Come Down: II.1

II: “THE GOD THOU SERV’ST IS THINE OWN APPETITE”

The place was nothing like Horsie’s. 

That is, to be clear, putting it as mildly as I can, understatement for dramatic effect. You might argue that both venues were loud, and in that sense they had something in common, but Horsie’s was loud in a wholesome way, squeals and shouts and drunken laughter over cheesy decade-old Hot 100 beats. When I walked into Backchannel, I was assailed by such a sheer wall of sound that my first thought was of those little orange foam rubber earplugs in plastic packets that are sometimes given away at community events, along with individually wrapped condoms and promotional bookmarks. I wished I had some. Earplugs, I mean, but also, upon second thought as I scanned the unbroken sea of mostly-naked bodies, some individually wrapped condoms.

The light came from everywhere and all of it was red. The strip lights running beneath the lips of all three of the bars: red. The swirling stage lights hanging from a black metal grid above the dance floor: red. The footlights on the steps that led up to a sort of mezzanine that wrapped behind the bars and overlooked the dance floor: red. The spotlight pointed at the dominatrix who had taken over one section of the mezzanine to demonstrate a variety of smooth leather paddles and floggers on a twisting line of eager queers: red. The lava lamps on each corner of the DJ’s table illuminating the snakes’ nest of cords that ran between his deck and a dozen torso-sized speakers: red, albeit with black blobs of wax (was it wax in lava lamps? I couldn’t remember, and as I stood like a frozen deer in the doorway, it seemed like knowledge I ought to have had). All that red swirled and strobed in time with the music, which, I must reiterate, was so loud and rapid and pulsing and electronic that it no longer registered to my ears as music but rather as something between hypnosis and torture, and the color and movement and everywhereness of the lights made it impossible to tell where one person ended and another began, let alone whether I recognized anyone (as if I would, as if Angus would have been in attendance). And the bodies writhed, and the ice in the drinks sparkled pink, and someone shouldered past me toward the stairs up to street level with a polite shouted apology as if I weren’t the one blocking their path, and I considered following them, but I didn’t. Because, despite the overwhelm, this was a situation whose story I could follow: the country mouse in the city for the first time. Baby’s first real club. And, being that this was the plot I was part of, I already knew my lines.

“What have I gotten myself into?” I muttered, not loudly enough for anyone besides myself and the fourth wall to hear me, skirting the edge of the crowd to the closest of the bars for a desperately needed drink.

What I discovered, in the frantic research I conducted as the train shrieked and ground along the track on my way home from my final day of Intimacy on the Elizabethan Stage, was that Backchannel was a fairly new club. It had opened briefly in the early aughts, closed during the recession, then reopened under new ownership in the wake of the pandemic. It was slick, modern, spacious, trying hard to seem nebulously European, and it catered to a very different clientele than Horsie’s: people across the queer spectrum, mostly under 40, each kinkier and prouder of it than the last. Backchannel was not technically a sex club, but you wouldn’t know it from the way people talked about it on Reddit, nor the photos the club itself posted on Instagram. Backwash was their main monthly event (although they also hosted the usual gamut of drag shows and leather nights and furry meetups), and its main selling point was its clothes check. Not coat, clothes. Pay two dollars, receive a garbage bag to which an attendant in assless chaps staples a numbered tag, submit to a different attendant (also in assless chaps) Sharpie-ing that same number onto your hand, pile your clothes into the garbage bag, and you’re free to join the iniquity.

I don’t mean to imply that the concept shocked me. Dressing rooms, cast parties, shared accommodations with people for whom modesty had the same quaint Puritan ring as temperance or chastity. I was about as used to it as I could have been. But the knowledge that, somewhere in Boston, on a Friday evening in mid-May, five hundred or so people would be stripping to their underwear in a shiny bloodlit basement to get drunk and wait in line for three strictly-timed minutes of corporal punishment apiece was one thing. The vision of it, all at once, when I myself was shivering under the air conditioning in what I had imagined to be a safe outfit for the occasion (black boxer briefs, black fishnets, and my black leather sneakers -- acceptable, but overdressed, considering that the number of jock straps and, therefore, bare asses visible to me from the bar was in the high double digits), was, to state the obvious, another thing altogether. Perhaps it would have been manageable, but as I sucked down my gin rickey as quickly as the skinny cocktail straw would allow, I scanned the crowd with what I imagined was an increasingly frantic wild-animal look, because I had no idea whether Élouan was there or not.

