The Incident: Part 2

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Back in 1987 I remember being surprised to find out that there was an actual gay bar near the university campus. By the time I discovered it, I’d been living in the squalid little downtown neighborhood for weeks, and didn’t think there was anything in the block of gated buildings beyond a nail salon, a 24-hour braiding establishment, and a Popeye’s chicken.

But the bar was a narrow establishment wedged in between all those places, invisible to the naked eye and really only there if you knew where to look for it. I remember on my first venture inside I was convinced I was heading into some kind of crack house, only to be surprised that the place really wasn’t that bad at all. The drinks were cheap, and the hamburgers were good. So if I had a little extra cash and was sick of my one-bedroom apartment, I’d walk the half-mile to the bar, order a rum and coke, and nurse it while I soaked up the atmosphere.

I’d visited the bar all of about twice the night I saw Tom come in. My heart sank immediately. It was bad enough that sometimes it felt I couldn’t cruise the campus restrooms without him encroaching on what I thought of as my territory. Now here he was in the one bar I’d discovered, and approaching me. He stomped over with his old-man gait and sat in a bar stool beyond the one beside me.

Fuck, I thought to myself. He’s going to talk.

He did. “Slow night in the tearooms, huh?” he said after a couple of minutes. I was surprised that his voice sounded young—a light baritone that was at odds with his stern exterior. I smiled a little bit and nodded, hoping he’d take the hint and leave me alone.

But he didn’t.

At first the conversation he made was awkward. He introduced himself and told me his name. I learned that he’d attended school in Ann Arbor, though for some unspecified reason he’d never finished his degree; he talked about finishing it up at my university and asked advice about specific programs. He didn’t mention sex at all, for which I was grateful. He asked what I was studying, and if I lived on campus or in the surrounding neighborhood. I casually mentioned my apartment building, not giving out my apartment number or anything. Dozens of families lived in that building. Divulging my residence there didn’t seem like a bad thing to do.

And that was it. Not much of a conversation, to be sure, but it made me feel more at ease about him. When I saw him in the restrooms a few days later, I wasn’t as inclined to run away as before; I remember that the first time I encountered him again, we both shared the mouth of a black undergrad in the periodicals wing. Side by side we stood, dicks pointed in the same direction as that hungry mouth went back and forth between them. I remember that at one point Tom put his arm around my waist and held me there as we were being sucked. It didn’t feel bad at all.

On the evenings I’d go to the bar, he’d sometimes be there. I’d sit next to him and we’d compare our fucks for the week, or talk about the regulars in the tearooms we both knew. “You never get fucked?” he asked me, one time. “You look like you should be fucked.”

“Nah,” I lied. I did get fucked then. I hadn’t done it as much since I’d discovered the pleasures of raw topping, but it happened occasionally. Just not in the restrooms, and not around Tom. Though I tolerated him enough to share a mouth with him, I was still not attracted enough to him, or especially to his dick, to let him fuck me. “Just not my thing.”

“We should share a hole sometime, then,” he told me. I made a non-committal noise. I could probably do that, I reasoned.

Over the course of a couple of weeks I discovered a few facts about Tom. He’d never finished college because he’d been arrested twenty-five years before—and been in federal incarceration all that time. In fact, he’d only been released a few weeks prior to my first sighting of him. I asked him why he’d been in jail. “Oh.” He laughed. “Just because of a little bomb.”

Apparently during the late sixties and early nineteen-seventies, Tom had been part of a University of Michigan group of radical activists protesting the war; he’d been arrested after a bombing of government property and shut away for over two decades. The story was genuine. He showed me a few clippings he kept in his wallet of his arrest and trial. The hippie activist story made sense of his long hair and lack of dress sense, at least. Tom told me that he was fairly sure that the FBI had placed bugs all over his apartment, which struck me as romantic but unlikely. Plus, he taught me a lot of nifty facts about how to make homemade bombs. (None of which I ever put to a practical test, mind you.)

I still wasn’t attracted to Tom, but he was more interesting to me. I told him a little bit about my studies and my background, but I still wasn’t especially forthcoming with information. I didn’t think of him as a friend, certainly. But the point was, I didn’t think of him as an enemy, or an adversary, either. He was just a guy with whom I occasionally shot the shit in a crappy bar, and with whom I shared the mouths of undergrads when we happened to be cruising the same spots. That was it.

The night of the incident would have been in January of my first year in the city. I’d just returned from a week in Virginia visiting my folks, but school hadn’t started yet. Most of my graduate student apartment building was empty, populated by only a few families who’d stayed in town for the holiday. The campus was deserted, and the classroom buildings and library closed. After a week at home, I’d returned up north sex-starved and horny. So I hit the bar. I’d only picked up a couple of guys there during my visits, but I figured if I was going to get lucky, that was going to be the one place it’d happen.

The bar was pretty quiet as well. Only a couple of the regular patrons were there. Even the bartender seemed ready to close the place up, at eight in the evening. After a little bit, though, Tom walked in, his feet hitting the floor like a Clydesdale. I was bored and grateful enough to welcome any familiar face, so I didn’t object when he sat down next to me.

He asked about my holidays, and told me he’d spent his alone. “Not much in the way of fucking, either,” he said. “But I did meet this hot kid who wants two dicks.”

“Yeah?” I asked. At that moment, it sounded interesting.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “Lives in my building too. You ought to come by some night and tag him with me.” He took a drink from his glass, then looked sideways at me. “Want to?”

“Want to what?” I asked.

“Want to tag him? Tonight? He’ll do it All I’ve gotta do is ask and he’s there. I know he’s home. His light was on when I left.” I thought about it for a moment. I hadn’t had sex in a week. The campus wasn’t going to get back to normal for another couple of days. I had nothing better to do that night. Fucking some undergrad in his dirty apartment sounded pretty good to me. “You could come back to my place, relax while I get him, then we could fuck the shit out of him. He’s good stuff, trust me.”

I listened and thought for a moment. “All right,” I said. He started to gulp down his drink, so I finished mine and left it on the bar. “Let’s do it.”

When I think about that night these days, I want to think of it as one of those cheap-o horror movies in which the heroine, alone in her Cape Cod cottage by herself on a stormy night when the mental institution patient has escaped, decides to go investigate by herself after hearing strange noises emanating from the basement. Don’t do it, you stupid bitch! I want to yell out.

At this point, yelling at the screen does no good, though. I’d made my decision, and five minutes later was stumbling off into the night, hands deep in my pockets and scarf across my face, to ward off the cold and the dark.