Come Down: II.8

Élouan Gage was born on the sixteenth of August, 1990, in Athol, Massachusetts, making them a Leo sun, Gemini moon, Leo rising, according to Dolly, who knew about such things. I had taken her to be too canny for astrology, and indeed whenever she spoke to me about it her voice held a dry layer of detachment, but she had far too much information about the movements of the heavens at her fingertips to be truly disinterested in horoscopes.

The plan for Élouan’s party took shape over the next month or so, during which time I did what I had been doing: making my courier laps, buying used clothing with the roll of cash in my underwear drawer, apologizing to Rachel and Zach for being unable to attend their weekend pub crawls and Angus for being unable to stay with him past dark (and never explaining the reasoning behind these inabilities, although I’m sure I could have -- but then whither the pleasure of leading a secret double life?), eating when I remembered to, sleeping when I hadn’t intended to, picking up gogo shifts whenever Jet offered them to me, eager for the purpose and the exertion and the sparkling quickness of the coke he was always kind enough to share, and dancing for free on the floor with the whole posse when I couldn’t get paid. Élouan attended perhaps half of the parties I did in this time and often begged off early, citing rehearsals, and the rest of us wished them well in chorus and went right on having a good time. I longed to be in their bed again, tied up, high, naked, sore, anything, but their newly demanding schedule offered me no casual way to say so, and when we saw each other it was nothing but swapping barbs or spit or both. I reached out here and there on Instagram to try to set something up -- even invited them over once, though I experienced full-body relief that nearly sagged me to the floor when they declined; the idea of Élouan in my apartment still produced a cognitive dissonance that bordered on the maddening -- but to no avail. I missed them with a feverish intensity that provoked new fantasies in me, visions of the two of us running into each other after some time apart, unable to keep our hands off of each other from the first moment of unexpected eye contact; the other denizens of their favorite clubs missed them too, and would often come up to the rest of us and inquire about their whereabouts, which would lead to longer conversations, drinks and joints exchanged, all of us bouncing in a circle like we were at our first middle-school dance whenever an ABBA song came on. Élouan was so much larger than life that even their ghost could improve a party, and in fact I often enjoyed myself more conventionally when they were absent, being able to use my energy on the people and the substances and the music rather than on the equally pleasurable but much more specific and internal act of figuring out who I should be to them in real time. ‘Guy having fun at a party’ was a role so easy to play that I did not, once my character was established, have to think about it once. It was, like smoking quietly with Dolly or lisping with Rachel’s coworkers, a little ill-fitting, not someone I could be all the time, but a relaxing change of pace even so, and a few drinks at a bar or a joint under the eaves of a club or a line of coke off a green room table reliably eased the transition into the role until the delineations between Marco and ‘guy having fun at a party’ were drawn in pencil, not pen, or even erased altogether. The others helped, too -- I never worked a gogo shift without at least two or three of them, often all of them, turning up to watch and cheer and stuff singles in my underwear that I promptly removed and used to buy them drinks (although not Dolly, who since our conversation at the restaurant was strict about never letting me buy her anything except with free drink tickets). Though it was likely a function of me turning up early to events, preferring as I did to err on the side of assuming that the T would develop some new way to delay me, nevertheless when Élouan wasn’t there the group seemed to coalesce with me at its center instead, an actor-jester around whom they could rally, to whom they could play audience. It was, of course, the perfect arrangement for me. The only sour note of these Élouan-less parties was that they could not see me at my best, shiny and entertaining, playing the role of Élouan with my own half-shy, dance-sweaty twist. Again I longed, as I had during Intimacy on the Elizabethan Stage, to be them and be with them, to possess them like a ghost, although they were already so self-possessed, the poltergeist of Élouan Gage inhabiting the body of Élouan Gage; but this time it was not a longing borne of envy but of pride. Look, I wanted to say to them, look how far I’ve come.

The plan for the birthday party ran as such: Alder, October, and Madonna shared two floors of a collapsing duplex in Chelsea with a rotating cast of other queers, many of whom hosted regular orgies in which the three of them rarely participated (Alder and October being improbably monogamous, Madonna being too busy), and thus had free rein to take over the house more or less whenever they wanted to as recompense for their unsown oats. They would do so on August sixteenth, being as it was, by divine providence, a Saturday that year. Élouan would finish up their third performance of Damn Yankees and be brought to the Chelsea house by Alder and October under the pretense of a pregame before going out to dance until they could stomach no more free birthday drinks. Meanwhile, the rest of us -- Madonna and Paris and Shea and Dolly and I, along with the other Chelsea housemates and some of Élouan’s castmates from previous shows and some of the other regulars from Backchannel and the Quartz Club -- would be getting into costume and into character.

