“I hate weeds with bad breath,” I said.

  “His is like pickled dog shit.”

  I blanched. “That’s pretty bad.”

  CJ sighed and chugged the final bits of sugar from the banana, tapping the bottom and then tossing it on the floor.

  “You’re littering?”

  He gestured dramatically with his hands. “By four a.m., that piece of plastic will be easily the least offensive thing found on this bathroom floor. Anyway, the thing is, shit breath was my cab ride home. And he has all our money.”

  I studied CJ. Was this a con? He certainly had the pizzazz of a con man. But there was something else there, too. When he’d stood up for me against the other Club Kids, it had been sincere. I was sure of it.

  Well, pretty sure.

  “So you need cab fare?” I said. His story didn’t quite add up. Who leaves their money with a guy and then ditches him?

  “No, no. Well, yeah. I mean, I need to get home. I have a token in my pocket—”

  “I thought you were just happy to see me!” I said, channeling my best Mae West.

  “Ha! But yeah. I have a token, but this may not be the best outfit for the subway. I’m not sure I want to be pushed onto the train tracks by the brawling boys of Bensonhurst.”

  He said this with such a gleam that I couldn’t help but feel myself gleaming back at him. I realized that in some ways I didn’t care if he was a con man. This conversation, in this place, was by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me. Even if it seemed to barely register for him. Or maybe especially because of that. This was natural to him, but for me this was a leap into the great queer unknown. He was a gay guy just about my age who was actually talking to me. That was new, and needed. Even if he was conning me, I was a willing target, if that was what it took for me to see what happened next.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Okay?”

  “Okay, I’ll help you get home. I’ll put you in a cab and give you the money for it.”

  “Oh my God, would you? That’s so nice of you. Thank you. You’re literally the nicest person in the history of the world. Like, if Mother Teresa, Florence Nightingale, and Oprah Winfrey got together, they’d say, Why can’t we be more like Miles?”

  Feeling myself blush, I told him to meet me at the front of the club because I had to say goodbye to my friends. Unsaid was that there was no way I was going to walk out of the bathroom with this guy. I wasn’t sure what the reaction would be at school, but I knew I didn’t want to find out.

  Deena was dancing on the sunken dance floor with Rolando and Cherise, who were doing a faster, more manic version of the shuffle from The Breakfast Club, arms akimbo and flailing. Deena was cackling, having the time of her life, doing that Tiffany heel-shuffle thing. Too bad I’d never be able to move that fast. I tapped her on the shoulder.

  “Sooo … I’m gonna go,” I said.

  I must have looked different, because her eyes got wide, she stopped dancing, and she pulled me off the floor, up the stairs, and into this rafters area where we leaned on a black metal railing.

  “Tell me you met someone. Tell me!”

  I mugged for the camera.

  She punched my chest with her fists. “Oh my God! My baby boy—he’s all grown up! Where is he? Let me meet him! Is he our age? Please let him be our age and not some grody pedophile.”

  “He’s definitely the right age, and you’re definitely not meeting him yet.”

  “Ooh. No. You have to introduce him to your friends. That way if you’re hacked to death and dumped into the Hudson River, we’ll at least know what to tell the police sketch artist.”

  “I’ll be fine. I’m not going home with him. Just living a little, for once.”

  “I’m going with you!”

  “But you so aren’t.” I leaned in. “It’s the boy in the bra.”

  She shrieked. “Omigod! Omigod omigod omigod!”

  “Like, gag you with a spoon?”

  “No! Not at all. I’m just impressed, that’s all. He was a babe.”

  “Call you tomorrow?”

  She hugged me tight. “Remember everything. Everything. And be safe, please. Use a condom for everything, and be the boy, not the girl. That’s safer.”

  I pulled back and looked at her. “Did you really just say that?”

  “I’m just saying.”

  I didn’t have the energy to tell her how not cool the whole be the boy thing was, so I dropped it. With Napoleon from the basketball team, I was always the boy. Did that make Napoleon a girl? I didn’t think he’d like that too much.

