“Now this. This is educational,” Deena said, apparently not having gotten the message that it’s rude to stare at gay porn in front of your best friend.

  “Ick,” I said, lying.

  “Such a prude.”

  All the while, my heart pulsed, wondering if CJ was here, pondering what it would mean for our friendship if suddenly he got up on that stage and our eyes met. Would he be ashamed? Angry? Oh yeah, and what about me? Would this be just another of those things that my friend who “never lies to people like us” was withholding from me? And would this one be the dealbreaker?

  Yeah. Probably. I hoped to God it wasn’t him.

  After an interminable amount of time sitting through porn with Deena, the movie screen ascended and we were left with the silver tassels and a bare stage again. A song started playing, and finally, a dancer appeared.

  Tall and thin, self-assured, dressed like a sailor.

  Yes. That would be my CJ.

  I could feel Deena trying to catch my reaction, but my eyes were plenty busy trying to take this new reality in. This was my new best buddy, who had told me he had a sort of a waiter job. I wasn’t sure exactly what he was serving, but. Actually, I very much was.

  He danced to “Centipede” by Rebbie Jackson, which I surmised was probably not his choice, since it didn’t make much sense with the sailor costume. His lithe fame moved fluidly, with grace, and he seemed totally at home with his body, which was not at all what I had felt back in the park that night, when it seemed like he didn’t want me to see it. That thought made my stomach turn, because clearly I made his body uncomfortable. His beautiful, flawless body, which I could not stop looking at. I shrank back into my disgusting, creaky seat, hoping he didn’t see me, lest he freeze up again.

  His set lasted four songs, during which assorted older men came and stuffed green bills into his purple G-string. The third song was definitely Dale Bozzio and Missing Persons. It was kind of disco-y, with lyrics about not thinking about dancing. During his finale, to Prince’s “Kiss,” he climbed down from the stage and gyrated atop a balding man’s lap.

  Deena gasped. “Wow.”

  I was simultaneously peeved and thankful for Deena taking me here, but mostly I wanted her gone, because I was being pulled as if by a magnetic force up to the stage. Part of it was needing answers. Another part was CJ in a jockstrap. I knew I needed to go up to him, and I didn’t want to do that with Deena present. I also knew the likelihood of her giving me space to do that was nil.

  After his set, we approached him near the front of the stage. Deena’s existence—or maybe both of us, who knows?—seemed to make many of the men uncomfortable, based on the dirty looks thrown our way.

  CJ had sat down in one of the seats, next to the balding man, who, from the side, appeared to be maybe forty, possibly older. We stood at the side of the row, Deena behind me, my heart racing. CJ was using his charm, the full smile, the self-assuredness, and it occurred to me that what was happening was a transaction, and that wasn’t something I was sure I could take. The lies, the dancing, the creepy place? Those were all things I could imagine him explaining in a way that I would be able to accept. But offering this man whatever he was offering him, for money? That was something else entirely.

  And then CJ turned his head and saw me—and he didn’t even bat an eye.

  “Micah! Oh my God! You came!”

  He put up a finger to the man and excused himself, and he pranced over in his jock strap and gave me a full-body hug, which was a lot of things.

  His sweaty, bare chest against my jacket. His face, his ear, pushed up against mine. I wanted to freeze time. It was the most contact I’d ever had with CJ, and even with everything I now knew, it was among my top five moments ever.

  Ever.

  “So this is the famous Deena, I assume?” CJ said, looking behind me and sizing her up.

  Deena sized him up right back, gaining the upper hand because she had much more clothing on. “And clearly this is the infamous CJ.”

  They stared at each other until CJ broke into his toothy grin.

  “How come I feel like we’re about to have a duel?”

  I laughed; Deena did not.

  “Come on,” Deena said. “Let’s go. We’ve obviously seen enough.”

  “Stay,” CJ said. “Let me show you the dressing room and the back area. Oh … the back area!”

