I sat on the edge of my seat as the streetcar clamored along the rails, my hands cupped under my legs while I gazed through the windows, awe-struck.  There were men everywhere. Men like me. Real men, walking too close together for Nebraska, some holding hands, some with their arms hooked around each other, others kissing—out in the open—on the street corners. Casual. Free. Normal. I felt like a pilgrim on the bow of the Mayflower as I sailed on the F-Market down to the Castro, the unfamiliar coastline of the new world was in sight and ripe with opportunity.

I stepped down from the streetcar into the cool, wet night, stood for a few minutes beneath a streetlamp and watched the breath puff from my lips, rise and diffuse into the light. The Castro was bustling with activity, hordes of men swaggering down the sidewalks, through the muffled sounds of dance music that escaped from half-open windows and doorways. The streets were electric with the high-pitched whistles of men summoning cabs as others shouted to each other over the traffic. I felt intoxicated. I took a deep breath and committed myself to becoming a part of this crowd. It was going to be easy. Keep your head up, don’t slouch. Smile, look them in the eye. Appear interested, but not desperate.

Not knowing where to go, I stumbled into the first line that snaked around a corner toward a dance club. The place was packed with guys hanging over the balcony above me, craning their necks to scope out who was in line. Of course I was doing the same, my eyes darting from man to man. So many to choose from.

But once I climbed the narrow stairwell to the main floor, past dozens of men, all better looking and more comfortable than me, I felt my confidence drain away. It was like those dreams you have, the ones where you’re at school and everyone’s laughing and pointing at you because you’re naked, you’ve forgotten to dress and haven’t noticed until that precise moment. A couple guys snickered as I pushed past, and I thought I heard one of them say something like, “Look who escaped from the cast of Hee Haw.” But I kept moving up the stairs until the room opened up into a triangular dance floor that stretched between three bars.

I yawned in an effort to loosen up and headed toward the bar with the shortest line. A couple nights earlier I’d discovered how quickly gin and tonics relaxed me, so I ordered a double, chugged it before I could find a spot to prop myself up against the wall, then I got back in line and ordered another. I retreated into a corner. Every time I finished my drink a waiter would bring me a new one and say, “compliments of George,” then point to an old guy across the room who kept watching me. I needed the drinks more than I cared about him staring at me. Every now and then I’d raise my glass to him and nod, then turn my attention to the dance floor and the men that I really wanted. Why couldn’t I just go out there and dance with them? Join their jostling bodies? But I didn’t have any rhythm. And I was dressed like a fool. I finished my drink and found another had been set down in front of me—I hadn’t even noticed the waiter deliver it this time—so I hoisted it again toward George and I guzzled some more.

Before long I began not to care. The dance floor blended together like a watercolor and I stumbled into this mass, no longer worried about rhythm. Just wanting. Wanting it all. And I didn’t care now if I was naked because I wanted them to see me. I imagined their hands on me and mine on them, on the smooth curve between their backs and buttocks, the stickiness of their sweat. But they weren’t looking at me.

I kept dancing. Fantasizing. Hoping that one of them would choose me. But they all danced around me, brushed by me, and after awhile I retreated back to my spot against the wall.

The room was shifting now, and I thought maybe this was what an earthquake felt like, this lack of balance I was experiencing, the swaying of everything first one way then the opposite then some entirely impossible direction. I closed my eyes but that was worse, everything still tilting but now spinning too. I opened my eyes and felt like I was being pulled down, like a magnet to metal, into my chair. The room continued to tilt. I wanted to close my eyes again but I knew I couldn’t. And then I felt sick. The undulation of the floor and the twisting of everyone in the room and the music too loud to focus. I had to get up, had to find the restroom. But where was it?

There were too many people, packed together like cattle being led up a chute, and I couldn’t see anything, just kept pushing myself forward and through until I lunged too hard and the corner of the pool table plunged into my stomach. I lost it. All over the bright green velvet. And the men who had been gathered around the table scattered back a few feet.

