Phone Numbers

<BODY bgcolor="#FFFFFF" background="imgs/mainbg.gif" text="#333333" link="333300" alink="999900" vlink="#666666"> <table border=0 cellspacing=0 cellpadding=0 width="90%"> <tr><td colspan=2 align=right valign=middle bgcolor="#000000"><nobr><img src="imgs/title.gif" alt="Phone Numbers" width="185" height="32" border="0" vspace=0 hspace=0><a href="../../bios/albo.html" target="_top"><img src="imgs/albo.gif" alt="by Mike Albo" width="102" height="32" border="0" vspace=0 hspace=0></a></nobr></td></tr> <tr> <td align=left valign=top><img src="imgs/spacer.gif" alt="" width="24" height="1" border="0"></td> <td align=left valign=top><br><br><br><br><br> <font size=3 face="ARIAL,HELVETICA"> NUMBERS <p> I have been keeping the scrappy phone numbers given to me by guys for the past seven years or so and I recently put them all in a pile and stared at them. There are at least thirty, lying there torn and jumbled. Like always, I have waited until things are scary and huge before I think about what I am doing . Why am I collecting old bits of paper, like some loony philatelist? <p> If I was not stupid I would have used my collecting interests in more lucrative ways, like keeping clean mint versions of Star Wars Action figures and Knight Rider lunchboxes and Princess House decanters. But no. Instead, I decide to keep the numbers of the many many guys I have sportily chattered with in bars and parties and streets--hi, so where are you from, what do you do, give me a call--until finally scraps are traded, like sexual baseball cards. <p> People who are well-adjusted, forward-thinking and have savings accounts would not do this. They would be slightly elated but their dreams would be contained. In a sober flowchart of feeling, they would realize that they would never call this person, and they would simply toss the scrap away. Then they would make a wholesome, low-fat dinner for themselves. <p> Unlike them, though, I can't seem to trash this little heap. I'm not efficient emotionally...or maybe I'm a hoarder... It's like I am trying to prepare for that dim day in the retirement home when I am 105, when I dump them out of an accordion file and look at them nostalgically on my lap before my lunch of pills and my lukewarm sponge bath. Or maybe I just have an overabundance of hope. I don't know what I am waiting for. <p> I must have too much hope, because I actually thought every one of these was a true thing. I guess I have a problem discerning durability. Pans really flash in me. Whether it was that night, or four months from then, I have imagined all these guys at some time being "it" for me -- and you know what "it"is: that dependable man you see in daylight. That man with rootsy hobbies and a non-nervous demeanor. The one who has something to do with clean air and seven-grain dinners, but you can't clearly visualize him because he is huge and out there and fills up your brain like weather. <p> If there was some way to be able to discern the value of a number.... <p> Maybe you have better judgement. Maybe you, with your intense sensitivity to graphology and psychological/emotional distance, will be able to detect the cruel curlicue or the plangent loop in the name and number of these guys. Would you have been able to tell me if the person was an asshole or the tarry, sticky, glowing Duraflame of my heart? Is there anyone I should call up now--out of the blue, months, years later--just because of the flourish of his script? Use your incredible intuitive druid powers to help me. <p> Ian 532-9721 <p> The beginning of spring. Everything is sickly with thick, malarial rain. It's 1993, and we as a country are nearing the end of the Tweeds catalogue era, so Ian wears baggy, linen-y all-natural pants, sandals and a wide-necked knit sweater. Half-Polynesian, he looks dark and beautiful, with black shiny hair and airbrushed skin. He's a dancer, so it's hard to tell if he is on amphetamines, or just high on life. Every one of his movements is an expression using a flowing series of muscles. We are in Glenn's coffee bar on Monday Bingo night, which is hosted by the stately, articulate drag queen Afro. While Afro calls out bingo numbers--G43, B11--Ian pips around the room in dancer poses, bouncing like an uncatchable dragonfly. Then, near the boozy end of the night, he jigs up to me."I just got reviewed in the Village Voice!" I can't remember what I say or what he says next, but we talk long enough so that we go to the bathroom together and kiss in the tiny toilet. <p> Flipside: "Let's play swordfight!" he says afterwards, and we pee at the same time and cross streams. We exchange numbers on a green lined paper