Come Down: II.4

Over the following weeks, the narrative of my first night with Élouan took shape, becoming thrilling and windswept. Rachel and Zach received an abbreviated version of it, Angus no version at all (while we had never established any expectation of exclusivity I still would have felt strange telling him I’d had sex with someone else), but I polished it in my head until it bore the form in which I would have relayed to Rachel’s coworkers or, once upon a time, my theatre department friends.

Because the issue, it occurred to me that first night when I got home and showered and stared at my low ceiling still feeling sick, was almost entirely me. The bedroom had been disappointing; I was not so eager to overwrite my first magical impressions of Élouan as to deny that the bedroom had been disappointing. But really I was the problem. I had gotten in my own head, not been entertaining, failed at every turn to produce the kind of dialogue that I ordinarily shared with Élouan. The accidental-on-purpose seductive ingénue was a role that was much more difficult to play when the seduction was complete and the relationship had been consummated, and I had felt caught backstage, mid-costume-change, before establishing what my new role in their life would be, which had made me awkward and uninteresting, wooden as a scene partner. And yet! Élouan Gage -- my former professor, need I remind you, what scandal! -- had hardly been able to contain their desire for me, had made only the most perfunctory gestures at a social occasion before getting me in their bed and fucking me until we were both satisfied. I’d never been tied up before, never been high before, certainly never combined either of the previous sensations with sex before, but God it had felt good, why hadn’t anyone told me about this sooner, and on top of all that they had been vulnerable with me, told me about their father, their treasured car, their thoroughgoing rejection of shame. The wedding bells, or rather the low-commitment queer polyamorous equivalent of bells, were practically beginning their tinnitus already. With Dolly’s favor somehow already won and Élouan’s presumably mine to lose so long as I nailed down whoever it was they wanted me to be, soon I would be their shared favorite toy, their prized possession, an adorable, tan-striped peachick to complete the cock-and-hen set. Perhaps nestled under Élouan’s iridescent wing I would take up singing again, find the courage to go out for auditions, begin landing bigger and better roles in bigger and better productions, quit my courier job or at least scale down to part time and let them find some other sucker to handle the afternoons, and all would be glamor and spectacle and theatre. It was only a matter of time.

It was a good story. I enjoyed telling it. Although my Élouan fantasies did take on a rather different character from then on: rarely my apartment, never theirs. Instead things moved increasingly into the public sphere. They would push themself out from underneath their car, artfully grease-stained, hair mussed into a green tangle that they let me comb back into shape with my fingers, and, finding their own hands too dirtied for more delicate jobs, they would lift me onto the hood of the car and kneel before me for passers-by to gape at my ecstasy. Or, more often, they would kiss me at a party and simply keep going, heedless of the crowds; we would join the inner circle on the Backwash dance floor and in concert so dazzle that we became our own even-more-inner molten core of the whole night. Sometimes we were onstage when it happened, during closing night of our first production together, although I was rarely able to get off to those fantasies because I spent too much time considering which show we would be in and how we would be cast to share the maximum number of scenes without playing blood relations. Always, we had an audience. I suspected this exhibitionist bent to be their preference as well, and the idea that they might on any given night be a few miles away lost in the same reverie that I was reliably unraveled me.

But in every scenario, it was our first time together, the moment when the tension finally collapsed in on itself and we could no longer hold back, the amber-crystallized instant of my success in wooing them, never anything beyond. I struggled to conceptualize our future. In the meantime, I kept going to parties.