  I looked from my best friend to my new friend. I went back and forth a few times. I felt the room closing in on me. I began to realize that this was exactly my problem. Other people could do things, could tell me what to do, and I just went along with it. And finally, this was my chance to get a life, make a choice.

  “Yeah, I think I’ll stay,” I said.

  Deena’s eyes widened and her nostrils flared. I went to her and pulled her aside.

  “First of all, thank you. I needed to know this. And I know it now, okay? My eyes are open. And this place is hideous. But this is my friend, and I’m not just dropping him because he’s a—whatever. I want this. I want this friendship. Okay?”

  She looked down, her feelings clearly hurt.

  “I love you, Deena Robin,” I said, and then I lowered my voice. “And I’m gonna need you in about an hour, when I get home and my head explodes and I need to unpack all of this.”

  Her head stayed down but she gave a half smile. “My boy is growing up,” she said. “I despise it.”

  “Love you, too,” I said, and I went to hug her. She jumped back. I laughed, realizing this was about her not wanting whatever had been on CJ’s body on her own.

  “Fair enough,” I said.

  CJ made apologies to his new older friend, or maybe he just said wait a minute—I couldn’t tell. He took my hand and led me back to the dressing room, which was less nice than the dressing room in any movie about a strip club I had ever seen. The gray concrete floors were sticky with who knows what and dotted with spat-out chewing gum. The mirrors were dusty and the chairs in front of them would have been at home on the set of Sanford and Son, a TV show about a junkyard. He dressed while he yammered away about the guy before him snorting coke in the dressing room and the balding guy he had been chatting with, and how Deena was pretty.

  “She dresses like she watches a lot of Designing Women. Like she’s not Delta Burke but the other brunette. You know, tall, with shoulder pads. She—”

  “CJ,” I said, hoping to interrupt. It was my first word in the maybe five minutes we’d been in the dressing room.

  He blinked a couple of times. “Yes,” he said, going from low to high, singsong style.

  “You’re a dancer at the Gaiety, CJ.”

  “Yes.” This time, high to low.

  “This was information I didn’t know. It makes me think you don’t care about me.”

  “Do you really think that?”

  I shrugged.

  “I spend my nights off talking to you on the phone, despite the increasing threats of Jack the Bully,” he said.

  “Okay, but … this is a big one, CJ. You didn’t tell me a really big thing.”

  He nodded a few times, like this was something he hadn’t considered. “Okay, true. But. I have a good excuse.”

  “Okay.” This time I went low to high. It sounded artificial to me and I regretted it right away, because it didn’t match my growing frustration.

  “So, um. I’m shy. And a very private person.”

  I scrunched up my face, like, Nice try.

  “I like to be a man of mystery?”

  “What does that even mean? CJ. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  He raised his voice in a way I’d never heard before.

  “Because I figured you’d leave, okay? Like everyone else, ever.”

  We stood for a while. I leaned against the makeup table and then immediately straightened up, aware that I really did not want to touch that many surfaces in this place. What he’d said had been real.

  “Okay,” I said. “I get that. Do I look like I’m leaving?”

  His lips went flat. “I’ll call you.”

  “What?” My pulse quickened.

  “ ‘I’ll call you.’ That’s what you said the first time we met. Did you call? No. I like you, Micah. But do you think for a moment I believe that this is a forever friendship? No. Because that’s not a thing. Not in my life, okay?”

  “But it is a thing in my life,” I said.

  He studied my face. I couldn’t really tell what he was thinking.

  “You are so fucking lucky,” he said. “You have no idea.”

  This time I sat back on the ledge, germs be damned. “That’s true. I don’t know what you’ve been through, but I kind of wish you’d just tell me. Instead, you make shit up, you refuse to tell me the truth, you—I don’t know, CJ. I don’t know how to get you to open up.”

  He turned his body and put on his coat. He paused, facing the other way. When he turned around, his eyes were slightly red.

  “Could you teach me how?”