The assumption on which the party was predicated, which Dolly assured me was solid, not that I needed the assurance, was that even after a back-to-back matinee and evening show as Lola, Élouan would not be sick of performing and in fact would be thrilled when the rest of us surprised them with a drunken group reading of Twelfth Night, starring (of course) Élouan as Viola, Dolly as Olivia, and myself as Orsino. As it happened, one of the club regulars was a costumer by trade and could get her hands on some pieces to supplement what she expected we could dig out of our wardrobes; several of Élouan’s former costars had Shakespearean training and counseled the novices on proper pronunciation and what all the dirty jokes meant; an orgy-organizing grad student who supplemented her meager stipend with part-time work at a copy shop printed scripts for all of us so we could look over our parts ahead of time; everyone committed to purchasing enough alcohol for a small army, sake and soju and ouzo and orange wine, anything but the drinks ordinarily provided at clubs. The month-long coordination of it all, Dolly at the helm and me as her nominal second-in-command, filled me with rib-clawing envy which was alleviated only by the notion that, come my birthday in November, this group of people might do the same or similar for me. It was, I knew, going to be amazing.

Dolly afforded me the title of first mate not because I was any help at all to the planning process but because only I was privy to her intended second phase of the evening. There was, according to Madonna, all but guaranteed to be an empty bedroom at the Chelsea house on the evening of Élouan’s birthday; they were between subletters and counting on an influx of half-broke college queers come September. This available bed and the gay-no-matter-how-you-look-at-it love triangle that defined Twelfth Night would combine to provide Élouan with what Dolly wouldn’t stop referring to as their real birthday gift: me, and her, at the same time, with them, for them, however they wanted. She had hardly touched me since we’d gotten lunch together, never kissed me again, but she spoke of this ‘real’ gift in such giddy terms, pulling me aside to ask how I thought we should coordinate our approach, that she reminded me of a schoolgirl with a crush.

“Have you two never had a threesome before?” I asked her after one of these ebullient discussions, conducted under our breaths though there was nobody else but the bouncer outside of Backchannel, the pair of us pressed against the wall in a fruitless effort to protect her cigarette and my joint from the thunderstorm blowing rain sideways under the eaves.

She shook her head, an irrepressible smile playing with the corners of her red lips. Her hair would need another buzz soon: the black peach fuzz had grown out into something approaching a pixie cut. “They have,” she said, “but I haven’t. Not with them. We only ever play separately.”

“But they’re open to it?”

“Of course. Lou’s open to everything.” She took a long drag, still smiling. “Besides, I hear you’re very good with your mouth. How could they refuse?”

“You hear?” I was blushing, I could feel it, and I quickly turned my face away from her, politely blowing my smoke in the other direction so I wouldn’t make eye contact and give in to the urge to curl up into a ball. I’m good with my mouth? What else have they told her?

She leaned toward me, voice dropping into an even more conspiratorial register. “We talk about everyone they see. Sometimes, when we’re in bed, they’ll drop a detail about someone else they’ve been with and I just --”

Dolly shivered all over, tilting her head back and exposing her throat in what I knew to be an orgasmic posture for her. My embarrassment solidified into arousal: I had, in some way, already been part of their relationship all along, Élouan, utterly shameless, whispering my name in Dolly’s ear -- telling her what? Precisely which aspects of my person, my performance, my anatomy, my desires, were noteworthy in Élouan’s eyes? -- perhaps even picturing me, if not in her place (what a disservice that would be to Dolly, even as I hoped it was true), then alongside her, just as we would be, a real gift indeed.

