There were many advantages to getting horizontal in bed with a man. Mainly, I appreciated the way my flaws weren’t as noticeable under covers. If a cop brought a guy to a lineup and asked him to point to the man who screwed him silly the night before, odds were good that the person singled out would be a muscular hunk, not some scrawny twink. I wasn’t like my beefy brothers—or my beefy gay brothers in the larger sense—and it mystified me when people felt compelled to point out how thin I was. Only the nagging mother of an overweight person would dwell on the obvious. But total strangers would tell a slender person to eat because he was too skinny. Or they’d use code words to express their criticism. Rangy. Lanky. Wiry. Gangly. Wasting away.
I wasn’t as thin as my height made me seem, and I had big bones. But even I had to admit that being sick had left me looking borderline emaciated. Still, no one ever complained about being wrapped up in my bony arms and legs in bed, Mark included.
I went to see Mark because my boss, Benny the Whiner, wouldn’t let me come back to work without a release from my doctor. I figured the clinic was closed on Sunday, but when I called the number from my prescription, I got the option of paging Mark. A couple cell calls and a brisk walk later, and I was at his apartment near Columbia University.
“I’m not sure you’ve had enough bed rest to go back to work,” Mark said after he let me in. He looked more appealing than he had on the day I’d met him. Kind of rumpled. Like he had no plans for Sunday except parking himself on the couch and eating junk food.
“Are you coming on to me? Shouldn’t you be worried about doctor-patient ethics?” I asked.
Ethics didn’t seem to be an issue. An hour or so later, the sheets were twisted around and between us like Morgan’s snakes. Which wasn’t an image I wanted in my head at that time. I started to tell Mark about my bizarre roommate, but he already knew from Roberto.
“How do you know Roberto, anyway?” I asked. “Is he a patient?”
“My current breach of ethics notwithstanding,” he said, while tracing my sternum with his finger, “if he were a patient, I wouldn’t talk about him. He’s a friend. How do you know him?”
“We went to school together,” I said. “Broadway High School for the Arts.”
“Right. I forgot how young you are,” Mark said.
He didn’t look too bothered by it, but if he was beginning to dwell on my flaws, he’d soon be stressing over my weight and shoving food down my throat. To head him off, I said, “I’m not young. I’m nineteen. Why? How old are you?”
“In gay years, I’m ancient. In doctor years, I’m young.”
“Gay years,” I mimicked. “I hate that. Sounds like dog years.” He only shrugged as a response, so I asked, “How young?”
“Thirty-one.”
“Ugh. It’s like I’m in bed with my uncle.”
“I can think of worse things,” Mark said.
“Do you know him? Is he your patient?”
“Roberto told me that Blaine Dunhill’s your uncle. You can’t be my age and gay in Manhattan without knowing who he is. Also, I’ve been part of AIDS and HIV fund-raisers with Daniel Stephenson.”
My uncle’s boyfriend, Daniel, was a C-list actor who’d been the focus of a very public outing a few years before. Even though it was old news, for a while he and Blaine had been the celebrity gay couple, constantly pictured or interviewed in Advocate, Out, the New York Blade, HX, and for some reason, Martha Stewart Living magazine.
“Their fifteen minutes were nearly over around the time I moved in with Blaine,” I said.
“When was that?”
“October”—I had to think a second—“of 2000.”
“Where’s your family? Or is that an insensitive question?”
“They’re in Wisconsin. I came out to them that fall. My father was completely not cool with it—he still isn’t—and my mother just hoped it would go away. My brothers are big jocks. Actually, my older brother was away at college, but Chuck—my twin—couldn’t deal. When our fights got physical, it seemed like a good idea for me to go away.”
Mark was a good listener, lying on his side and absently running his thumb up and down my arm while I talked. The swing I’d taken at Chuck came after years of dealing with my family’s crap. What made it different was that in the aftermath, I’d impulsively blurted out to my parents that I wanted to move in with my uncle.
When they sent me to my room so they could discuss the idea, I jumped online and researched art schools in Manhattan. I downloaded and printed a brochure from Broadway High School for the Arts. Next, I Googled Uncle Blaine. We’d spent a little time together and exchanged e-mails, but I thought it would be a good idea to see what I was attempting to get myself into. I knew he was an advertising executive for Lillith Allure Cosmetics, but I’d never bothered to check out his work.
With a few clicks of my mouse, I found his company’s Web site and saw pages of ads with beautiful photographs of models in extravagant settings. It was good stuff. Everything popped. My mind wandered, imagining the effort that went into putting together even a simple ad. The models, props, costumes, lighting, photographers, location, poses, product placement. The final result.
I wanted to be in the middle of that kind of creative buzz, surrounded by artistic energy and innovative people. I didn’t think I wanted to get into advertising, but if I was going to be sent away and hoped for a life in art, Uncle Blaine and his friends seemed like the kind of people I needed to be around. Plus they were a thousand miles from my family.
A few weeks later, I was in Manhattan, in public school for a couple months until the new term started at BHSA.
“Then I met Roberto,” I told Mark. “Our group of friends stayed tight even after graduation. When I moved out of my uncle’s place, Roberto was looking for a roommate, too.”
“What are you doing now? Are you in college? Art school?” Mark asked.
“I was at Pratt for a semester. Then I dropped out. Now everyone in my family is pissed at me.”
Mark’s phone rang, and while he talked a patient through some crisis, I thought about my confrontation with Blaine. I’d chosen to break the news over dinner in a restaurant, sure that my uncle wouldn’t make a scene in public.
“What do you mean you dropped out of college? Your second semester started two weeks ago. Are you telling me that you’ve been pretending to go?” Blaine hissed.
“It wasn’t for me,” I said in a way that I hoped sounded offhanded, as if I had everything under control. “It was boring. I want to start my life now.”
“Oh? How? Do you have a job lined up? A career?”
“Kinda. I got a job with I Dream Of Cleanie.”
“The gay maid service? You’re going to be a maid?” Blaine laughed and looked around, as if he expected Ashton Kutcher and a cameraman to jump out from behind a ficus. “That’s not a career, Nick.”
He was right. It wasn’t a career. Then again, I hadn’t said I intended to slave for I Dream of Cleanie the rest of my life.
Plus—I liked the job. It got me inside some really cool apartments, places I’d never get to see any other way. Not to mention that it gave me surprising insights into the dirty underbelly of human nature. The stuff you found under people’s beds….
It was that night, with Blaine at the restaurant, when I’d run into Kendra. She was our server. Her uniform was stained and slightly disheveled, like it realized it wasn’t up to par with the ritzy décor and was rejecting its wearer. She’d gotten the order wrong and begged us not to tell her manager.
“You’re