I arrived at the open doorway of the room. I felt the waft of synthetic fog. I don’t want to look creepy; I realigned as “hopeful-presenting.” I no longer knew where I stood with my erratic feelings of hope and hate but I remembered that most sexual interactions began with a projection of positivity and possibility. The complication being that my thoughts had often felt so encrypted, delusional, so at odds with what I saw before me all of the time, that it only made sense I would be atomized to all that feels secret, arcane, underexpressed. Yet in the end I remained someone who had begun to feel lonely at night, I unbuttoned my top two shirt buttons and let the fog roll in.
Half-lidded eyes embraced me, then panned away. Some came back. Someone almost tripped over a floor cord protector but righted themselves in time. No one laughed or smiled at this. This made sense since it wasn’t funny. The timing was very off. An 80s-era Serge Gainsbourg analog of sorts rambled through the red light, kind of nodding to himself compulsively, shirtless and jockstrapped with Coors Light in hand, sharing eyes with me. When I unshared he continued nodding along, mostly in contact with the pacing of the deep house track most seemed to be ignoring. I couldn’t help but instantly map out an imagined existence for him when not jaunting through the zestful haze. “Lives with his mom” arose as a promising cliche, I admonished myself for being so unoriginal. Maybe he worked at a letterpress company as a binder of bespoke greeting cards, or crucially, as a gentle, trustworthy accountant. Perhaps he was just about as nice a person as could be, with keen altruistic depth, pretty much incapable of casual abuses or indifferent exploitations of others, and forged with the healing infection of common interpersonal respect. I pummeled the sex fog with this level of blanching rumination; this was part of why I would not get laid.
My problem was I still could not hope for a continuum where most could agree on what was altruistic depth, what was abuse or exploitation, what was common interpersonal respect. All felt so circumscribed, carefully molded to specific personal boundaries formed by information preferences. Of course by prematurely aging myself I had pursued my own calling to hyper-personalization. I had embraced my thrawny yanking of organic materials, I had felt the thrill of a desperate individualist’s search for a combative truth that was mostly inaccessible to others.
Even in the cancel of heavy red light I was able to spot a slim hand popping with a giant ruby red ring Anton LaVey would have loved. I traced up to observe an imperious ectomorph in his late 40s, very tall in a conventional white button down long sleeved office worker shirt tucked into boot-cut blue jeans and descending onto common black dress shoes. Elements that swirled in opposition to the cryptic flamboyance unleashed in that ruby red spellcaster’s ring. My eyes slammed into his other hand — every finger ringed in different-colored metals, with high variety in style and assumed quality and cost. One of them seemed to be a simple silver celtic knot pattern. Another in gold appeared to replicate the top half of an eagle’s beak, the bottom of it starting just beneath the joint of the middle finger with the tip of the beak extending upwards within spitting distance of the nail bed, which was currently marinated in red light. There are so many varieties of self-expression in the world, I considered.
It was only a matter of time before his awareness caught curious whiff of my scanning his body. And since the conditions of this space were such that 2+ sec. of staring implied unerring sexual interest, we locked inspector’s eyes. His narrow, forceful face had the aura of displeased raven, long ago found injured in a dumpster and rescued by a caring family who rehabilitated it in the placid expanse of their soybean farm, that was capable of mimicking overheard psoriatic arthritis medication commercials and tornado sirens. He wasn’t interested in me and sharply turned away.
I failed to detect what exactly I was interested in. I softly sauntered through the fog with the impenetrable emotional distance of a pretty good college black box production of one of those plays where people are stuck in trashcans. Occasionally I would remember to unroll my eyes, to slacken the skin that surrounded them. To believe I could make bedroom eyes. To warmly smirk out the messaging, I’m available.
After wading without result for four-ish minutes, I identified an open voyeur’s position against the wall with soothing distance from any of the other wallhuggers. I stood against the wall, my eyes locked on the floor cord protector. The floor cord protector was placed in a very bad position and threatened the flow of action with great disharmony. I stared at the floor cord protector also because I needed somewhere to look. To expand a dreamy glance across the room in search of rapturous connection with another felt very high stakes, suddenly. If I was to get out there and “give it a whirl,” I would accept nothing less than complete rapture. But here I was, in less-than-rapturous communion with the floor cord protector of the gay bar dark room.