My great fear was that I had missed them. I had agonized over what time to arrive: too close to nine and I would have no sense of the thing’s scale and have to mill about awkwardly for God only knew how long; too close to two in the morning and I’d surely miss the best parts of the party and be left with the dregs. I’d showered, dressed, fluffed up my eyebrows with drugstore mascara, and sat on my couch waiting until my maps app informed me that, if I left now, I’d arrive precisely at ten p.m., and indeed I had first been assaulted by the experience of Backwash at 10:07, so three cheers for technology with a special fourth cheer for the MBTA running on time for once in its steel and aluminum life. But, staring at the double-digit asses, my vision already beginning to swim from the gin, I considered the notion that this, for Élouan, might have been a pregame, that they might already be across town at a smaller, more intimate, more interesting, better-in-every-way party to which I had not been invited. That they might be skipping Backwash altogether did not figure in my anxiety. They might be sick, they might have forgotten, they might be playing an elaborate prank on me and would be delighted to learn that I’d fallen for it, that someone like me had even set foot in a place like Backchannel; any of these options would at least give me the chance to contact them afterwards and ask why they hadn’t attended. But if they had come and gone and thought that I had stood them up or, worse, the worst possible, that I had been too cowardly to attend, there would not be another chance for me. I knew that like I knew my lines.

To distract myself, and to determine whether Élouan’s was one of the hundred-odd bodies I couldn’t begin to glimpse through the densely packed crowd, I slugged the rest of my drink, slid the glass back across the bar, and waded onto the dance floor.

It was slow going. There was, I realized, a concentric structure, with the outer ring comprising the partnerless (mostly gay men, it seemed) chatting each other up and attempting to penetrate further toward the center. Beyond them were the people dancing close in pairs and trios, hands on each other’s hips, grinding more or less in time with the noise blaring from the speakers. At the center, things felt suddenly less dense, with more space between couples and more breathing room at face level for reasons that took me a moment to understand and which I will freely admit did shock me a bit. At the center of the dance floor, instead of dancing, almost everyone was having sex. About (although not precisely) one in every two people was on their knees. I had a vague notion that what I was seeing was illegal, although I am now not entirely sure whether or not that’s true, nor do I know where darkened basement clubs fall on the scale of ‘adults behind closed doors’ to ‘public indecency.’ Regardless, I thought at the time that I was, for the first time in my life, bearing witness to an actual crime and that it was imperative that I be cool about it. I had no idea how to be cool about it. I stared unselfconsciously for a moment and very self-consciously for another few, not wanting to be a voyeur despite the fact that these people were engaging in public sex precisely because they wanted to be watched. I would have stopped staring sooner if I could have. But I had to check.

There was no commonality that I could discern across all of the people at the center of the dance floor. Many were young and many were white, but many were not. Many were beautiful and many were handsome, but many were not. A potbellied man in a wine-colored leather pup mask tilted his head back to allow an impossibly tiny sprite of a person with a fox-ear headband to kiss his neck while they shoved their hand down the front of his underwear. A woman who must have been at least a foot taller than me even without her platform heels combed Barbie-pink fingernails through the curly hair of the young man who was, at that moment, giving her a very enthusiastic blowjob. Two guys in black latex union suits rubbed against each other so close to me that, even over the music, I could hear the squeaking. I felt as if every possible fetish, every kink, every gender and sexuality, every type of human being in existence had elected one champion to represent them in the middle of Backchannel’s dance floor, that I had intruded on some kind of harebrained Bacchic world-peace scheme. People, people everywhere.

But no Élouan.

I retreated, face hot, limbs cold, stomach squirming with embarrassment -- for watching people fuck in public? for not having anyone to fuck me in public? for wearing too many clothes? for being there at all? -- and got myself another gin rickey, forgoing the straw in favor of swigging the whole thing down and crunching a couple of ice cubes for good measure. That counted as hydration. I couldn’t leave, not without either seeing Élouan or knowing for sure they weren’t coming. I couldn’t go back to the center of the dance floor. I couldn’t go up on the mezzanine, with the dominatrix and the people waiting in line for the dominatrix, although it occurred to me that waiting in line with them would at least give me something to do with myself, but then I’d have to attempt to communicate to a professional dominatrix that I would prefer she didn’t hit me with her many hitting implements, actually, and I was only here to meet my professor (my professor? Surely that couldn’t be right, but what else would I call Élouan?), so she could see to the next customer and I’d just hop right back in at the end of the line, thanks.