  “Can you believe—” I started, but she was running down the stairs back to the dance floor and I felt this sudden twinge of abandonment, which was weird because I was actually the one leaving. I knew I could do things without Deena, but I almost never did. Which made this a very big deal.

  * * *

  CJ seemed to go way back with everybody at the door of the club, or maybe he’d just made fast friends with everyone and become the center of it all. A guy pulled a Polaroid camera out from his knapsack and snapped a picture, and CJ’s face came alive as it emerged from the cloudy gray square. In the photo, he looked completely at home in the glare of fame’s flashbulb, as if he were Dale Bozzio herself and hadn’t just needed to ask a stranger for cab money in a bathroom stall. When he saw me watching, he started saying goodbye to the crowd, and a bunch of people hugged him like they were old friends. I was left wondering why, with all these people to choose from, he’d picked plain old me to leave with.

  Was I just an easy mark?

  We crossed Twelfth Avenue and walked east on Twenty-Eighth Street under some scaffolding. There was nothing there but industrial space and darkness. This wasn’t a neighborhood for walking. For anything, really. If CJ turned out to be some sort of dangerous killer, like Deena had said, he wouldn’t have to carry my dead, chubby body far. It would blend in fine in this West Side wasteland.

  He clutched his thin, sequined jacket over as much of his exposed skin as possible. “Brr,” he said.

  “You look cold. You want my jacket?”

  He looked over at me and laughed. “I’m good. Put me naked on an ice floe in the middle of the Arctic Ocean and I still wouldn’t want to be seen in that thing. No offense.”

  “You’d die for fashion,” I said as we approached Eleventh Avenue.

  “Yup. And eventually, I intend to make fashion die for me. What about you? Would you rather die than be seen with me?”

  “No!”

  “Then what was that all about? Meeting me at the door?”

  “Oh.”

  “Nothing? Okay, then.”

  I couldn’t come up with a single lie to tell him, so I said, “Well … I guess it’s because I’m not exactly out to all the people I was there with.”

  He laughed. “Are they terminally oblivious? You basically scream gay. Gay!” he shouted into the night sky, and I instinctively shrank into myself.

  “Do I?”

  “Well, not your outfit. But you? Yeah. You’re very … gentle. What is it with your outfit, by the way?”

  “It’s kind of my thing. The absence of fashion.”

  He pursed his lips. “Okay. Not fully getting it, but it’s your thing, so.”

  “I just wear what I like, I guess.”

  “There’s something to be said for that. This,” he said, pointing to his bra and sequined jacket, and then up to his hair and makeup, “is what happens when you put your faith in an older guy who turns out to be an asshole.”

  “Yeah?”

  “The guy we were hiding from. This dipshit from Union Theological Seminary I met at this Columbia dance last month. We’ve been kind of dating. Or I thought we were. He insisted I dress as Dale Bozzio, because he knows I worship her. He suggested it and bankrolled it. I never dressed as a woman before in my life, but what do you know? A humpy older guy asks me to do something and I spend all day working on it. We get here and, I don’t know, maybe he didn’t like the way it turned out. He pretty much abandoned me for a walking cliché in a gold Speedo and angel wings, as older men do.” This last part he shouted, and then went back to his normal tone. “And now here I am, cashless and cabless, leaving the Tunnel. I guess sometimes I’m too trusting? Sigh. ‘Women who love too much,’ next time on Lifetime. Television for Gay Men with Too Many Emotions.”

  I stopped walking. “Wait. I thought you were the one ditching him.”

  He looked away. “Oh yeah. That. Well. I meant ditching him as a metaphor, more than as the absolute, actual truth.”

  “Huh.”

  “In that way, it’s true in a larger sense. Which makes me brave. Yes. Very brave.”

  I laughed and rolled my eyes. “I have a feeling that you can be a little fast and loose with the truth?”

  He shuffled his high heels. “I have been known to tell a tale or two. To embellish, maybe a smidge. But it’s all in the name of benevolence.” He looked into my eyes. His were this incredible cool gray color I’d never seen, and suddenly he was looking at me in a very serious way. “I can stop, though. I only lie to them, not us.”