One guy threw his hands up and said, “Fuck,” and looked at me like I was a freak.

The others just stared, some of them talking behind their hands to their friends. I vomited again.

“Oh Jesus,” someone else shrieked. The men began to shuffle away from the table. I felt a heavy hand on my back.

“Whoa, buddy, you better slow it down.” It was George. He began to rub his hand in slow circles around my back, circles that weren’t at all comforting. He pulled me up and toward him and handed me a handkerchief for my mouth, all the time still touching me, his hand now on my waist. I wiped my mouth and he kissed my cheek, then it seemed he was going to move directly for my lips when a hand with slender fingers grabbed a hold of George’s shoulder.

“George,” the tall man in a bar apron said, “back off, man.”

He pushed George off into the crowd and turned back and walked toward me, a cock-sure grin on his face, shaking his head and laughing. His hair was black and wavy and a little too long in the front. He had to brush his bangs away to see me. He looked at me seriously, though the sparkle in his spaniel eyes betrayed any anger.

“A bit much to drink?” he said, the words soothing and lazy, thick as syrup.

“Uh, yeah.” He looked me up and down and in just a few seconds nodded in such a way that it was as if he’d figured out my entire life story. Then his thin lips wrinkled into a smirk and he raised his eyebrows.

“Fake ID?” he said and I wanted to vomit again but then he continued, barely concealing his laugh, “I’m not going to turn you in.”

“Thanks.”

He squeezed my shoulder gently, dropped his hand against the small of my back and led me through the crowd.

“But,” he said, “you’ve got to stay here and sober up. Got that?” He brushed a couple guys out of a booth across from the bar and motioned for me to slide in. I sat there for a couple minutes after he disappeared, a little enchanted by his cocky stride and smirk, and even more amazed that he was still talking to me. Of course, I’m sure he’d seen it all working in that place, but still I wanted to slink under the table and curl up into a ball rather than watch him as he mopped up my mess. He looked up every couple seconds, shaking his finger at me while he laughed. When he finished he plunked a huge glass of water on the table and sat down beside me. I moved my leg so that it was grazing his.

“Listen. I’ve got to get back up to the bar. So here’s the deal. There will be no more puking from you. And this,” he thumped the glass of water, “is your new drink of choice. Best stuff in the house—trust me. And the sooner you learn that, the better off you’ll be in this kind of place. Just ask George.”

“God, I’m sorry,” I mumbled.

He hoisted himself from the seat and looked at me straight in the eyes, so dead-on that I felt almost uncomfortable.
“You’re not from around here are you?” He scratched his stubbly chin for a second then pointed to the bar across from us. “You need anything, I’m right there. And we’ll keep you going on refills.” He picked up the glass and handed it to me then went back to his bar.

My throat was scratchy and sour with the first swallow, but eventually the water became crisp and cool. I drank it rapidly and when my glass was almost empty, the bartender would fill it from his pitcher, pick my glass up and hand it to me. Each time I rushed to grab it, I would brush his fingers with the underside of mine.

Before I knew it, the crowd began to disperse and I sat and watched the crew clean the place up. I realized I had not been the only one who vomited that night. My vomiting, however, was higher profile. But I no longer cared, as I watched the bartender lift the stools up onto the bar ledge. He told the others he was “out of there” then he strolled over to me, his body smooth and fluid. He leaned down, splaying his hands on the table, his arms defined but not bulky, smooth and olive, softened with fine black hairs. He smirked and my stomach flipped.

“So,” he said to me, “where are we headed tonight?”

Eric Delehoy is the founding editor of Gertrude, a small press literary and arts journal featuring gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, and straight ally writers and artists. His essays, poetry, and fiction have appeared in a number of journals such as The Rockford Review, Coal City Review, Upstairs at Duroc, Seedhouse, HazMat Review, Cranial Tempest, and The Armchair Asthete 2002 & 2004. Work is forthcoming in Onthebus and an anthology by Moment Point Press, After the Day Is Done. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his partner.