Any second I was going to melt or explode or both, and nobody would even notice, because they were preoccupied with their own bare skin and each other’s, and when I melted and/or exploded I would no longer have anything resembling skin, bare or otherwise. I drifted back to the edge of the dance floor with the hopefuls and the hangers-on and, having lost the plot, squeezed my eyes shut for a little relief from the pulsing red light and began to move in time with the relentless beat.

I have never been much of a dancer -- at least, not as much of a dancer as I was a singer before my voice began to break -- but I had been competent enough to keep up with the ensembles’ moves in college musicals. Between Guys and Dolls and Oklahoma! and the bootleg shadowcast of Rocky Horror that my housemates and I put on one spring by projecting the movie against the off-white vinyl siding and parading around the lawn in fishnets for a few dozen of our friends spread out on picnic blankets (Rachel and Zach had brought flowers, bless them), I had quite a bit of basic footwork at my disposal and a dormant-but-not-dead ability to perform sexiness, albeit a camp, scary-girl version of sexiness. (I had played Columbia in the shadowcast.) I shuffled my feet in something that I hoped was not recognizable as a foxtrot box and swiveled my hips and my shoulders in whatever directions felt like they would look the most natural and enticing in any given moment, trying to let the music pulverize me into its shape. And, to a certain extent, it worked. I got into it. With my eyes closed I existed in a dim, featureless, pinkish glow, and it felt good to move by choice, without dragging a stack of locking-lid bins along with me. The dancing warmed me until I no longer had goosebumps from the air conditioner, and I could feel the crowd thickening around me, the air beginning to smell more noticeably of other people’s sweat, my biceps and thighs occasionally brushing against other bodies. It was fine. It was good. I was dancing. This was, if you were willing to strip away the many accoutrements that made Backwash different from any party I had ever attended, more or less what one was supposed to do at a party.

I leaned back into someone and course-corrected, but the contact remained as I pulled away, the sensation resolving itself into a hand on my lower back. I opened my eyes and swiveled into the half-embrace of a man -- probably Angus’ age or a bit younger, well-kept grey goatee and a full head of thick, wavy grey hair, tan skin, fine cheekbones, thick black-rimmed glasses, bright pink-and-white trunks styled to look like a cartoon cake -- who held what was probably a Cosmopolitan in the hand that was not holding me.

He leaned down until his lips nearly brushed my ear and half-shouted over the music, “You’re a good dancer.”

“That so?” I yelled back.

He nodded, which I felt more than saw as his face was still pressed against the side of my head, and looped his free arm around my waist, pulling me in so my back was flush with his chest. He was hot and solid, and he moved against me in rhythm, so I moved too, about to close my eyes again when another guy came up -- my age, I thought, with black hair down to his shoulder blades and a face like it was carved out of stone, white jock strap and a white fanny pack slung across his chest like a purse. He inclined his chin towards me, raising his eyebrows, and I nodded, and I felt the guy behind me nod too, and I became the filling in a much taller sandwich, my head level with Cake Trunks’ neck and Long Hair’s collarbones, both of them pressed as tight against me as they could get. A few more people gathered around, drinks in hand, to watch the show, and both of my dance partners began to grow hard against me, and I twisted and swayed and writhed between them and felt the heat, felt the visceral, vicarious pleasure of the onlookers, and, to my mild surprise, to what would have been much greater surprise had I not been operating largely on gin and instinct, I loved it. I loved every iota of it.

Because, of course, I had an audience.

I rolled my neck, eyes sweeping across the men and up to the mezzanine, checking if anyone up there was watching, too, if they were getting a good show. My gaze stuttered on a purple-black plume of hair (of course, red light, how long had they been there, I wondered, had I been subconsciously awaiting a flash of green the whole time?) that projected up over the heads of most of the others on the mezzanine. Unlike the rest of the underwear- and leather-clad crowd, Élouan was draped in something sheer and diaphanous, a kind of dark cloud that wrapped their upper arms and fell barely past their hips, only just covering everything that had to be covered. Their tattoos extended further than I’d realized, spilling down their thighs and onto their chest, and from a distance in the strange light it was difficult to tell what was clothing and what was ink. They stood with both hands braced against the railing, leaning out over the bar below, looking like a bird of prey. We made eye contact.

They smiled.

