Saturday Night

The air is crisp tonight. Jacket weather has returned to the District, a starter pistol provoking goose bumped arms, realigned mindsets, and opening closets full of warm things that need to be aired out and made ready for wear. The gay boys, both merry and naughty in nature will no doubt dismiss the sparking gun tonight, and will insolently march from one bar to the next, shivering with arms tightly crossed over form fitted tees, vainly retentive of summer and his sexual appetite.

I go to a movie with a young friend. He seems different tonight, and I'm thrown by 3 days of facial growth and a sense of steadiness and calm self-assurance that I haven't seen before. I feed off of him and it helps me slow and clear my crowded mind. In the cab we talk about home. He spent a week in Arizona, and the experience brought him peace and perspective. We agree that DC feels like another world, and we try to figure out what it is about home that makes it so different from this place. The consensus answer is people, but we both agree that its also the air. I tell him that the air in Louisiana is a thick mixture of strong incense and muscle relaxers. What I don't tell him is that for the last week, when I close my eyes and think of home, I smell hot gumbo, as if a big bowl of it were right under my nose. I ask him to tell me about the air in Arizona, but he can't put it into words. I remind myself that one day I must go there and find out for myself.

The movie is a musical set to tunes by the Beatles, and it helps me to further wrap my arms around internal quiet, and inspires me to be a better person. I sing quietly to myself for the rest of the night. The movie lets out after midnight and I get a call to meet friends at Cobalt, but my friend's mind is still tethered to a place over a thousand miles away, and he knows as I do that joining me at that bar will rob him of something that he doesn't want to part with just yet. He will return to DC soon enough. I go home and put on better clothes, a cap and a sweet coat I bought at a thrift store in New Orleans that is missing two of its three buttons but looks sharp, and I'm out the door by 1, just as people on the street are coming home. As I walk out my front door I smell weed from the street and hear ecstatic moaning from the fat lesbians who live behind the paper thin walls of the apartment next to me.

Vomit patches on the ground, on the sidewalk, in bathrooms, on the cinnamon tiled floor of a metro station.You see more of it as summer lags. As I skip and side-step I look but don't linger over the selections, each splatter pattern tells me a story of a Virginia weekender spreading the boundaries of the party foul, a young intern's empirical study of her body's relationship with the depth and breadth of alcohol, a townie's overconfidence, or any number of people trying to keep up but getting lost along the way. Vomit will always be a sign of weakness and defeat, always repulsive, but fascinating.

The bartender gives me a free drink, which is nice because I'm not a regular anymore. I stand by the bar and think about how gays are unique in that we aren't born into a culture, we have to go and find it, usually in bars. That's why Cobalt is the best platform for sociological inquiry in the gay ghetto. I haven't been here in months but have frequented the place for years. This is optimal, as time and distance allows for the detachment necessary to observe and make sense of patterns. I feel like Margaret Mead in this place. A friend of mine was with Margaret Mead when she died, holding her hand as her disease ravaged body gave out. He told me that she was a hateful dyke right up until the very end. Sometimes I wonder if her bitterness was due to the indigenous cultures she so famously observed. Did she lose her objectivity the longer she invested herself in their world? I wonder if her research revealed essential elements of man and his nature that calcified her heart.

Twinkies rubbing their noses on the way to the restroom, conversations too loud for the room, the boys at cobalt stumble and stare, immersed in loud conversations remembered only in snapshot, recalled days or weeks later when passing by vaguely remembered faces with which something was once shared. The savannah isn't so much dangerous tonight as it is tired, the hunter energy ever present but not pitched, as the crowd lacks thickness. Predators are roaming all around me, hungry for something but not convincing me that it's sex. A cute young man passes by me several times with sharpened eyes and a lowered jaw, unsure if he wants to strike or defend himself. I've seen him in many men over the years, at this very bar. The promise of eternal spring moves through the heat of summer leaving many just like him, good intentioned and humid with lust, beaten and exhausted by it all come fall. I sit on a bench with a somber friend who considers his nascent romance and its potential for peril, and I watch all and consider the coming winter and what it holds for the boys who play the game like grasshoppers.

I put my iPod on and beat my feet. I pass the boys on the street and feel their glances, some furtive, some bold, all seeking. I smile at some, not deceiving but unsure of the line between friendly and flirting. I just want to be kind, but perhaps the time for it is not after 2am.

I pass couples on the street. I see and hear their politics. I study them in the moments I have in passing, knowing some won't survive to see the sun while others might get breakfast. I turn up the sound of the new Stooges album and give my best on the back of the wind.

I'm home and out of the cold in 20 minutes. I open the door to the bathroom and my boyfriend is naked, just out of the shower and drying his hair. I feel my body go warm with his smile, and I wrap him in my arms. This is my Saturday night.