  Them? Us? “Okay …”

  “Seriously. I am ditching him, but I don’t have money. And I like you. You’re smart and funny and age appropriate. You can carry on an intelligent conversation, which is rare, believe me. And as I said, you’re cute as a button, which is weird because I don’t usually go for guys our age. Or buttons.”

  I looked away, unsure I could believe him, but he softly said, “No, really. You are, Miles.”

  I grimaced. “Micah.”

  “Oh, I misheard.”

  “Nope,” I said. “Not exactly.”

  He cracked up. “Well well well! I’m starting to think that you have your own special relationship to the truth, too. I’m all for that. I actually think we’re going to be great friends. Partners in crime. And who knows? Maybe it’s time I give up the older guys, who totally suck, by the way. In case that wasn’t clear.”

  He took my hand, gently, and we walked toward Tenth Avenue along abandoned Twenty-Eighth Street, hand in hand. My body was absolutely buzzing. His hand was tepid, bony, tentative. Part of me wanted to pull away, so no one would see. Part of me wanted to feel my hand in his forever.

  “So you’re in the closet,” he said.

  “Yup. I just don’t think it would be a good idea for most people to know I’m, you know …”

  “Gay. And would it be that bad?”

  “It would.”

  “Your parents are homophobes?”

  I nodded. It felt like too much trouble to explain that no, not really—what they were, other than liberal New York Jews, was entirely blind to the possibility. My dad’s best friend, Rick, was gay, but any time I got ready to bring up my sexuality, they’d ruin it by saying something that made it clear that I had to be straight. For them.

  CJ and I walked on in a semi-comfortable silence, our arms swinging together like we were schoolchildren holding hands. The night stretched thin before us, and I was glad we were alone together. I wondered what he was thinking. I was thinking about maybe trying again with my parents. Because maybe they’d be okay with it. I was just scared. I was just—

  My thoughts were interrupted by CJ muttering something I couldn’t quite hear, and then I saw these two white guys, maybe in their twenties, walking toward us. One wore a Yankees cap and had a sloppy mustache. The other, wearing a white down jacket, looked greasy to me. The thin night thickened. The energy changed around us in an instant.

  “Fags,” Yankees Cap called out, loud, menacing.

  CJ grabbed my hand harder in defiance. “Brothers,” he said.

  “Fuckin’ fags, you’re gonna give us all AIDS,” Down Jacket said. They were near us now, and CJ stopped walking. I wanted the world to stop. I wanted to disappear. I wanted the safety of my bed.

  “And what if we were fags?” CJ asked calmly. “You think you’re gonna do something about it?”

  The guy cracked up. “Yeah, some dude dressed like a slut really scares me. I’ll do something about it. I’ll kick your fuckin’ ass and—”

  CJ reached into his pocket and pulled out a Swiss Army knife. He pulled out the gleaming blade and showed it to the guys.

  “Your pansy ass wouldn’t—”

  CJ picked up his other hand and, emotionless, sliced a small cut on his index finger with the blade. A crimson line emerged from the gash. He looked at the guys.

  “That’s exactly it,” he said, still calm. “We’re all here to give you AIDS. Which one of you is first?” He moved toward the guys, and they jumped back.

  Down Jacket backed off. “Crazy faggot,” he muttered.

  “You have no idea,” CJ said. “Please test me. Please.”

  The guys turned and walked away, and CJ closed the knife, put it back in his pocket. We started back walking toward Tenth Avenue.

  I was trying not to hyperventilate. Telling myself it was okay, we were okay, and that, dangerous or not, CJ’s tactic had worked. No way were those guys coming at us again.

  “I don’t have AIDS, don’t worry,” CJ assured me. “I was just playing off their fear.”

  I may have nodded. Or my head may have been frozen.

  “You learn to take care of yourself,” CJ said after putting his bloody finger in his mouth and sucking it. “You learn to take care of yourself when no one else does.”

  My thoughts ran in so many directions, and the nausea I felt from nearly getting gay bashed threatened to empty my stomach.