My immediate instinct was to break away from my new friends and sprint up to the mezzanine lest Élouan vanish in a puff of smoke if I took my eyes off of them, but I restrained myself, waiting until the music transitioned from one pounding thrust to a slightly different one before gently extricating myself with a wiggle of my fingers, mouthing back soon with my whole face so they’d be able to understand. Unbothered, they both nodded and closed the Marco-sized gap I’d left between them, tongues already in each other’s mouths by the time I turned away.

Élouan hadn’t moved, still surveying the party from their perch even as the packed-tight bodies on the mezzanine jostled around them. They were waiting for me. I had taken my time, and they had waited.

How pliant, I thought, is this Mephistopheles.

“Hey!” I shouted.

They turned, an eyebrow already arched. “You’re fitting right in, aren’t you?”

There was something attached to the question, an undertone too quiet for me to parse out from the noise, but it set off the same alarm circuits in my brain as derision would have. I swallowed hard, shrugged.

“I seem to recall someone inviting me because they thought I’d enjoy it here.”

“I’m never wrong about people,” Élouan replied with an airy shrug.

“That so?” I was repeating myself. I’d said the same thing to Cake Trunks. Under Élouan’s bright, wide eyes I feared, suddenly, running out of script, not entertaining them, and losing them to the crowd. I wanted the ease we’d had onstage together, wanted it badly, but my head was swimming, and matters did not improve when a drop-dead gorgeous woman climbed the stairs to the mezzanine, a drink in each hand, and caught Élouan in a deep, hungry kiss before passing them one of the glasses.

“What good timing. Marco, meet my beloved, Dolly.”

She was almost as tall as Élouan, lithe and pale just like them, but with black eyes and delicate round features, her head shaved to the scalp, strong dark eyebrows offsetting her snub nose. She wore a negligee, sweet white lace and blue ribbons, that was a size too small for her -- she wasn’t quite spilling out of it, but it was close.

“Dolly like Dolly Parton,” she shouted, offering her soft hand for me to shake.

As I grasped it, Élouan said, “Doll, this is Marco Fitzpatrick.”

“Like Marco Polo,” I offered, unsure why I did it except to mimic her clarification.

Élouan smirked. “He’s one of my students.”

“Former student.” The words were already out of my mouth as I realized what I was saying.

Dolly smiled, holding my hand for an extra half a beat before letting it go. “Lou,” she said, “I saw Shea in line for the impact demo. I’m going to go say hi.” And she slipped back into the crowd.

Élouan lifted their glass to her as she went, then turned back to me. “Former student?” they asked, dripping with emphasis.

“Well, class is over.”

“So it is.”

“My tuition money’s been refunded. I passed. The semester’s ended. You’re not teaching at the university again in the fall, are you?”

“Not as far as I know.”

I lifted my palms toward them. “Ergo, I am not your student anymore.”

“You raise an excellent point.” They sipped their drink. Whatever was in it, it was dark. Something and Coke, maybe.

“I don’t like to raise any other kind of point.”

“So…” They shifted towards me, easing their weight forward.

“So?”

“Aren’t you going to ask me what that makes you now?”

“Am I?”

They set their glass down on the railing, slid their hand further along it towards where my elbow rested. We were barely not touching now, a thousand points of potential contact that prickled with pins and needles scattered across my skin. I was sweating. My glasses were sliding down my nose, but I didn’t push them up for fear that the gesture’s association with nerdiness would defuse any sexual appeal I had by then built up. I wasn’t wearing a shirt. I had been aware of that fact all night, but it arose anew in my brain like the answer bobbing out of a Magic 8 ball. I am not wearing a shirt.

“I think you should,” they said.

“Since I’m not your student anymore, what does that make me?”

“That,” Élouan said, lowering their voice so I had to strain to hear over the music, so quiet I would have no chance to hear it at all were they not standing so close to me, the fabric of their outfit -- tulle? -- just brushing my chest, making me itch, “makes you one of my friends.”

Absurdly -- we were so close together -- they offered me their right hand to shake. I attempted a cool half-smile, wondering if they could smell me. I was so sweaty. 

“Hm. Alright.” I took their hand, shook it, let it go. Their skin was cool in the overheated atmosphere. “Friends.”

Élouan stooped to kiss me.

Their hair was soft.

