From Visions of
Garleyville
Max lives alone
Dear
Ken:
I hate beginning with the old cliche about
wishing you were here. But since you've gone west again, life in the old city
has been less than perfect.
Max has been making moves on me, despite me telling him against and again that I'm
completely straight.
How could I be attracted to a man when I'm
already living with a woman?
Peggy, however, has been no help in the
matter. She seems to encourage his advances, and sees him as a guard against my
cheating on her. She figures with Max hunting for me in the streets, I'll
stay home at night rather than seeking out the
teenyboppers in the
I've pointed out to her the obvious danger
in her strategy, how he might just walk off with me someday -- something
neither of us believe, but something I hoped would cause her to discourage his
visits to the apartment.
I just can't stand his drooling over me
like he does. I've even taken on extra hours at work to avoid him, finding
myself wandering uptown on Saturday mornings for the messenger service
when I should be at home asleep.
I figured if I stayed away long enough
some young stud would eventually steal away Max's
attention, although I will admit that this part of Peggy's plan to keep me
faithful has worked admirably. The only female attention I have received in
weeks has been from the prostitutes on
As you well know, I won't go that far no
matter how horny I get.
All
this came to naught since one Monday morning I came into the office to find you
know who standing in the messenger office grinning at me, telling me he's just
got a job there and that he and I would be seeing a lot more of each other from
then on out. This was one of Peggy's bright ideas, he wheels of her jealous working over
time. I suppose she believed I had a harum of hot little office secretaries to
do me while on my rounds and that having Max wandering around might just keep
me from indulging.
This shows just how little Peggy knows
about these uptown girls. Maybe
Angry enough for me to want to get even,
angry enough for me to begin hatching a plot of my own.
I agreed to meet Max later for a drink at a
downtown gay bar, then went home to tell Peggy.
You should have seen the look on her face,
her green eyes flickering with a look of sudden doubt. She began to wonder
about me and what she had possibly done, dragging me out of the arms of another
woman and pushing me into a life style against which she could never compete.
Jealousy?
She pleaded with me not to go, and maybe I
shouldn't have. But I was feeling particularly cruel and needed to make it hurt
her a little. I even smiled when I waved good bye.
I
wasn't smiling when I stepped into the gay bar to meet Max. This wasn't just a
bar, but a world unto itself with its own alien culture and rules of behavior
-- none of which I understood in the least. It had been three years since you
and I wandered into one of these places by accident. While the Stonewall riots
a few years ago brought the scene out into the open, it still seemed a little
sleezy to me. I didn't even look in the windows when I
passed such places, let alone setting foot into one to order a drink.
To tell you the truth, I've never been so
certain about myself that I would allow myself to broach the line between
straight and gay. Maybe at times I even felt a certain attraction there and
pondered the differences in sexual experiences: what made Max's experience with
boys differ from mine with girls? At the same time, these musings horrified me
as if to suggest I might be slipping over the edge.
If nothing else, Max's glee at seeing me
should have terrified me even more. He charged through the crowded room,
grabbed my hand and began to pump it in his manic expression of welcome. Then, he took me on a tour of the bar,
insisting that I meet everyone of his friends, like a
child showing off a new toy. I saw jealousy dripping out of the eyes of these
men, the way I had seen it dripping out of the dirty old men in the go go bars
on
To my surprise, however, one of Max's
friends wasn't a man, and the moment he introduced us, I understood how
unattracted I actually was to other men. This was the most attractive woman I
had ever met, green eyes and red hair and lips so full I would have melted into
them. So caught up in lust was I that I nearly missed Max's revelation that
this was his roommate.
"She's
not gay," Max informed me. "But I thought I'd tease the girls around
here by showing her off."
Max apparently teased everyone when he got
a chance.
He said she and he had come to the same
conclusion about the safety of living with someone to whom
neither was attracted. Sexual involvement, he claimed, could screw up a cozy
living arrangement -- at which point she interrupted Max and invited me to come
see their apartment some time.
Max heartily agreed, although so caught up
with his own lust for me that he missed mine for her, or the subtle agreement
she and I had come to.
That meeting ruined me.
I couldn't get her out of my head for
days, walking the wrong routes at work, and into walls
at night. Freddie, my boss, said I must be sick, although he seemed to suspect
me of being on drugs.
Maybe the woman was a drug. Maybe I was
insane.
Peggy certainly suspected something,
starting up with talk about moving out to
Max -- ignorant of my true feelings --
continued his barage of invitations to have me over to the apartment. No doubt
he had plans of his own, missing the real attraction such an invitation had for
me.
Finally, I couldn't take it any more and agreed
to visit Max, but only -- I told him -- if his roommate was there as well. He
assumed I wanted her there as protection from him, and he reluctantly agreed.
Peggy, absolutely enraged, told me not to bother coming home again if I went.
But I went anyway, crawling up Max's
stairs like a dog in heat, drolling when Max openned the door.
At which point, everything became clear:
especially how easily I had been taken in, entrapped by Max's devious plan.
You see, Ken, Max lives alone.