A Night With Eeyore

I had the opportunity recently to spend an afternoon and evening with my friend Eeyore. Longer-term readers of my blog will realize that I am not myself a long-term resident of The Hundred Acre Wood, but am talking about an old, decades-old, old-old-old friend of mine who has a glum and dour disposition. He has a unique talent for making lemons out of lemonade; I’m not exaggerating much when I say his mere appearance at a Mardi Gras celebration could turn a happy festival into a mass suicide.

Going out with Eeyore these days is really not that different from going out by myself, much of the time. No sooner will we have arrived at a place than he’ll whip out his smartphone and absorb himself, for half-hours at a time, in the seemingly dozens of GPS sex apps that occupy his phone’s first screen. There’s Grindr and Scruff, of course, and Growlr, but then there are a good ten more of which I’ve never heard. Mind you, Eeyore will never actually hook up with any of the guys he sees on these apps. The last time I checked in with him, he hadn’t actually had sex in two decades. But that doesn’t keep him from dreaming about it . . . in public, surrounded by men in a gay bar, in the company of friends who take him out because they want to socialize with him and not with the back of his phone’s case.

So there we were, in a fairly quiet gay bar—just me, Eeyore, and Eeyore’s smartphone. I sipped my drink and watched his fingers move lovingly over the silicone-and-glass device. I looked away when he stroked it intimately, as it might a lover. “This one’s hot, huh?” he would occasional say, then show me a photo of a blue-haired, big-schnozzed twenty-four year old.

“Where’s he from?” I’d ask.

“He’s only thirty-six hundred miles away,” he’d sigh, and then lose himself in concentration for another half hour. I’d sit there, sipping and sipping, watching the gay men come and go while he’d hunch over and peck out conversations with ugly guys who lived just on the other side of the Urals.

A very long and silent forty-five minutes later, he nudged me to show me a profile on Grindr. “Oh god! This one’s less than two hundred and fifty feet away!” he said, using much the same strangled, ecstatic tones as might a happy pilgrim upon seeing the Virgin Mary pop her head into Lourdes.

“That’s because it’s the bartender,” I told him, nodding at the young guy at the room’s other side. The photo on the phone was of a twenty-five-year-old in shorts and hiking boots, his feet firmly planted on some rocky precipice. He had longer hair in his Grindr photo, but it was unmistakably the same guy in the jeans and the tee with the cut-off arms who was standing across the room. “If you actually looked up once in a while. . . .”

“Oh god, do you think? He’s so, so beautiful,” mooned Eeyore. I thought the kid was all right. Nothing too special. I wouldn’t have turned him down if he’d come on to me, but I wouldn’t have turned into a crushed-out schoolgirl over the kid, either.

“So go talk to him,” I suggested. I wouldn’t have minded being left alone for a few minutes. Hell, I’d been alone for the hour we’d been in the bar.

He recoiled. “I couldn’t do that,” he said, horrified at the thought. Eeyore is a good seven or eight years older than I, if I’ve not mentioned it; he behaves as if he’s thirty-seven or thirty-eight years younger. “Look at him,” he said, over and over again, cupping his smartphone as if it were a religious icon. He stared at the photo for long minutes, not seeming to realize that the real thing was standing not twenty feet from his downturned face. “Less than two hundred and fifty feet away!”

“Uh-huh,” I said, starting to grind my teeth.

For another half-hour I sat there with Eeyore, staring at the top of his bent head. “Let’s go get some dinner,” I finally suggested. Without complaint he agreed. We sucked down the rest of our drinks, collected our things, and were on the way to the front door when I realized that Eeyore had stopped in front of the bar.

“Hey,” he said. Then, louder, “HEY.”

There were two guys behind the bar that evening. One was the one from Grindr; the other was older and closer. They both stopped what they were doing to look at Eeyore.

“You ever been on a mountaintop?” Eeyore asked the younger bartender.

“What?” said the older one. “On a mountaintop?”

“I know what I’m asking!” said Eeyore. “You. You ever been on a mountaintop?”

“Hey,” I said, realizing he was a little more drunk than I realized. “Let’s go.”

“Why would I be on a mountaintop?” asked the older bartender, still not realizing he wasn’t the one being addressed. The younger bartender, in the meantime, seem to have finally realized what Eeyore was asking. He blinked and opened his mouth, then closed it again.