~

I spent the sunlight hours of Élouan’s birthday immersed in furious preparation. Because we would need time to ready the Chelsea house for the party, those of us who wished to see Damn Yankees had planned to attend the Saturday matinee, saying our brief hellos to Élouan after the show but pretending we were unaware of the significance of the date. Only Alder and October would attend the evening show, thereby serving as the pretext to lure Élouan out to the house in the first place. Thus, if I was to procure a ride to Chelsea, I would not have time to return to my apartment between looking (I hoped) effortlessly, nonchalantly attractive at the show and effortfully, tights-and-puffy-sleeves attractive at the party, so I gave over my morning entirely to ritual ablutions that reminded me, in a funhouse-mirror sort of way, of being a girl. Not the girl I had been, obviously -- I had made desultory attempts at learning to do my own makeup but had failed to ever get the hang of it, and I only shaved my legs when a role dictated that an audience would see them -- but the more nebulous, cultural girl, the Molly Ringwald girl, the Galinda girl, the girl who spent hours comparing outfits and curling her hair in preparation for the prom, for her big break, for a first date with a handsome stranger.

I filled the bathroom with steam, extending my shower well beyond the point of rudeness to my neighbors who might have also wished to use the hot water that day, as I scrubbed and exfoliated and double-conditioned and curl-creamed and lotioned until there was, as best I could tell, no square inch of my body that was not soft to the touch, moisturized, and appealingly scented. When I opened the bathroom door to let the mirror defog, all that steam whooshed and billowed out into my apartment, and though I was still naked and dripping fat blobs of water onto the tiles, I couldn’t resist the fog-machine drama (Hamlet Senior, the Weïrd Sisters) and stepped out into my kitchen, wisps of steam swirling around my ankles. I felt like a newborn rock star. But the air raised goosebumps on my arms and chest -- how warm was it outside? I had no idea, at once (as always) both grateful and annoyed to live in a basement -- and I quickly shut myself in the bathroom again to catch the last of the shower heat. I buffed the streaks off of the mirror with the side of my fist, located my shaving cream and razor, and squirted a tiny dollop of foam into my palm. I only needed enough to cover my chin and some of my neck, and that may still have been unnecessary; I was not yet at the point of growing a proper beard or even goatee and likely never would be, but the underside of my chin had sprouted a dozen or so hairs that were longer and thicker than the natural resident fuzz, and if I let them grow I thought they made me look unkempt, even dirty, and I was forever catching myself trying to pick them off, thinking they were stray eyelashes. Besides, I enjoyed the act of shaving my face, went about it with care, working slowly around the curves, never making strokes more than an inch at a time,  never so much as nicking myself, patting an even smaller squirt of aftershave into my skin like I had seen men do in midcentury period pieces, roleplaying masculinity yet emerging from the scene with a smooth, androgynous chin and neck, a twink’s chin and neck, a chin and neck that would offer no resistance, let alone scratches or a rash, to anyone who might want to kiss them. I fluffed my eyebrows and, after a moment’s consideration, traced my lash lines black with the stub of an old eyeliner pencil, giving myself the wide-eyed melancholic stare of a mall goth two decades out of date. I looked good. Given the chance I would, I thought, not to put too fine a point on it, have a threesome with me.

When I was finished in the bathroom, I opened the windows. The sun was high and brilliant and there was a dry breeze that put me in mind of tumbleweeds and saloon showdowns. It would have to be shorts, then -- I selected the denim cutoffs I’d made the first time I slept with Élouan and the t-shirt I’d sewed all the patches onto back in Vermont, rolling up the sleeves until it functioned as a tank top and securing them with what I hoped were unobtrusive safety pins. Into my messenger bag I stuffed an old pair of tights and the only waistcoat I owned (for my costume) as well as a ball of crinkled gogo tips (for purchasing alcohol) and the eyebrow gel (for touch-ups) and a travel-sized stick of deodorant (for obvious reasons). I gave myself a final once-over that turned into a twice- and then a thrice-over as I caught the streaks in my curls where dragging a hand truck across the sun-bleached university lawns had lightened my hair; the way my funky new cloud-shaped glasses magnified my eyes just barely so, with the eyeliner, they looked deep and dark yet still naïve; the things that passed, in my rolled-up sleeves, for visible biceps; the fact that I’d gotten a little skinnier since taking up all-night dancing as a hobby, or else my jaw had just started to define itself thanks to the magic of testosterone. The last of the envy that this marvelous party, this weeks-long plan, would not be for me drained away, replaced with an expansive, magnanimous gratitude. Élouan and their friends had made me more interesting, more worldly, hotter, why had nobody told me it was possible for me to look like this, to be this person?

I patted down my messenger bag to ensure its contents were safely in place and climbed the stairs out of my basement and into the arid and promising afternoon.

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