sheet he pulls out of his bag. I never call him and he never calls me. The next week, I get this horrid gastrointestinal virus, where I vomit for a week and have hallucinations that I am married to a young Indian woman in a peach A-line dress. So maybe this number prognosticates the illness, with its queasy greenness and bleeding blue marker name. <p> Raj 663-9875 [details from Con Ed bill should be visible] <p> Dustiness and must. Raj wears jeans and a diaphanous purple patterned scarf and a yellow sweater. We are both sober. He is Indian-American and I tell him about my gastrointestinal hallucination. It's one of the first things I say to him, which is a bad idea because it sounds slightly crazy. We meet at the library, but please don't think I cruise libraries when I tell you that. I see him walking down the silent aisles of the library and I stare at a book to pretend I am studious. "What are you reading?" he asks and I look at it. It is an index of Canadian wheat prices for 1938. Telling him about my hallucination is also a bad idea because it's 1994 and we are on a college campus. All our words sound veiled and sacreligious in the echoey stacks and settled dust. Every relationship here is overladen with codes, and I begin to feel like a gawky representation of imperialism. But Raj just looks at me glossily. After many minutes, he takes out a Con Ed gas bill envelope and writes his number down. <p> Flipside: <p> For two weeks I put Raj's number in this little ever-present bowl on the kitchen table filled with loose change and ATM receipts. It floats there, the soft penciling of his soft name, its curvy, kind capital C. Every time I leave the apartment I look at it and think of him, of our plausible relationship-- attending brown bag race relations lunches together, fighting with our Latino brothers and sisters for a Latin American Studies Department, holding hands and cheering on the gals at the Take Back The Night march... But as time goes on, the idea of actually dating him begins to seem more and more unreal--idyllic, but strange--like our flirtation in the Canadian Economics aisle. Raj is smart and nice and cute and with all those categories peaking, I panic and do not call. Weeks pass. I take the number out of the bowl and slip it in my journal, pressed between pages with all my other numbers. I don't dwell. Then I am in the health clinic, getting an HIV test, and I look up at the bulletin board of safe sex propaganda and there he is, on one of those posters that is supposed to show you how happy and cute you are when you are careful. He is smiling, surrounded by a multicultural mass of people, all smiling as well. Everyone is smiling as I am getting my blood drawn out of me. <p> James 624-9987 <p> Weather and time: humid and 4 AM What he wears: jeans with a wallet chain, white T-shirt, baseball hat pulled so far down over his eyes he must tip his head up to see. Breathalyzer: xstasy Place: my body-hot queen-size mattress What he says: "I'm a painter and I use the color red. Nobody uses red really. And I mean a deep, deep red, and I can just stare at it when I brush it on a canvas and it is so intense". James and I meet at Flamingo East, a lounge. It is 1995 and everyone is wild about lounges. Lounges, where people can lounge! Lounges, where people can do xstasy and talk to each other and grind their jaws, which is what Joey and I are doing when we meet and he tells me he is a painter, and I am SO interested. We are sitting on a lounge couch, twisting our legs around each other like praying mantises, and suddenly, Ian sits down beside me. Ian is also tripping, fancy that. James is busy talking to someone else, but his hand keeps on kneading my leg. Ian and I are overbrimming with xstasy-induced affection. He looks into my eyes and says, "You know, I know we never call each other but...remember when we hung out and we were talking about Farinelli?" Uh huh, I say. I don't remember, though. "Well, you are my Farinelli." I smile. Later, when James and I are mashing into each other on my bed, I finally register what Ian said. You're my Farinelli. You're my Farinelli? You are my castrated opera star? <p> But that is all I think because James is on top of me, pressing me into the bed, occasionally saying a sex sentence with a low syllable count like "Damn you are so hot," his eyes and hands launching and exploring. <p> Flipside: As you can see from his wide John Hancock, James is like a founding father -- he promises a glorious union but, after he conquers you and plows through your land, all he does is leave you a psychic blanket soaked with blow-offy polio. Look at his mean, pin pointy "N's" and "O's"...they speak for him. In the following weeks I called him, he was too busy to see me. But all his posturing and promises and sweaty pressing that night in my bed still had me convinced he actually was interested. I called him twice more, still not getting the hint because I guess I am a fool who tries to use the data I gather from my senses to determine what people may think of me. I keep thinking that there is a through-line between then and now, but there isn't. Nothing sticks. Everything expires. I saw James on the street the other day and he actually ignored me. I lifted my face into a "hi" and he passed and I stood there on the corner of 7th and 2nd Avenue, the grin slowly failing on my face. <p> Lorenzo 477-6732 <p> It is the summer and I have been sitting at a booth all day for work pretending to be made of cheer. My job has a space in the "Gay and Lesbian Business Expo" at the Javits Center and I just sit there and fan out our stupid brochures on the table all day. It's Stonewall 95, the apex of gay pride, and the Games are happening and every one is getting a little too into being gay: rainbows and pink triangles and cheap metal "freedom rings". Now I am at the Boiler Room, a bar, sitting on a pool table with Lorenzo next to me, touching my knee. He wears a red Members Only-style vintage jacket with speakers imbedded in the shoulders. "Cool jacket," I say. "Thanks" he says. He is silent but fills those silences with his smile. We are both kind of drunk. He is drunker than me probably. He invites me to his place, and I find out that he lives in the building next door to me on East 6th Street. "How crazy," he says smokily. He has a mohawk, and both of his nipples are pierced with lightning bolts. Tattoos of Saturns and other planets line the insides of his arms. Lorenzo esta muy seductivo. He swaggers, smiles, and something makes him take up more space than his actual size. If you were to de-contextualize him--throwing him up into the air above history--he would land back in front of you as a Spanish conquistador. Lorenzo lives with two people and sleeps on their sofa in the living room, the sofa where we're making out. The lights are still on, and the two huge windows which are open to the street present us to passers-by, like we are a diorama of gay sex for the Natural History Museum. Surprisingly, I don't care. But I keep thinking someone is going to come out of their bedroom for a glass of water, and the entire time we are having sex I am thinking about how I am always going back to the bathroom when I am in bed, back and forth, back and forth. We fall asleep. I wake up and he is on top of me and says, "Won't you be my neighbor?" Haha. He gives me his number scrawled on a notepad square made from obsolete maps. He fills the little note with facts. "I don't have a job so I don't have a life, so I am just going to put 'no life' here." <p> Flipside: <p> I call him. We go to see "Leaving Las Vegas," and then he tells me we should be friends. "Cool", I say, but I am dying inside. I should have understood from Lorenzo's overproduced note that he was all promises, all sellable cardboard promotion posturing. <p> Jamie 717-9108 <p> It is cold and I am crying because I am walking in Soho. I always cry here because it is so full of rich Italian tourists and they make me very very sad with their expensive bags and sunglasses. People keep surging. People keep surging in me and passing through me. People keep surging in me and passing through me and I am so sick of it. I'm a castrated opera star. Then someone stops in front of me. It's Jamie, this man in my acting class with long blond hair and a beautiful diamond-eyed face. He is straight. In our class, we used to have to play all those emotion-inducing games where you stare at each other and say a word like "pillow" with tears in your eyes, over and over, so Jamie and I have that summer camp-like, acting-class closeness. He hugs me hello. What's wrong? he says. Nothing Nothing I say. I look at him. He gives me his number. We should hang out, he says. <p> Flipside: Jamie saves me. I am in the miserable streets of gentrified, hollow-hearted Soho, emptied of anything having promise, thinking about the stacks of numbers I have, about the fact that they're all false gestures. Then Jamie emerges on the street, giving me his number in threading ballpoint pen, his handwriting flowing in comforting curves, his "J" embracing and wide. One of his sketches, of a winking superheroic man with dangly bangs, is on the back of the paper he hands me. I walk on and feel my body fasten back together. <br><br><br><br></font> </td></tr> </table> </BODY>