Eeyore caught the gesture. “Oh yeah,” he said, way too loudly and nastily. “He knows what I mean. You know exactly what I’m talking about, don’tcha, sweetheart? Standing there pretending like you don’t know—”

“We’re going,” I told him, grabbing him by the arm and pulling him out. Eeyore is a lot heavier than I, but I was a lot more sober, and had my balance. He tumbled out the door into the night. “What the fuck was that?” I wanted to know. He started to make excuses for his behavior, but I wasn’t having any of it. “That kid didn’t do anything to you,” I lectured. “There’s no need to be confrontational with him just because he’s on Grindr and you’re too afraid to go up and—“

“I can’t help it if I don’t know the etiquette of these situations!” he yelled at my back, then scurried to catch up with me.

“Just be nice,” I suggested. “Not weird.”

We went to dinner. Now, normally, when I go out with friends, I am the slow eater. Everyone else will have cleaned his plate and folded his napkin while I’m still rounding that final leg of my cheeseburger. By the time I’ve downed that last fry with small grunts of pleasure, they’re usually tapping their toes, avoiding my glance, and wondering when the entire ugly spectacle will finally come to an end. When I’m with Eeyore, however, he’s spending so much time staring at his phone and checking messages on Fuckr or Scrappr or whatever is the app du jour that I seem like a high-powered Hoover in comparison. I finished eating whatever the hell it was I’d ordered after twenty minutes; it took him a full hour and a half to consume a salad and a wedge of whole-grain bread.

But once he had some food in him he started to become the charming guy I’ve known he can be—at least when the waiter was around, anyway. The kid tending our table was a student who was outright adorable. Cute face, lithe little body, a smile that lit up our corner of the dank little restaurant. Whenever he was around, Eeyore would set down his phone, come to life, and elicit some new little bit of information about the boy. That’s how we discovered the kid was a senior in college who worked seven nights a week all summer to earn his tuition for the next year of school; he was majoring in business; he loved to surf and planned to move to San Diego with his girlfriend after he graduated. I started to relax, thinking that maybe my lecture about not being weird had sunk in a little.

The waiter enjoyed the interactions. It was a slow night, and he obviously enjoyed talking about himself. I’m sure he knew we were both gay, and even though he seemed pretty straight, he didn’t mind Eeyore’s none-too-subtle flirtation.

Then came the check. “Oh thank god,” Eeyore said, grabbing it. For a moment I thought the waiter had discounted our drinks or something. But no. “His full name’s on it. Gimme.” He pointed to the kid’s moniker under a generic computer-printed line about how happy he’d been to serve us. He grabbed his phone and started to tap at it.

I prised his fingers out of the folder and stuck my credit card in it. “What are you doing?” I asked.
“Investigating,” he said, stabbing furiously at the glass. “Look,” he said, showing me the waiter’s Facebook profile. There was a photo of him with a surfboard, shirtless and looking good. Then another of him with a smiling girl. “I hate her,” Eeyore growled, looking at the other photos.

“Come on,” I said, feeling the old dread settle over me once again. “You’re being creepy.”

The cute waiter boy came over to collect the bill. He wore a big smile on his face. “Hey guys, thanks for being at my. . . .”

The smile faded when Eeyore thrust his smartphone into the kid’s face. “Who’s the girl?” he wanted to know. “She looks like a skank.”

“How did you . . . oh . . . you saw my name on the check,” said the waiter, all color fading from his face. “Then you . . . looked me up online. . . .”

“Yeah, he’s a regular Hardy Boy,” I said, trying to lighten the moment with a joke. The waiter walked away expressionlessly to cash out the bill. When he was out of earshot, I stared at Eeyore. “Asshole,” I said to him.

“What?” he asked, still looking at the boy’s photos.

“You had a nice rapport going with that kid. Then you fucked it up. Why the hell?”

“I don’t know the etiquette of. . . .”

“That is bullshit,” I told him. “You are nearly sixty years old. You’ve had half a century to learn by now that if you want to stalk someone online, do it in private. You don’t do it, then share the results of your stalking with your victim. You don’t put them on the spot like that. You don’t—“

But I was too mad by that point to be coherent for much longer. I’d had enough for that night.
I keep thinking about my anger from that evening, in a week where I’ve had several kinds of rudeness thrown my way by other guys. Each time something new and creative and shitty has happened, I keep wanting to put my hands on my hips and ask, What in the world were you thinking? to the guys. But I’m sure that I’d just get the reply of, What?! I don’t know the etiquette here. . . .!