Élouan never again invited me ahead of time, but they didn’t have to -- the clubs they and Dolly and their friends frequented operated according to a soothing rhythm. First Fridays, third Thursdays, every other Saturday, Sunday night specials, goth night, trans night, leather night, disco night, free before 10 p.m., 15 bucks for cover, 20 under 21. On weekend mornings I rode triple-digit buses out as far from the city as they would take me and scoured the cheaper suburban thrift stores for garments that could be cut, torn, and Sharpied into thematically-appropriate going-out wear. To make space in my dresser, I brought along the last vestiges of my girl clothes for donation, leaving me with a wardrobe that was, by volume, almost half unwearable between sunrise and sunset. I paid ninety-nine cents for an app that promised to measure my pupillary distance and ordered new glasses online: rimless, delicate silver arms and nose bridge, lenses with scalloped edges like cartoon thought bubbles. Madonna’s Instagram filled in whatever gaps might have remained in my knowledge of the local nightlife; she, as a full-time drag entertainer, lived and died by her ability to promote the events at which she’d be stagehanding, emceeing, barbacking, running coat check, and performing. These nights, she was quick to remind Paris whenever he suggested that she have another drink, were networking for her, and indeed I discovered that our nonstop dancing had been a rare treat to herself when, at subsequent parties, I often noticed her slipping away to talk to one venue employee or another. But everyone else was there strictly on pleasure, not business, and I happily fell into twirling with Paris and laughing at Shea’s jokes (she was, as promised, a riot) and, most often, doing whatever it was that Élouan and Dolly were doing.

They were rarely together at parties, coming together and breaking apart with balletic regularity and complexity. Often Élouan would pull me aside after a few drinks and kiss me, long minutes of their hands dipping under my waistband to trace patterns on my tailbone, and when they broke away to return to the bar and to their crowd of admirers I’d notice Dolly watching from just far enough away to be unobtrusive without breaking her line of sight, and she’d give me a satisfied little smirk. Sometimes she and I would be chatting and her attention would drift, and I’d follow her eyes across the club to Élouan’s lips on someone else’s neck, and we’d watch until they were finished. These episodes aroused no particular jealousy in me -- the idea of containing Élouan’s puckish flirtations to one or even two recipients was absurd -- but Dolly seemed to get real enjoyment out of watching her partner feel up other people. I never saw the reverse happen, though. Dolly would flirt with me, would make paper-thin excuses to touch me, would buy me drinks, would encourage me to join the others on the dance floor and watch with a doting smile, would bring me outside with her and offer me a joint while she chain-smoked cigarettes and stand in companionable silence with her arm just touching mine as the two of us blew twin clouds into the night. I enjoyed those quiet smoke breaks most -- the bassline of the music still discernible at our backs and the distant wailing of ambulances ahead of us, but in our hazy little oasis there was no expectation of noise, of dialogue, of performance. Much as she genuinely seemed to like it when Élouan was intimate with other people, she genuinely seemed to like my company without any notion that I might entertain her; I didn’t understand either proclivity, but both came as great reliefs to me. But she never kissed me, never did anything that could not be called plausibly deniable, and I never tried anything myself. We did not have the theatrical rapport that Élouan and I had, but I was still more than capable of taking cues from Dolly.

It was, I believe, a few weeks after I first slept with Élouan -- it was well into June, at any rate -- when, at that month’s Backwash, I saw the cage dancers for the first time.

Having had weeks of practice, I was far better prepared than I had been in May. I was armed with earplugs, my new glasses, a small black shoulder bag that October had lent me for my phone and cash, my most interesting underwear (boxer briefs, green and yellow palm leaves), and nothing else. I arrived earlier than I’d expected -- the train, miraculously, had pulled in just as I swiped through the gates at Porter Square -- and the crowd was still thin enough that I could spot the absence of Élouan, et alia. At once the paralysis that had seized me at my first Backwash wound itself around my limbs once more -- what was I supposed to do while I waited? the dance floor? what if I missed everyone coming in? the bar? and appear incapable of entertaining myself? -- and, to stave it off, I got a drink and turned my attention to the mezzanine.