Bringing my eyes from the floor cord protector and back up to the world of bodies equated to a huge personality deadlift; I started to try, but could not fully launch my line of sight all the way up. Luckily, eyes locked at knee height in a room like this were capable of taking in lots of atypical information. I will sing again, I will smile again, I slowly began to believe, in contemplative clock of the richly textured bj now holding my attention four feet to my right. A huge rocket of breath pulled at the uncareful mix of cement, sand, and gravel in my eyes, finally lifting them back up to the height befitting someone integrated into their social surroundings. The 50-something man I had seen wandering through the pool room snapped into recognition on the opposite side of the space. He was partially shrouded in the shift of freshly blasted red mist but recognizable all the same. A traditional rainbow flag on the chest of his t-shirt also popped out in bizarre color shifts when drenched in red light.
As the fog began to clear itself, I scanned towards his face. I considered how, in a previous iteration of my understanding of the world, I had thought that every face, no matter the asymmetry or trauma or whatever, had some aspect to it that was beautiful. For instance: the easy kindness and depth in a pair of sunny brown eyes. The welcoming calm and frequent smile of full lips. The economical vertical furrow in a pleasingly spaced glabella.
Of course the brown eyes had been flanked by enormous protruding lower lid cups. The full lips surrounded by pube-ish near-beard hiding a too narrow jaw. The glabella >2 cm away from an enormous flat grey mole. But at least I had once had the capacity to find these examples of the universe and its gorgeous sparkle. Perhaps, like a vast and desolate volcanic valley, not so long ago buried by black sand, is sparsely dotted with the polite yet hardy arrangement of newly emerged wildflowers in a halting splatter of ochre, the magnificent beauty of nature had a lot to do with its emotional indifference. Nature brings the truth, fear takes it all away; ‘my body is a temple’ I struggled to sorta reconsider as the techno chugged. I looked to the 50-something man’s face, which I was not immediately attracted to. But I tried to find the divine doorway. Of course I noticed all that was not pleasing to my butcher brain — what details instinct or conditioning instructed I should not let cross the perimeter of my sacred fuck.
I cautiously migrated towards him, avoiding the shadowy bodies practicing their connectivity, and stopped before I could be seen by him as an advancing question mark. But I was close enough now to have a better look at his face, which I analyzed in broad tripod swings from left to right yet with enough tasteful restraint and tact to not be considered an unstable cryptid. I still struggled to find the thing in his face that proved the world was not totally uneven in its transcendence. His nose was not interesting, his ears were not interesting. His lips were very thin and seemed as if they would easily reveal his front teeth. I took a step closer. My camera pans became even more languid and delicate. I then confirmed: his ears were NOT interesting. His eyebrows seemed “average.” I supposed he had somewhat high cheekbones. But that did not seem to be an aspect of the face that brought me to transcendence. All that was left were his eyes, which I could not look at closely without triggering the cruising process.
The sudden isolation of a single upper octave synth note with ample delay straight up lacerated my membranes with its peptic zing. I carefully noted that in morse, the lonely synth note had communicated the letter T. Interesting. In response to this momentary relief from full-spectrum techno, there were tiny shifts in body posture throughout the room. The man who I had just seen delivering a pious blowjob now swiped his eyes to a peripheral position, as those who are concentrating will do when they suddenly hear a mysterious noise in the room behind them.
The change also seemed to force the 50-something’s eyes onto me, which I did not like. One balletic flick of ankle brought me to the wall down the way from him, and I spun my body so it once again hugged the wall and faced the center of the dark room. Now my peripheral vision peeped his head, which likely wanted to understand the reasons behind my beguiling hamster twirl, lose interest in me once again and turn away. Meanwhile the techno came back.