Which is bullshit. We’re all adults. By now we should know to play nicely with each other. We’re not theoretical constructs that exist only thirty-six hundred miles away. We’re not nerveless imaginary beings on the other side of a layer of glass. We’re all real people, and if we’re wielding our dicks at each other, we should be mature enough to treat each other with a little respect.

We all know the etiquette here. We just have to understand that it’s up to every single one of us to apply it.

Sink or Swim?

I’ve mentioned before I occasionally see a friend of mine I’ve known at this point for nearly a quarter-century. He’s a glum personality; I’m afraid that in a couple of past entries in which he made appearances, I assigned him the unfortunate soubriquet of “Eeyore.”

But it’s fitting. He’s a sweet guy. I genuinely believe he’d give to me the shirt off his back if I complained I was chilly. In all the time I’ve known him, though, he’s always been a bit of a downer. Not a whirlwind of drama, mind you. More like a powerful but silent magnetic force that can walk into a room full of the most upbeat and high-spirited folk around—a real Baz Luhrmann Great Gatsby of a party with hot jazz and hotcha flappers sipping bathtub gin and doing the hot new sensation called the Charleston—and without really meaning to, can suck up all the fun until there’s nothing left in the room but some limp crepe paper streamers and a sad, tattered print hanging on the wall of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” Within minutes he can have every single person in a five-room radius moping, contemplating the futility of his existence, and reaching for the extra Ambien.

Come to think, I’m pretty sure I saw that exact situation on an episode of Fringe.

I went out on the town with Eeyore and another friend of mine not so long ago. As a trio we bar-hopped our way across Manhattan, pretty basically. We had drinks at a few establishments along Christopher Street. We stopped off for happy-hour $3 Long Island iced teas and drag queen fun before dinner. (I drank bottles of water.) We decided to have dinner before heading off to the Eagle, which involved me, the sober one, guiding them up Seventh Avenue and restraining them at intersections by planting my hands on their chests, so my two extremely inebriated friends wouldn’t blunder out into oncoming traffic. For all of those three hours we were together before dinner, the entire time Eeyore kept talking about the guy he’d taken home the night before.

I hadn’t paid much mind to the story, because all the guys Eeyore takes home are strippers. Dancers, I mean. (When I fuck dancers, they’re ballet dancers or former contestants on So You Think You Can Dance. When Eeyore gets with a dancer, it’s a stripper.) You know those newly-engaged women who, when you’re trying to relate your father’s medical issues and your own recent work woes, lean forward and flash the rock on their fingers and manage to turn every conversation into OMG your diamond is so BIG! ? Well, it was like that with Eeyore and the stripp . . . er, dancer.

I was trying to recap the plot of Blue Jasmine for someone and it would trigger Eeyore into saying, “That reminds me of something my dancer said last night after I took him home. . . .” Or I’d ask Eeyore how was his vacation in Chicago, and he’d reply, “Oh, it was fine. I found out the dancer I took home last night was from Bushwick. That’s not very far. Do you think it’s too far?”

It wasn’t really until we were sitting down at dinner and Eeyore picked up the menu and said, “I think the dancer I took home last night would really like this place. They have hamburgers,” that I turned to him in surprise. Here I’d been kind of politely ignoring his dancer stories in the same way I might have overlooked a big old booger hanging from his nostril. I’d been thinking, Oh my god, how many times can he bring up the fact AGAIN that he had sex last night? And when a sex blogger who’s constantly parading his tricks in front of an international audience of thousands is getting annoyed with with someone exhibitionistically talking about fucking, you know it’s got to be excessive.

But over the hamburger menu I realized that for the first time in I didn’t know how long, Eeyore actually seemed kind of happy. I commented on it. “Well yeah,” he said. “Of course. I mean, I almost got laid for the first time last night in twenty years.”

And I shouted, “WHAT?!”

He repeated it for me. “I said, last night was the first time in twenty years that I was close to getting laid.”

“Twenty years,” I said.

He nodded.