Where the dominatrix had set up shop the previous month, there were now, on either end of the middle leg of the mezzanine, a pair of large black metal cages on round platforms. As I watched, a pair of men slipped out from an unmarked door at the back of the club and, in rough unison, glancing back and forth at each other the whole time, opened the cages and stepped into them. At once a cheer went up from the crowd on the floor, which swiveled en masse to watch as the men in the cages grabbed hold of the bars and danced, swiveling their hips, kicking their legs high, turning around to shake their asses. The man on the right was tall and fat, wearing a neon pink mesh leotard and matching pink gogo boots. The man on the left was almost as tall, lean but visibly muscular in the way that is usually reserved for film actors, with a crisscrossing black leather harness that seemed to cut him into geometric pieces. Neither of them, to my eye, was particularly attractive -- both had unremarkable faces, and the man in the harness was balding, a fate I was endlessly thankful to have avoided until that point despite the testosterone -- but they overflowed with charisma. Their stage presence leaked between the bars of their cages and washed the whole room clean of other concerns, and though those of us on the floor soon enough turned back to our drinks and our conversations and our dance partners, a taut thread of attention remained between the cage dancers and their audience. A steady stream of admirers climbed the steps to the mezzanine to poke dollar bills into the cages, which the men accepted graciously, putting a special flair on each transaction -- grabbing the cash with their teeth or inviting the onlookers to tuck it into their boots. The man in the mesh leaned over for a trio of women with fistfuls of ones and fives and let them shove it all down the front of his leotard like they were stuffing a stripper’s bra, and the three of them shrieked with joy. I wouldn’t have, couldn’t have stopped watching the dancers for the world -- they reminded me, in their way, of seeing Élouan up close for the first time, fascinating in motion, not beautiful but nevertheless more worth looking at than anything else in the room.

It startled me so badly when Paris came up behind me and grabbed me around the waist in a hug that I sloshed the remains of my drink all over myself and stood dripping and cold until he enlisted Shea and Alder in retrieving handfuls of black cocktail napkins (plus another drink for me) and wiping me down.

“Do you know either of those guys?” I asked the cleanup crew as they helped me dab at my torso and underwear with the napkins.

Shea glanced over at the dancers. “No, but the guy in the pink is hot. Why, you interested?”

“I find them interesting, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“I bet Donna knows them,” Alder offered.

“Is she coming tonight, though?” Shea asked.

“No, she can’t make it, remember? She’s doing that Juneteenth cabaret thing up in Salem,” Paris said.

“Damn.” Shea turned back to me. “Guess you’re SOL. Unless you want me to wingwoman you. Do you want me to wingwoman you? Because I have not gotten to wingwoman anybody in so long and I’m so good at it.”

Élouan, who had been watching the others dry me off with arch amusement -- Dolly had already blurred into the crowd -- stepped forward and laced their fingers into my hair, something between touseling it and grabbing a handful. “Marco,” they declared, “does not need wings, woman or otherwise.”

“Cuz he’s so cute all on his own?” Paris asked.

I snorted. “Lest I fly too close to the sun, more likely.”

“My point exactly,” Élouan said. “The heavens are overrated.”

The front pocket of their skintight pants (shiny, black, concealing absolutely nothing) displayed the outline of a joint, and I patted their thigh. “Surely I could afford to get a little higher.”

“This from the boy who doesn’t smoke.”

“Oh, my God, that was one time.”

“Just don’t blame me when you crash into the sea afterwards.”

“First you don’t want me to get high, and now you don’t want me to get wet? Cruel.”

Élouan smirked and grabbed my hair a little tighter, rocking my head back and forth -- it was a bizarre gesture but one that seemed, to the extent that I could interpret it at all, affectionate. “That was juvenile,” they said.

“And if you have a problem with juvenility, you had better bribe me to stop making jokes,” I said, “or, failing that, find some other way to shut me up.”

“Peace,” they said, rolling their eyes, “I will stop your mouth.”