  October 1987

  I called home from the pay phone and told my mother it was an emergency, and I’d be home late. She didn’t sound thrilled, even though I lied and said I was still with Deena. I could tell I was kind of right at the edge of what she was willing to take, that this new part of me scared her and she didn’t know how to deal with it. Then I took CJ to HoJo’s, where we ate fried clam strips and drank Cokes.

  “So … real, huh.”

  “Yup,” I said, soaking a soppy French fry in ketchup.

  “And how, pray tell, does one do that?”

  “You just do it. Talk.”

  He snorted. “Oy. Okay. So, just talk, right?”

  CJ’s jaw was tight, and I realized in the time I’d known him, I’d seen him not smiling almost never. I just wanted to reach over and tell him to relax, but then I understood: He was, actually, telling me something real. He was telling me, in his own CJ-ish way, that people had hurt him before. Suddenly I felt unworthy, like my shoulders fell and I thought, Who am I to tell this person, who has experienced so much, that everything is safe?

  “So when I was eight, my mom left my dad.”

  “Wait, I thought—”

  He put his hand up, and I let him finish.

  “My mom left my dad, and he had a good job, but because he had to take care of me, he lost it. We started to get closer, though—that was one good thing. He met this other single parent, and she kind of helped him with me. One time, I ran into her in the bathroom and she was topless and it was awkward.”

  I laughed, and he gave me an impish, rueful grin.

  “Anyway, then my mom came back, and she wanted custody of me, and my dad was like, ‘No, you can’t do this,’ and she was like, ‘He’s my child. And I love him. I know I left my son, and that’s a terrible thing to do. I have to live with that every day of my life.’ And everyone started crying, because they realized she was human and not a monster, and—”

  “Wait,” I said. “Isn’t that the plot of Kramer vs. Kramer?”

  He grabbed a couple of fried clams and threw them into his mouth. He shrugged.

  “It might be.”

  “CJ!”

  He threw his hands up. “I don’t know what to tell you, Micah. This is me. This is who I am. I’m not sad. I’m not a dancer at the Gaiety because my daddy doesn’t love me and therefore I need a new one. I could give two fucks what my dad thinks of me, and my mom isn’t here anymore, and Jack is barely a parent. It’s all fine, okay?”

  I shook my head. “You’re unbelievable.”

  He curtsied in his chair, and I stood up.

  “What?” he asked, suddenly all innocent.

  “This is me leaving you at a Howard Johnson’s.”

  “Micah. C’mon. Sit.” I didn’t. “Sit, boy. Sit.”

  I started to walk out.

  He raised his voice. “I didn’t tell you because I thought you’d judge me.”

  I stopped.

  “What do you think happens when I tell people I dance at the Gaiety? You think people find that impressive? They pity me. They look at me like I’m a speck of dirt. I didn’t—I don’t want you to look at me that way, okay?”

  I sat back down. “Okay,” I said.

  “So … do you?”

  “Do I what?” I asked, but I knew what he wanted me to answer. I was just stalling, because I didn’t know how.

  “Judge me?”

  I took a deep breath. “I judge you for lying, CJ. You lie so much. I’ve never met anyone who lies as much as you.”

  “Fine, but. For the dancing thing? Am I … less, in your eyes?”

  I had the urge to make a joke, but he was looking down at his plate in this really vulnerable way.

  “I don’t know. Not really. I mean, it’s a job.”

  “Are we, like, still friends?”

  “Yes. But you have to stop lying to me.”

  He nodded. “Okay. I promise. By the way, what did you think?” He averted his eyes and grabbed for his soda.

  I truly didn’t know what to say. For one thing, CJ had been great dancing. Not that I had anything really to compare it to, except the skeezy guy who danced before him, but he’d owned that stage, he’d radiated charm and charisma and mystery, and the truth was I was two different people about it: the one who was sitting here, still weirded out that my friend danced in front of strangers for a living, and the one who wanted a ticket for his next show.

  “It was … good.”