“Two decades.”

He nodded again.

“Since 1993.”

By now he was looking at me like I was a blithering idiot. “Well, yeah.”

I stared at him for a moment and then, with outrage, demanded to know, “WHAT THE FUCK?!”

I have a tendency to think of myself as unfairly deprived if I have to go for five days without sex. Twenty years, to me, sounded like the stuff of science fiction. I’d known that Eeyore’s track record wasn’t stellar. All of his stories tend to end with the dancer (stripper) stealing his wallet, or leading him on, over the course of weeks or months, for lap dance money and then leaving him high and dry. Or else they involve the mercenary cleaning out his bank account and moving on to the next john.

But jeez. I assumed that from time to time in there, there’d been some actual nookie.

“There are just things in play that prevent me. . . .” he started to say.

I wanted to know what.

“My job. . . .”

“. . . . doesn’t involve a vow of celibacy and allows you plenty of hook-up time,” I countered.

“It’s a crazy city. . . .”

“. . . . where I manage to have sex several times a week.”

“I just wasn’t raised that way. My parents. . . .”

And here’s where I lost my patience.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve had people—friends, lovers, readers of my blog who’ll write in to me or engage me in social media—tell me that they want to experience sexual joy, but that they can’t because of outside factors. I’ve had men tell me that they want to let go and play with whom they choose, but they can’t do it because they were raised in a religious household. I’ve had dozens and dozens of guys tell me they want to play with men, but they can’t because they’re married. They’ll tell me they were raised in the South and their upbringing prevents them from seeking sex with men. Or any number of other factors—all external, all allegedly beyond their control.

When a guy tells me that he wants to be more sexually adventurous (or, you know, to have sex more than nearly once every twenty years), but then rattles off a number of outside forces preventing him from achieving his goal, I know it’s not any of those externals that truly restrain him. Religion can be overcome. There are pigs worldwide from every ethnicity, nationality, and regional background. Not every relationship comes with a lock and key. No, what I hear is a man telling me that his inaction is a result of a mysterious societal conspiracy. Other people, vague and undefined, are making his choices for him. What I hear is a man telling me that he’s too frightened to make his own choices.

Look. I grew up in a family with no less than four ordained and practicing ministers, all Southern Baptist. It doesn’t get much more religious than that. I’m married. I was raised in the very same South. I know I’m not everyone’s touchstone, but none of those things keeps me from being a total whore. I don't allow any of those factors to keep me from pursuing sexual adventure any more than they I would allow them to keep me from reading what I want, watching the television shows that interest me, or listening to that demon rock and roll. I don’t allow external, invisible forces, up to and including God himself, to dictate my day-to-day happiness.

If Eeyore had, in answer to my question of why he’d been celibate for two decades, replied, Well, I’ve decided that it’s important to me to wait for a special someone, I would’ve thought about it, probably privately decided that his response wouldn’t be mine, and then given him a pat on the back and some words of support. That would’ve been a choice he’d made, based on a philosophy he believed in. If a married reader tells me that he wishes he could fuck around, but that he’s made a choice to stay true to his marriage vows because it makes him a more honest and committed person—fuck yes, more power to him. I admire anyone who makes a choice and owns that choice and isn’t afraid to stick to it.

For me it all boils down to whether a person is an active protagonist in his own life, or whether he’s passive and adrift and allowing invisible forces to carry him downstream. An invisible god shouldn’t be making choices for you. Kowtowing to the a disapproving, inchoate society or the thought of frowning and unhappy parents (who, in Eeyore’s case, have both been deceased for years) means you’ve taken the passive route. Thinking about your choices, and making the ones that are right for you—even if you’ve been told that they’ll make Baby Jesus cry—make you a warrior in your own life.

It really doesn’t take a lot to move from passive floater to an active leader of your own life. Mindfulness helps. Reflection. Learning to recognize when you’re allowing fear and commonplace external forces to dictate your direction. I truly believe it’s important to take as much control of our own lives as possible, because every one of us one day will find ourselves facing external obstacles that will throw the triviality of everything else into sharp relief. I’m talking about illness, and accidents, and irreplaceable losses of love and family. It’s when those roll around—and they always do—that we realize that we had happiness within reach all the time.

Whether or not you grasp it, or at least chase it, is up to you.