It was a line from Much Ado About Nothing -- I remembered it as they kissed me -- and I smiled into the kiss, pressed myself against them, trying to thank them without thanking them for their insightful casting note. It was a perfectly legible dynamic, the bickering lovers, the long-suffering wit and the annoying joker, even shading into the wry disciplinarian and the cheeky brat. It made use of the existing difference in age and the teacher-student dynamic between us while setting us on more even footing, preserved the tension while elevating my status in their life to a choice they were making rather than an accident of circumstance and lust. I would reflect their mischief and their teasing back at them, louder and brasher, and they would love me for it, and in turn they would cut me down to size, but I would be irrepressible and we would both know it, and so the barbs would continue to be traded until there was nothing left to do but fuck the agitation away and start all over again. It was, frankly, a bit of a dream role.

I had a good night -- between the weed and the drinks I shot my own proprioception until I could do nothing but hang on one arm or another, usually Élouan’s, sometimes Paris’, occasionally that of a random man who tried to strike up a dance with me, so I bounced from one companion to the next like a pinball, enjoying the flash and the movement and the speed at which the wide world revolved around my small, unsteady body. But when things were winding down and Élouan’s posse thinned and Élouan themself kissed me goodbye without an invitation to accompany them home but with an invitation to accompany them on the last train back across the river, at least, I shook my head and waved them away and ascended the mezzanine to linger by the cages.

The men had been cycling in and out all night, and by then some of their star power had been depleted; their movements slowed and their limbs shone with sweat. Even so, latecomers to the party greeted them with just as much enthusiasm and just as many bills as the early crowd had, and when the man in the harness went in for a big finish -- faux grinding against one of the bars before folding one leg under himself and dropping to the ground -- a cheer went up among those nearest to his cage. Glancing back and forth between each other once more, the men opened their cages and emerged. I aimed for the man in the harness, but he was already disappearing behind that same unmarked door before I even made it halfway to him. Thankfully, the man in the leotard remained, chatting with a few members of his adoring public, throwing his head back and laughing at some joke one of them made.

I waited until he, too, made a move for the door and tapped him on the elbow.

He spun to face me, and before he could get his mouth far enough open to say anything, I -- still a little drunk, still a little high, a little shy on mental faculties but more than making up for it with my grand plan -- said, gesturing vaguely at the cages, “How do I do that?”

He stared blankly down at me for half a second before breaking out into a smile and eyeing me, theatrically, up and down. “That depends,” he said. “Let’s see some moves.”

“I’m a little crossed,” I warned him, and he laughed.

“Don’t tell Jet, he’ll kill me, but so am I. C’mon, show me what you’ve got.”

I took a deep breath, waited for the song on its way out to be fully replaced by the song on its way in, and did my best: fifteen or so seconds of whatever felt like it looked attractive and competent and sensual, forcing myself to keep my gaze on the man in the leotard and judge his reactions even though the intensity of his scrutiny was making my face hot and the eye contact, by the end of it, produced a nearly physical pain in me. But at last he held up a hand and smiled.

“Are you, like, classically trained?” he asked.

“Not really? I did musical theatre.”

“Anything that’s not a pole class counts as classical training here. You’ve got rhythm. And you’re cute.” He glanced over his shoulder at the unmarked door. “Here, come back with me. We’ll talk to Jet, see if he’s got any openings.”

“It’s that easy?”

The man chuckled. “That’s how I got the gig.”

Jet, as I probably could have guessed had I been of sound mind and body, was the man in the leather harness, and when he and Nicky (the man in the leotard) and I spoke in the dim industrial hallway behind the black door he said he would have to check with Backchannel’s regular DJs but that they probably had some gogo openings later that month, and if nothing else he could fit me in for a shift at the Quartz Club since he had inherited the position of performer coordinator there when the previous coordinator moved to Philadelphia, but anyway, he figured he could get me in soon, probably late June or early July, and he’d reach out tomorrow with more information, and he followed me on Instagram and I followed him back, and then I was back in the club and then I was back up the stairs and eventually I was back in my apartment, and it was, to my great surprise, that easy.

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