  CJ stopped and turned toward me, wiping his wet-but-not-as-bloody finger on his leather pants. “I’m sorry you had to see that. You’re new. You don’t know yet what it can be like.”

  I looked away. I wanted to say, I’m not like you. I don’t wear women’s clothing on the street. But I also knew that was bullshit. The guys stopped two fags. Not one fag and one random innocent person. If he was a fag, so was I.

  “I promise that most of it is really fun. It’s just the assholes that aren’t. That and AIDS. AIDS. Is really not fun.”

  “Understatement of the century,” I said. I knew about AIDS from the news and everything, but I felt its presence the most when I was working at the Lortel Theatre on Christopher Street. Walter, the concessions guy, had it. My boss, Felicia, talked about it all the time.

  But even with that, the disease wasn’t real to me.

  Not yet.

  CJ and I started to walk again.

  “Damn, I’m cold,” he said, shivering.

  I began to shimmy out of my Members Only jacket.

  “No means no, Micah.”

  “Take it. You’re cold. I have more on than you.” We stopped walking again and I handed him my jacket.

  He sighed and took it, holding it like it had kryptonite lining. “I guess it’s better than nothing.”

  Watching CJ Gorman put my beige Members Only jacket over his plexiglass bra is something I will never, ever forget.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “Don’t mention it.”

  “I’ll give it back to you. I’ll give you my number. Is there a pen in one of these many, many Members Only pockets?”

  I shook my head. “Members only. Pens are not members.”

  He fished around. “Is this a typewriter in here? No. Just tissues. Lots and lots of tissues. Are you a crier, Micah? Do you masturbate in public? Which is it?”

  “No and no. Are those seriously the only options you can come up with? And why are you going through my pockets?”

  “Well, without any writing or typing implement handy, can you memorize?”

  I nodded, knowing that as much as I was drawn to CJ, as much as I wanted to get to know this person, I was still Micah Strauss, son of Ira and Dalia Strauss, and that person just wasn’t going to be able to keep up with CJ, who carried a knife, wore women’s clothing, and lied a lot. So I nodded, he recited it, I pretended to memorize it, and we walked on.

  We hailed a cab, and I handed him a twenty.

  As he got in, he said, “I’ll pay this back, too. I promise.”

  “Sure, CJ.”

  “You have my number memorized?”

  I nodded again.

  “Repeat it back to me.”

  I paused and looked down, and when I looked back up, the life had left his eyes, like the gray had dimmed. I could see, in that moment, that this was a thing for CJ, people not calling him back. I suddenly hated myself.

  “I’ll definitely call you,” I said, feeling like the worst person.

  “I’m certain that you will,” he replied, monotone.

  The cab drove off.

  I never even got to say goodbye.

  October 1987

  The second time I met CJ Gorman, he was wearing aviator glasses and a brown leather bomber jacket.

  It was a Saturday night about three weeks later, and I was tearing tickets at the Lortel, on Christopher Street. The play was Steel Magnolias, about a close-knit group of Southern women who hang out in a beauty parlor. I’d started ushering over the summer. The ten dollars I made per show wasn’t much, but I did get to meet all the actors and see the show every night.

  I had the entire play memorized.

  “Laughter through tears is my favorite emotion.”

  “Shelby? You need some juice … drink the juice, honey.”

  Felicia, the feisty, birdlike lesbian theater manager, was supervising, which is to say she was standing around talking to me while I tore tickets. She’d just whispered a stupid joke about a penguin with a lisp to me when the person to whom I’d just handed a ticket back didn’t enter the theater.

  I looked up and saw a tall, skinny, cute guy with wavy brown hair who otherwise looked like he had taken a wrong turn on his way to pilot school.

  “It’s you!” he said.

  I had no idea who this person was, though I admit I was intrigued that someone so handsome was excited to see me. I wondered who he’d mistaken me for. The redheaded kid with the glasses from Revenge of the Nerds? A chubby Anthony Michael Hall? ALF?

  “It is me. And it is you. It is us!” I said.