All of us are living on borrowed time. Every single one of us. One day it all comes due. Trust me, I know from experience that it’s possible to drift for long periods of time on tides that seem beyond our control. But some day we wake up and realize that a year has passed—five years, twenty years—and we’ll never again have that time or the opportunities it presented. I know that I’d rather face that moment knowing I threw myself into those waters and relished the sport and challenge of them. I’d rather splash and make noise and make a goddamned mess than drift quietly and apologetically through life. I’d rather regret the choices I made for myself, crazy as they may be, while I can make them, rather than regret fearing everything, making no choices at all, and blaming it all on forces beyond my control.

Again: I know my choices are my own. I don't expect anyone to follow in my exact footsteps. I just want people—I want you—to be the person at the helm of your own life. I want you to conquer those fears holding you back, whatever they may be.

For Eeyore, breaking a twenty-year dry spell is a first step. Learning that it’s not too late to quench his thirst is up to him.

The Power of Ma Peen

Some sage advice from me to you guys: if one of your friends suggests a Christopher Street bar crawl, just say no.

Or at least have bladders that’re larger than ours. The plan was to start at Rock Bar, right at the Hudson, and work our way east one bar at a time, stopping in for a single drink in each. I agreed to the plan because it sounded, as Barney Stinson might say, legen—wait for it—dary. In my head I pictured myself with my four friends, stopping in pubs old and familiar and new and interesting alike, then leaning against the bar ledges and tossing back shots, all in the spirit of friendly camaraderie.

What actually happened was that we’d arrive in a bar with our legs crossed and expressions of pain on our faces, and then we’d all immediately run for the men’s rooms. After what would feel like hours of pissing like horses while making orgasmic sounds of relief, we’d stagger to the bar, take a couple of sips of something, and then repeat the process as we walked cross-legged with another gallon of liquid trying to slosh out of our urethras.

Middle age is a bitch, folks.

One of the friends I was with that night last week was an old buddy from Michigan whom I’ve known for almost a quarter of a century. He was young and handsome and a little bit arrogant when I first met him; over the years he’s grown jowly and morose. He moons over and falls desperately in love with twenty-year-old male Russian strippers who don’t see anything more of him than his wallet. When they’ve tickled him like a human ATM and extracted all his cash, he mopes and wonders why he’s so alone. Eeyore, I think of him.

By the time we staggered into Pieces near the end of our trip, Eeyore had been itchily consulting his phone every thirty seconds. After I came back from the restroom and waved away the cute bartender offering liquid refreshment—I’d had enough fluid to pee out a tank suitable for a Titanic set piece—I found him slump-shouldered and morose on one of the barstools. “Can we make one more stop. . . ?” he asked me.

“Well, sure,” I said, praying that wherever it was had a clean men’s room.

“. . . in Midtown?” he concluded.

It turned out that Eeyore had learned that one of his crushes was at a bar near Grand Central. His name was Ken, and he was a lawyer. We gathered that Eeyore’s plan was to show up, stare at Ken from afar, and feel sorry for himself for not being able to go home with the guy. It sounded like kind of a downer of a ending of a boozy kind of evening, but we agreed to it, steeled ourselves to holding our bladders for another twenty minutes, and went out to hail a cab.

We quickly saw, upon walking into the Midtown bar, that Ken was not exactly what we’d expected. Eeyore had described him as a ‘hot redhead with a killer body’, when in actuality he was a kind of skinny, skeevy-looking redhead with a pot belly who was drunk off his ass. He was also singing along, badly, with the piano player in the lounge. “Why’s he singing with an accent?” I asked.

“He’s from Alabama,” said Eeyore, staring at Ken over his drink. “Is that the accent you hear?”

“No. . . .” I said, trying to think of how to phrase it. “It sounds more like if a Muppet version of Bette Davis were auditioning for Wicked. While gargling with Listerine. That kind of accent.”

“Oh, stop,” Eeyore growled.

We met Ken immediately after he finished defying gravity, when he came over, spilled his drink on me, and then proceeded to shake all our hands and immediately mangle our names. “This is my boyfriend, James,” he said, putting his arm around a handsome Asian man who’d been lingering off to the side.