If only I had a printout of this man that I could stare at to understand where on his body he was beautiful, and those parts I could then circle in red, and put on my bedroom wall, and use as a constant reminder of beauty’s various crevices, crannies and trickles that seemed to miss me these days. If I were going to sacrifice my slo-mo ferocity, I just needed the smallest unit possible of pulchritude, that would prove the world to encompass a vibe that felt minimally perky and livable.
I tried to drip my body just slightly towards him once more. I was determined to summon that heartfelt behavior from my distant idealistic past…a sloppy and stupid epoch in which I often could be found wafting a dreamy perspective of the world…and finally locate the part of his face that was beautiful. If I could just locate the part of his face that was beautiful, I might be able to drift myself back into the dream. If I could just see his eyes…well his hair looked full and quite shiny too, hmm, I felt a hand strum my crotch. A turn to the left brought me face to face with an obscured gorgon scamp who blasted lusty data directly into my well-timed moment of tender self-reflection. The random man who had just groped me did not understand where I was at in my internal pickle, did not understand that, within the past three days, I had lived the full arc of a 9/11 Was An Inside Job car bumper sticker that had been torn off in anger by a stranger, and then, I had lived the part where the driver, after finding the shredded sticker scraps abandoned underneath his back tire and still believing in the statement so fundamentally, picks up the remnants and pastes them back onto the part of the sticker that was still attached to his car, and then, having successfully done so, calmly drives away, or something pretty close to this.
I did not even try to find the part of the groper’s face that was beautiful. I turned my head from him without incident. Both of us moved on. I had a sudden vision of a harness, instead of black leather, made from the most sinuous and sustainable natural fibers and marketed with the color ecru. There was no productive way to understand this crotchety thought I just had. I had ‘lost the plot’ as they say but in addition to the plot I also had lost the richly detailed and three-dimensional characters, the semi-realistic yet thematically-directed dialogue, the subtle indications of the pressures of context and history. Somehow all I had retained was a brooding sense of atmosphere, a roaring belch of free-floating emotions.
My thoughts did not feel optionable as meaningful entertainment since they suggested that great bad girl of communication, style over substance. I, a rodent, addicted to the useless aura of dual lighting as it is reflected off a rainy quiet parking lot of a rural interstate rest stop late at night, for instance, was not capable of the civic duty provided by much stronger men: the maverick 14-minute continuous one take opening of a widely acclaimed war movie. These thoughts, so stupid that I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. My eyes once again rolled from the inside to the out, I turned off my laugh. Laughing alone to myself would likely stress to other dark room dwellers that my turgid nodes were also not optionable.
I focused on my desires. The fog became interesting again. Fog: style that could lead to substance. Because now there was a man, perhaps around my original age, in the corner to my right, whose form rolled in as the fog fell down. He stood next to another man I took to be his friend. They made intermittent comments to each other with occasional smiles and polite jerks to the music as well as several disconnected sways. What brought me to him most crucially was, while his friend was shirtless and wearing a black leather harness with t-shirt hanging from the waist of his blue jeans, the man I considered engaging in progressive eyefuckery with was not only fully clothed, but even overly clothed in a heavy black jacket whose origins were probably a major outdoor recreation-aligned department store. The weather outside, being early fall, was not quite matched to the insulating virtuosity of this probably $300+ jacket. This being at odds with the prevailing style that surrounded us immediately made him hot to me. There was also no struggle to find something beautiful in his face.
I looked, and looked away several times. I watched the fog fully dissipate, and the interactions of others conclude around me. We were now exactly in between fogs. I felt a creak of courage and looked to his face, which finally also happened to be aiming at me. Where can this go, I dolloped, I let slip a smile, but we were far from each other and perhaps I was not competently lit. My eyes scanned for reciprocation, but his face was reduced to distant lines, which now organized themselves into an obscured profile as he covered his mouth and turned to whisper some comment to his companion.
I flagellated for thinking it would be possible to impact his attention; it occurred to me that I could leave, return to my home alone, and there lay down, listening to some beautiful song that made my tears to fall. It did sound some degree of pleasurable. To splash around some tears in tantrum, then, when dry, once again amble roidfully down the furrow of the severe. The chute of choler. Back on track bitch. I could have easily gone home and felt sad, and the sadness would feel fulfilling, it would feel worthwhile, it would feel useful and directed. It’s spelled ‘betch,’ botch.
