
* * *
I got an email from Alan. He made no mention of the money I’d taken, but told me he’d started dating Ryan, his manager at the bank where he worked. I didn’t want Alan back, but felt an acid annoyance at the thought of him and Ryan on our couch. Him and Ryan making food together, him and Ryan all eye contact and platitudes as they got close to coming. I tried to convince myself that Ryan was an idiot, though the few times I’d met him I’d appreciated his sly humor and great hands. Hands off to you, I wrote Alan back. Alan answered right away that he thought I meant hats off, and, in the internet café I spent too much time in, me and a bunch of cabdrivers sending emails or slyly scouring message boards for hookups, I said to no one in particular, “Hats and hands.” A man next to me looked over. I gave him a thumbs-up. I wished he’d looked back with knowing interest so I could have invited him over for some fun on my formerly pullout sofa, the lights from the wavering Food Land sign pulsing against my apartment’s walls in a way that sometimes reminded me of the ocean, other times of electrocution. But he turned to his monitor, grumbled something in a language I didn’t know, and I wrote Alan back, You’re right, as usual, and waited for him to answer, though he did not, and later I was surprised that I’d thought he would.
* * *
On days off, I started to ride the subway. Sometimes on those rides I got caught staring and had to look away fast or pretend I was reading an ad above people’s heads. Other times I’d find a seat and fall asleep, waking up on the far edge of the Bronx or Queens.
One night, awake when I should have been asleep, I heard a noise outside and hoped it was Thor/Vince. Though I wasn’t especially attracted to him, there was something in his manly indifference I found appealing. I peeked out my window. A man pissed between parked cars. My heart hurried as if I’d done too much coke, so I got dressed and took the subway into the city. It was two in the morning when I walked into the first rainbow-adorned bar I could find.
The bar was sparsely populated. The few beautiful men there looked either bored or tired. One of them said hello to me.
With no other questions coming to mind, I asked what he did for a living, wincing at the thought of being asked the same thing.
“Art director,” the man said.
“I don’t know what that means,” I told him, and dropped an ice cube into my mouth.
He smiled, as one might smile at a pukey baby, and told me he saw a friend he needed to say hello to. I chomped my ice cube into smaller pieces.
The night ended with me in a Honda, giving and getting an unsatisfying hand job from a man who didn’t bother to take off his wedding ring. In that car afterward, crumpled paper towels bouqueted at our crotches, the man said, “I wish you could come home with me.”
“Your wife might have a problem with that,” I said.
He wiped off his dick, asked me to throw out his paper towel, and kissed me sweetly. I took his hand, held it to my throat. He looked startled and pulled his hand away.
On the subway ride home, I fell asleep, was woken up by its conductor, telling me the train had reached its last stop and was out of service. “You okay?” he asked, a question so kind I felt myself tearing up, wishing I didn’t cry so easily, wondering if there would ever be a time when the biggest thing in my life wasn’t difficulty. My self-pity was large then, though maybe it was fear, the call and response of those two feelings so seamless it was difficult to distinguish follower and leader.
* * *
At work the next day, my sadness gathered momentum. I stayed in the cooler until I couldn’t feel my fingers. Tipped over a pallet of canned vegetables, one can exploding, the floor of aisle six a riot of grayish peas. I found Vince, told him something was off with my stomach, that I needed to go home.
Instead, I walked. I moved through unfamiliar neighborhoods, the signs written in Chinese characters, passed store entrances wreathed in purses, others crowded with trays of fish on ice. I turned in the direction I sensed would lead me to my neighborhood and thought of the man in his Honda the night before who’d looked at me like I was an unbelievable prize, his attention a wave to carry me for a time.
But then, walking past me, was Thor/Vince. He wore a pleased, mean smile as he asked, “Feeling better?”
I nodded. I also started to cry. I thought to kiss him just to see what he might do, though the thought of kissing someone who hated me turned everything bleaker. But, before he had a chance to walk away, I wiped my eyes and said, “Yes, I am feeling better,” which was as much a lie as his Scandinavian name. Then I asked him where I was.
* * *
In my second week of wandering, I stumbled onto a dive bar. Young people with grubby clothes and perfect teeth filled its booths, its walls weighed down with taxidermy and kitsch. Behind the bar stood a woman with long red hair finagled into a pompadour and a large chest, arms collaged in tattoos. When she gave customers her attention, they looked pleased. When she laughed, its throaty rattle rose above the miasma of music and conversation. Sitting at the bar, nursing a beer and a basket of stale popcorn, I found that I wanted her attention, too. Someone said something dumb; she smiled and told them to fuck themselves. A man commented on her shirt and she answered, “Didn’t know it was open season for talking to strangers about their bodies,” then poured him an overly foamy beer. She mixed and muddled without a pause in conversations. When certain songs came on, she hummed along. I left her a large tip in hopes that she’d remember me.
I returned a few nights later, trying not to watch her too much. When I find someone interesting, I spend a lot of time collecting the vocabulary and rhythm of their gestures. This looking has gotten me into trouble. Once, in fourth grade, the closest thing I’d understood about my interest in men and boys being a special attention I paid them, one of the Mikes in my class slammed me against a wall before I realized I’d been staring. But the bartender caught my eye, smiled, and though it wasn’t about sex for me, something in me looking, her looking back felt like seduction.
At the bar’s far end, a drunk couple played checkers. The man dropped a checker into his beer, fingered it out, then placed it on his tongue, like a communion wafer.
“You two good?” the bartender asked. The man nodded.
Kitschy watercolors crowded the wall behind them: boats and sunsets, landscapes featuring buffalo and industrious streams. Glasses clanged as the bartender washed them.
I was thinking of going home when she placed a fresh beer in front of me.
“On the house,” the bartender said, and smiled.
In that smile was the tingle I’d hoped New York would bring me, that sense of vaulting into the air.
“Checkmate,” the man at the other end of the bar said.
“Wrong game,” the bartender whispered.
“This is nice of you,” I said, lifting the beer in cheers.
“I’m nice sometimes. To my kind anyhow.”
“You mean the gays?”
She nodded.
“So this is in solidarity? Like a queer beer?”
She answered with a deep laugh and asked my name. I told her, and she said hers back—Janice—then went on about the only other Gordon she’d ever known, a Mormon in her middle school who couldn’t stop staring at her chest.
“Gordon the Mormon,” I said, and pointed to her cleavage. “You had all that, even then?”
Janice pressed a hand to each breast. “Blessing and a curse, these ladies.”
“These ladies have names?” I asked.
The checkers woman waved to Janice, who nodded, then handed me paper and a pen.
“Start a list,” she said, touching her breasts again. “Names for us to consider.”
I wrote down old-timey ones like Gertrude and Millie and Pearl. Janice came over, looked at the list, and said, “I knew I liked you, Gordon.”
A few minutes later, Janice’s girlfriend arrived. She was rangy, her haircut almost identical to mine.
“This is our new friend Gordon,” Janice said.
The girlfriend clapped a hand on my back and told me her name was Meredith.
“You don’t look like a Meredith,” I said.
“That dumb observation will cost you a cigarette,” she answered. I gave her one.
The man playing checkers knocked over his beer. Janice walked over with a cloth and spray bottle, told him he’d need to clean up the mess himself.
A look passed across his face suggesting he’d challenge her. Instead, he cleaned.
Copyright © 2024 by Thomas Grattan
