Manhattan
Last night after work I went to the legendary Astor Place Hairstylists for a haircut. I didn’t feel like going back to my apartment — in fact, I was dreading sleeping there last night — so instead, I wandered around the streets of downtown Manhattan. I walked up Broadway to the Strand Bookstore, where you can get lost among the tall claustrophobic shelves for hours. Then I walked up a couple of blocks and hit the Virgin Megastore at Union Square, specifically the classical section, where I spent a short while browsing and listening.
(I love how the classical music section of every huge mega-CD store is glassed off in a separate room, enforcing the impression that classical music is something completely inaccessible to the unwashed masses. It also gives the illusion that it’s fragile, that it needs to be protected from the big bad noisy world of Britney and Christina and Metallica. I think there’s some truth to this, actually; and to me, the classical music section of a CD store — like the music itself — is an oasis. (That’s oasis with a lowercase o.))
From there, I walked through Union Square and spent some time at the beautiful Barnes and Noble store there. After I left, I still didn’t want to go home, so I walked a few blocks west and it started drizzling lightly. I wound up in Chelsea, where I walked down Eighth Avenue, the Rodeo Drive of Manhattan’s gay world, and around 16th Street I ran into a guy I know who lives in Hoboken. I really don’t like this guy: it’s something about the way he talks, and the fact that his idea of conversation is jokingly insulting the person he’s talking with, and the fact that we have almost nothing in common and therefore have little to talk about. Unfortunately, I never seem to remember any of this until we’ve spent some time together.
I asked what he was up to, and he said, “Oh, you know… hanging out… cruising.” I still didn’t want to go home, so I asked if he wanted to grab a beer at Barracuda. He said sure. So we walked back up Eighth Avenue, looked through the windows of the Big Cup — which is basically a gay bar except they serve caffeine instead of alcohol — and continued on to Barracuda.
It was pretty empty, so we easily found a place to sit. But before we sat down, a guy came over to me and said hi. It was Joe, the only member of my high school class in Tokyo who’d been openly gay. He now lives in Chelsea. He was the first gay person I ever knew, but I never talked to him back then, because in high school I wasn’t ready for that sort of thing. But when I finally came out a couple of years ago, I got his e-mail address off the annual class newsletter and wrote him, basically saying Hi, do you remember me from high school? I’m gay too. We got together for dinner a year ago, but I hadn’t seen him since.
He and his friends were on their way out, so we said our goodbyes, and Latent Annoying Guy and I sat down. I had a Corona, he had a margarita. After several minutes, the conversation fizzled out. I had been a little horny, and his “cruising” comment had piqued my curiosity, and we’d hooked up once last spring, but now I remembered how much I didn’t like him, and he didn’t seem to be interested anyway, and I also knew that by the time we got back across the river to either Hoboken or Jersey City I would have lost any interest in him that I would have been trying to sustain, so I said I needed to get up for work in the morning and that I had to be going, and we parted ways.
I came home, heard too much noise from the neighbors, called the landlord and left a message, in which among other things I said “either they have to go or I have to go” and “could you please call me at work tomorrow.” But by around 11:30 the noise had stopped, so after talking on the phone with Penn for a bit, I got into bed and managed to sleep pretty well, a blanket over my head and a stuffed Uncle Scrooge doll in my arms because I needed it.
