Boys Keep Swinging by Jake Shears

Author:Jake Shears [Shears, Jake]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

I had moved out of the Cake Factory in the fall. One night I was boiling water to make a pot of pasta, stepped out to pick up some laundry, and realized I had locked myself out. I didn’t want to call the fire department. I thought they could break in our door and get us all busted for living in the space. So I decided to sprint as fast as I could to the L train, rode into the East Village, and ran all the way to Bowery Bar, where Anne Marie was bartending, me panicking that the loft was going up in flames. I arrived coughing and sweating. She gave me a set of keys and ten bucks for a cab ride back. By the time I made it back into the Cake Factory, the saucepan was burning and smoking the whole place up. I had been so close to setting the place on fire. I took it as a sign it was time to leave.

I moved into a spot on Bleecker Street, a block away from CBGB. It was a basement that used to be an old black-box theater. There were still pulleys and contraptions screwed into the wall where curtains had once been. I found the room from borrowing printouts that a friend had received from Rainbow Roommates, a service that helped queer people find fellow queer people to live with.

The apartment was basically one big room, with three makeshift “bedrooms” built inside. But the walls were only partitions, rising to about two feet beneath the ceiling. The entire place had no windows except for a tiny one in the kitchen. My roommates were two gay guys in their thirties named Matt and Tim. Matt had an office job and was obsessed with Broadway musicals. Tim was a DJ I had met one night at IC Guys; he had hired me to dance at SqueezeBox, where he sometimes controlled the lights. They were both odd and melancholy. I was their wild child, and the relationship was familial and caring, even though I interrupted their peace with my cacophonous comings and goings. Still, I think they liked having my energy around.

That night, Tim and Matt were perched in their usual spot on the couches watching SpongeBob SquarePants. “Hey, guys,” I said as I rushed past them.

“Jason, that guy Steve stopped by to see if you were around,” Tim called over my wall. “I told him you’d be back, but he just said to leave a message on his pager.” Steve Kramer still refused to buy a cell phone. He was the guy I had met in Matthew Delgado’s hot tub six months ago, when he’d been there with his boyfriend.

I had thought about him constantly since we’d met. So, one early evening on a whim, I had grabbed my copy of A Home at the End of the World by Michael Cunningham (whom I’d been stalking and begging for an interview) and taken it to the Hangar on Christopher Street, where Steve bartended.

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