Well. All of us looked at James and Ken as they exchanged pecks on the lips, and then at each other. And then we looked at Eeyore, who looked like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon being slowly deflated. I swear, the man shrunk two inches in height right before my eyes. His lips had permanently wrapped around the straw in his vodka and soda. He stared at the floor.

“Aw, honey,” I said, as I rubbed his back, after Ken and James had retreated to the other side of the room, where they dabbed at each other like fledgling couples tend to do. “Are you all right?”

“No,” said Eeyore, sounding like he meant it. “He’s so beautiful.” He sighed, and stared at Ken while he sipped at his drink.

I looked at Ken with more sober eyes, and saw an overgroomed thirty-something stuffed into some Abercrombie & Fitch clothing too young for him, but I kept my mouth shut about it. “I know, sweetie. Do you want me to break them up?” Ken turned his eyes to me, and raised his eyebrows. “It wouldn’t take much.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“All I’ve got to do is give the boyfriend a little of this,” I said, grabbing the crotch of my jeans, and squeezing. I spread my knees out and thrust forward my groin. “And you know. Give him a little of this.” I narrowed my eyes in James’ direction—neither he nor Ken were looking our way at the time. I bit my lip, and curled it, and let loose with a few come-hither looks intended purely for comic purposes. Then I sneered in a cocky manner and pretended to spank an invisible bottom.

It didn’t cheer Eeyore up completely, but at least I got a small laugh out of him. That’s all I wanted. “Oh yeah,” I growled, toward James’ back. “The power of ma peen will take care of James for you,” I told Eeyore. “Twenty-five minutes, tops. Then Ken’s allllll yours.”

“Yeah,” snorted Eeyore, as I pulled up my feet onto the bench where we were sitting, and jacked my legs open to their widest. “That’ll work.”

“Don’t underestimate the power of ma peen,” I scowled at him.

A drag queen dressed in head-to-toe zebra print, as she passed by, reached out and touched me lightly on the wrist. “Very subtle!”, she assured me before moving on.

I looked at Eeyore. He looked at me. We both burst out into laughter, and I gave him a hug. I hadn’t fixed his sadness, but for the moment, I felt like I’d stopped the bleeding with a friendship Band-Aid.

Well. I was still having issues holding my water. I spent a few minutes in the restroom emptying my bladder (and making out a little bit with a boy who was enjoying his twenty-first birthday). When I returned, my buddy Eeyore was sitting slumped over on the bench, fascinatedly watching Ken and James across the room. The pair were faced off against each other like a couple of fighting cats—shoulders hunched, eyes wide, mouths twisted into snarls. All that was missing was the puffy fur and the exposed fangs. “What the hell happened?” I asked Eeyore.

“I don’t know!” he said. “One minute they were all over each other . . . it was disgusting . . . and then the next. . . .” He gestured at them.

The pair rose and stalked by our table, in the direction of the outer bar. Their hands were stuffed into their own pockets.

The drag queen passed by on her super-high stilettos, very carefully balancing a martini in her painted talons. “There will be drama to-noight!” she assured us.

For several minutes Eeyore and I sat at our table, watching the formerly-happy couple bicker in the other room. They faced each other at the bar, gesticulated wildly, and shook with anger. At one point, Ken got up, slammed down his drink so hard that it sent a spray over the bar, and stomped out. He returned a couple of minutes later, stomped past poor James, who looked as if he’d been socked in the stomach, and marched into the piano lounge where we were sitting.

“Well. Guess who just broke up with his boyfriend?” he asked Eeyore. Then, seeing James come after him, he sighed heavily, and escaped to the outdoor courtyard. James pursued him, obviously with a few more things to say.

“Holy fuck,” I said.

“Holy fuck,” Eeyore echoed. He seemed as stunned as I. Then he looked at his watch. “Twenty-five minutes. Almost exactly.”

“What?” I asked, not comprehending.

“The power of your peen.” He gestured down to my junk.

“Oh,” I said. Then it sunk in. “Oh! Crap!” I’d been joking, of course. I knew it. Eeyore had known it. But there we were, less than half an hour later, and the happy couple’s relationship was hanging in tatters. “Wow. The power of ma peen.” I looked down at my open legs, amazed.

Eeyore reached down, put his hands on my knees, and gently pulled together my thighs. “Be careful where you aim that thing, cowboy,” he said. “It’s done enough damage already.”