But I did not leave, for unknown reasons or actually, I had somehow become welded to the pursuit of a specific feeling. I dreamt of having a glamorous mindset that was easy to watch and relate to. The specific feeling was that I might be able to find the thread of my new life, it just wasn’t visible yet. My yearning surged around the room like a decrepit claw machine rapidly approaching Saltstraumen at the dawn of the next great flood. I considered that this time I had actually lost my mind. A crunchy granola type had brought me to the brink of phantasmaGORPia so my eyes re-blasted in his direction.
I saw that he no longer spoke to his friend. He stood in silence and moved his eyes around the crowd. I would not look at the floor cord protector, his eyes felt my laser and turned towards mine. I experimented with the idea that I could be referred to as “creepy.” So I returned to the floor cord protector. Before remembering that “creepy” is rarely invoked in a room with this purpose, and I looked directly into his eyes.
A connective thread was established. He smiled so I looked away. Then reminded myself it was possible to look at him again, and it was possible as well to mix in a very reasonable half-smile, which I did. We were now both looking at each other and smiling at each other.
I folded my arms over my chest, my nipples again at forceful odds with rapacious A/C. Of course folding one’s arms was famously an indicator of “negative body language” as experts had discovered; I could be adaptable. I dropped my arms from my chest and embraced the dynamics of my body’s uncontrollable response to cold air. I somehow verged on the precipice of an unfurling. I shyly pawed at previously unconsidered attitudes and perspectives. And now both my eyes and formidable drillbit nipples pointed towards the distant man.
Then he was approaching me. I squealed internally. I squealed at various pitches. The endless scroll of possibilities swirled around me like a wash of heavy cherry blossoms caught in the sweep of a seasonally atypical thunderstorm gust, severing pink bulbs from the bountiful branch and pelting them down upon the central female protagonist of a romantic period drama in her moment of aching self-reflection on the decision to marry a rich man she does not love, and the only notable visual flourish in an otherwise stylistically flat and dialogue-driven prestige compost. The possibilities moved too fast to sufficiently track, his strobing shadow fell upon me in a vaguely red swath.
I was now in many ways in between his shoulders, which seemed a few inches higher than mine. I considered a frenzied coati’s launch towards the bathroom or, even better, a softer jaunt to the giant plastic orange water dispenser located at the entrance of the room and screaming my name. My eyes seemed to have signed a check that my lowly nards could not cash, he looked me in the eyes and smiled and said nothing, forcing me to battle valiantly against the silence on my own. Thus I introduced myself formally with a handshake. His name was Henry, which was followed by more quiet, though he seemed comfortable to be in front of me and saying nothing.
“Why are you wearing that huge coat in here?” was all I could think to ask.
He leaned closer to help me hear, “I’m too cheap to check it haha.”
His voice was not designed to be heard near techno; I had to lean in as well. “Haha, aren’t you hot? It’s kinda warm today.” In fact there was no socially defensible reason to be wearing this coat on such a warm day. There was also the foolish observation I could make on the disconnect between owning a very expensive jacket probably intended for prolonged primitive winter camping and yet being too cheap to check that enormous coat at a place where showing off the body was greatly encouraged. But both irrationalities only bolstered my absurd throb for some sort of connection.
“Only a little,” he stated succinctly and with another laugh, apparently believing he had provided a satisfying answer.
With nowhere else to go, I panned through flirtatious classics, “well it looks good on you heh” rocketing from my mouth.
He smiled, seemingly not acknowledging the compliment at all, before his hand gently came wrapping around my lower back. “You’re cute,” he dunked upon me. His mouth next to my ear, my eye on the dormant nozzle of the elevated fog machine. I saw that he was drunk but not to the point of losing all his personality or specifics. In fact I had entered my own mysterious corridor of beer-dappled bliss. I wasn’t sure what details he could or could not see in my face. I said “thanks” and smiled, and felt his hand spread.