  “Ouch.” He winced. “That’s what you say to your kid when he’s played Tree Number Two in the grade school play.”

  “You were better than a tree.”

  He snorted. “Oh good. ‘Come see CJ Gorman dance at the Gaiety. He’s better than a tree.’ ”

  “You’re beautiful, okay?” I said this way too loudly, and then I ducked my head as if I could make people not see me.

  “Oh!” CJ said. “Okay, I. Okay.” I glanced up at him, and his face was a little red.

  I had made CJ blush.

  It was all so weird. “How’d you get the job?” I asked, hoping to spare us even a second more of this awkward moment.

  “A guy at Charlie’s came up to me and asked me if I could dance. I was like, this isn’t a dance club, but he said he meant stripping, and did I want to, and honestly? At first I told him no way, but then a week later I saw him again and I guess curiosity got the better of me. Also, it’s great money. I make a ton of cash every night.”

  The mystery of him paying for dinner and all those records was now solved, at least.

  After a bit of silence, he mumbled, “You think I’m beautiful.”

  “I will deny having ever said that till the day I die,” I said, but his shit-eating grin told me that he wasn’t going to forget hearing it.

  * * *

  “Thanks for calling last night, like you said you would,” Deena said the next morning in the hallway at school. She was doing her Spanish homework as she sat in the main corridor, under the senior announcements bulletin board.

  I stopped and knelt down. “Sorry. It got late.”

  I could tell from her tight expression that her feelings were hurt, so I repeated my apology.

  “Whatever,” she said. “So what happened?”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell her that there was no major fight or reckoning, no dramatic coming-to-understand moment. She would skewer me for having no spine. So I told her a version of the truth.

  “He’s had it hard,” I said.

  “Humph,” she said. “Gandhi had it hard. You don’t see him dancing half naked to Prince.”

  “Interesting analogy,” I said. “I, too, see CJ as a figure likely to bring about world peace.”

  She looked up from her homework and gave me her full attention. “I just can’t believe you have a friend who sells his body.”

  I looked around to see if anyone walking by had heard her. They didn’t seem to. “He doesn’t sell his body.”

  “He dances for money, Micah. What do you think he was doing with that gross guy when he saw us? Getting notes on his performance?”

  “I just … I like him. I can’t explain it. Not like him, like him. I literally like him as a person. He interests me. He’s a hard nut to crack, and I’m gonna crack him.”

  “He may in fact be a nut, but I have news for you, Micah Strauss. You, my friend, are not a cracker.”

  We sat there thinking about that statement for a while, and then we started to laugh, and quite quickly we both realized that “You, my friend, are not a cracker” would surely be entering our lexicon forever.

  I sat down next to her and splayed my legs. “Life is so strange,” I said, mimicking the Missing Persons song. Deena didn’t seem to know it, because she took me literally.

  “Well, not sure you can befriend a hustler and then complain about your strange life. I think that just comes with the territory.”

  My throat tightened. I hated this feeling. Feeling judged. And I didn’t know how to stop it.

  “I guess.”

  She sighed loudly. “I just think you’re doing that thing again, where you’re super oblivious, and when things fall apart, I’m gonna have to pick up the pieces.”

  I realized that Deena was judging me and being harsher to me than I was to CJ, and I hadn’t done anything except not end a friendship. And that made me wonder: Was I missing something? Should I be judging CJ more?

  I truly didn’t know.

  * * *

  In the end, the whole Gaiety thing changed just about nothing between me and CJ. It meant that I now knew where he was during the days and on most Thursday, Friday, and Sunday nights, but I didn’t press him about it. I told myself I didn’t want to know if he was turning tricks. But really, that was all I wanted to know.

  “Is there some room you go to with the guys?” I asked. It was the first Monday night of November, and we were on the phone. We had both just bought the brand-new George Michael album and were attempting to listen to it together, like we tried to put the needle down at the exact same moment, and he was about two seconds ahead of me.