That was not the point, and I knew it very well in the moment, and I wish I could tell you that knowing it wasn’t the point had been enough for me to stop thinking about their hair and start making elegant metaphors about the things that kiss did to me, but unfortunately the hair was top of mind the entire time that our mouths were pressed against each other. My only explanation is that it was a sort of Lovecraftian thing, that when confronted with something too big and powerful to be explained, let alone understood, the mind picks something small to fixate on as a method of self-preservation. The overwhelm I had been battling all night crashed in on me when Élouan kissed me, and other than thrilled and victorious and too warm and very turned on I could not have told you exactly what I felt, only that it likely would have been faster to name the things I was not feeling. The long, bony fingers of Élouan’s right hand gripped my left bicep where my arm still leaned against the railing, and their left hand rested lightly on the small of my back. They kissed hard, not aggressive so much as matter-of-fact, like they couldn’t imagine a world where I would put up an ounce of resistance (which was fair; neither could I). I reached my free hand up to cup the back of their neck and ran my fingers through that brilliant mane of hair, and it was soft. Which, I thought, was impressive, since I had already spent time wondering how much bleach it must have taken to get the color as vibrant as it was -- an astronomical amount, I suspected. It made me happy that they were so attentive to their hair. It spoke, perhaps, to a type of vanity that I liked, that I wanted to cultivate in myself: the certainty that someone like me was going to have his hands in Élouan’s hair sooner or later, so they’d better take good care of it. I couldn’t stop combing my fingers through it, twisting strands around before letting them go.

I felt the pressure of their mouth on mine change, lessen ever so slightly, and I pulled back before they could, wanting to be the one to break the kiss first. I was lightheaded. I wondered, belatedly, how long it had been, and whether I’d remembered to breathe at any point.

“You’re awfully nice to your friends, aren’t you?” I asked.

Élouan grinned and reached for their drink. “I certainly am.”

They leaned toward me again, and I toward them, and -- perfectly on cue, I wondered whether she’d seen everything -- Dolly reappeared with a gaggle of people. They ran more towards the crowd at the center of the dance floor than at the edges, gender-presentation-wise: obviously queer, with bad-on-purpose haircuts and lots of piercings and outfits (if so little fabric could be called an outfit) that looked handmade.

Élouan pulled away from me with another grin as Dolly placed her hand on their arm. She had, I noticed, a joint tucked behind her ear that hadn’t been there before. “We’re going out for a smoke,” Élouan said. “Are you joining us?”

“Oh, I don’t smoke.” As soon as I said it I knew it was wrong; I should have followed them out and inhaled whatever secondhand drifted my way and damn the state of my lungs, but to take it back would not have repaired the situation, only embarrassed me further, so Élouan gave me a suit-yourself shrug and sailed away towards the exit, Dolly on their arm, a small army of queers at their heels.

To run after them would have looked desperate. The only right move, as far as I could tell, was to remain at the party until they came back inside so I could be seen conspicuously enjoying myself with another group of outgoing gay men in novelty underwear before making my excuses and leaving with enough of the night ahead of me that I could reasonably be thought to be attending a second party after Backwash (unless, of course, Élouan invited me to an actual second party, at which point I would leave with them in triumph). But I waited in the frustratingly long bathroom line (all of the stalls were occupied by couples seeking a modicum of privacy, and I grew increasingly jealous of the men who could use the urinals as the minutes ticked by) for what must have been half an hour, and when I emerged and made another couple of circuits of the club I couldn’t find Élouan or any of their entourage, and when the gin and the music transformed themselves into a splitting headache and my limbs began to feel heavy and I wanted nothing more than to be in my cozy underground lair, I cut my losses and retrieved my clothes from my garbage bag and climbed the stairs into the balmy night, thinking perhaps the weed had melted their time perception and they would all still be under the eaves outside the front door, talking and giggling, and I’d get to say a breezy goodnight, maybe kiss Élouan again and put a little bit of the energy of our Faustus scene into it, put on a proper show, let all their friends ask them who that was once I was out of earshot.

But when I got outside, I found that a light rain had started, spattering hissing drops on the litter-strewn but otherwise empty sidewalk. They were gone.

~

The metal grates were already pulled across the entrances to the Park Street station when I got there, so I called an Uber instead. In the backseat of Sanjay’s red Nissan Altima, perhaps emboldened by the cocktails and the leftover thrill of the kiss, or perhaps just too tired to think better of it, I searched for Élouan on Instagram, the same private account that I’d run across months earlier, and clicked Request To Follow.

Then I put my phone away and, apparently, dozed off, because Sanjay had to reach back and gently jostle my knee to wake me when he pulled up outside my studio.

Might Makes Write and all the writing shared herein are licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.