Looking closely at his features, I was only capable of incomplete analysis. I did not like not knowing his capabilities. I did not like not knowing why he was wearing an outrageously warm winter coat. Conversely, I also felt very excited by his extreme atypical dedication to keeping it on. I also felt excited by what I now felt to be his heavenly radiance and wildly resplendent personal beauty, which I had previously considered to be quite an uninteresting trait to be distrusted in others, and above all, flatly coincidental to the point of my return from hell. I felt ransacked by the idea of something actually beautiful being both close to me and even looking at me, and even sliding a kinda sweaty hand down the band of my “Slightly Imperfect”-stickered flannel print boxers. Again I suddenly yearned to jerk away from him like a noir woman with secrets. There were too many snags, snares, tears and screams lining my punishingly complex 65,000 stair journey out of an unshareable slop spiral, I believed. My past would make a very tiresome funhouse ride which would prob take two hours minimum and cost around $300, or perhaps a severely under-viewed internet video series titled something like “Whole Life FAIL” released in seven parts each lasting 130 minutes and distressingly unable to compete with the 8-second clip of a middle-aged woman who drunkenly falls off the back of a parked speed boat. There was simply so much in my past that felt like it could never be explained.
The question was why did I demand nothing less than vigorous compassion and understanding from the brand new stranger who just wanted to put his hand down my pants? His hand played with the band of my underwear with such simplicity. How could I align with that simplicity, “are you here alone?” he asked softly. I let his hand stay where it was and act how it wanted, I kept my own arms at my side.
He gestured indistinctly, “I came with a friend.”
“Do you need to be with him?” I confusingly asked.
I was very relieved the man Henry did not want to do something like dance to the music, which some patrons, mostly on the outskirts of bacchanalian froth, were interested in doing. We stood in this configuration for a half minute — his hand rubbing the border of my lower back/upper ass, occasionally teasing a deeper dive, with eye contact in a choppy flow of pursuit and retreat. It struck me that, though he had approached me, there was something shy in him too, which turned me on and filled me with dread. I optioned various topics that I noticed people in my original age group liked to discuss: what are you watching… what’s your sign… oh… oh ok… any upcoming trips?
“Are you from here?” I chose to ask, showing mature and neutral restraint though I had strongly considered ‘ya like chips?’
“No, actually I don’t even live here. I’m just in town for a couple nights. I’m on a road trip,” and in the meantime the fog machine had re-animated, sending swole tubes of careless smoke down from above. It blasted for quite some time.
“That’s a lot of fog,” I suggested.
“Yeah, I kinda hate it. It irritates my eyes.”
Of course now having a de facto curtain of cloud-based privacy greatly encouraged the manic flinging of hands and emboldened schlongs. I turned to ask him where he was visiting from when I was interrupted by a stare of certainty, penetrating me from within the eerie envelope of tacky billow. The whites of his eyes popped out from the sheath of grey, tinted and somehow accentuated overhead with slits of red light, and headed towards me. Meanwhile his hand pulled me into him by my waistband in the boner-mobilizing grandeur of someone successfully yanking a tablecloth from underneath a set of champagne glasses and family heirloom chinaware. In fact now we were making out, I even discovered myself kissing back.
I wondered how thoroughly gnarled my kissing was, how well it was being received. It’d been quite some time. Pulling away our heads from one another, I failed to detect any criticisms or hesitations in Henry’s face. He smiled at me. I had an interesting thought, but I chose not to share it with him. The thought was, ‘unfortunately, my ass tends to have a Ken Burns effect’ but he didn’t need to hear that. The sense of doom I had prudently house-broken over the past several years had temporarily discharged into some less interesting timeline. Banished by the attention I was receiving from a high stakes wildcard. Gleefully repressed by the sauce of possibility. Once again he leaned towards me, our make out resumed. If he had noticed the minuscule refurbishment in the gravity of my eyelids he did not seem to care. I thought about if Dr. Anne had deserved my money, this thought was quickly trashed by the wiggly spirit of newly introduced tongue -- very far from the floor cord protector now.
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