Chapter 4 #2
belt, on the hilt of a small dagger. The old man got up as well, shaky but determined and seething.
Simon pulled my arm. “Let’s go.” He didn’t want us becoming part of a scene.
We ducked away just as the child lunged at the old man.
Commotion rippled through the surrounding crowd, which we pushed our way through, making our way to a side street.
Only a piercing, sudden yelp broke through the jeers, and whether it was the old man or the child, I didn’t want to know.
The commotion made me nervous. If the lord of the manor at Greenwich came looking for us—and surely he would—there were few
places he’d need to go and few people he’d need to ask. London felt, aside from its anthill-like density, like a small room.
The anonymity it would one day afford its residents didn’t exist yet. We couldn’t stay, I decided.
“Of course we can,” said Simon, and maybe he took my worry to mean monetarily because he patted his newly filled coin purse,
then patted my back. And again here was the whiplash sensibility of Simon—of caution in the crowd, but oh look, another open
market at the end of the side street, another extension of the festival, another rowdy party, and it was all too easy for
me to be charmed and give way because this newfound freedom was just as sweet for me as it was for him. We bought apples cooked
in butter, a venison leg, two silly hats. We watched a stage performance of King Arthur saving Guinevere from an evil knight.
We linked arms and drank grassy, murky ale and wandered the streets, the clustered shops, ruddy pubs, the afternoon turning
orange and blue. We bought beer after beer. We shat side by side into a communal midden. We danced together and with strangers.
My head became overstuffed with circumstance and celebration, and where in my modern life we had the internet and texting
and breaking news, here there was nothing but our own brains and what stimulations we chose or had foisted upon them—the music,
the smells, the touching, the echoes of shouts and screams and songs.
The touching was strange. Maybe not strange, but I made note of it.
I was comfortable with it because I was comfortable with Simon after our escape together and, before that, our months of waning interaction, but still I noticed the touching—his hand on my chest when we were talking about jousting earlier, the two of us drunkenly linking arms, his hand lingering warmly on my shoulder blade throughout the day and into the evening, sharing food and drink.
It was friendship and trust between us, that was all, but my ever-drunkening brain granted more dominance to old paranoias and complication and while a greedy part of me didn’t mind the extended touching—because Simon was physically attractive, I could admit—I couldn’t help but read into it more than just anthropologically.
Simply put, I didn’t know what Simon’s intentions were.
I didn’t know him really, at all, I had to admit.
There was a barrier. And the drunker I got, those differences and that gulf became more apparent instead of dulled.
The natural affability in his eyes misdirected me, daring me to come closer but inching steadily backward at the same time—a clear strategy.
I felt frustrated and stubborn, only plodding along because what was my plan anyway?
As we cheered in crowds and danced and sang, I began to feel an unmistakable sense of alienation—a distinctly modern feeling—and though alcohol eased the harshness of this world, it gave way to a melancholic egoism, my modern-brain telling me that the miscommunication inherent to my existence here was a result of something everyone else lacked, that I was worth more than this.
These are barbarians, I thought to myself.
I’m in the midst of a musty group of bodies that are all technically dead.
Simon is handsome and fun but not alive.
These are the dark ages. I’m surrounded by dead, foolish ghosts and I don’t belong here.
My cheeks flushed red and furious. Still, I let Simon force me to dance.
I’ve always felt alienated, but it’s not like that’s an uncommon feeling. I grew up in the classically homophobic 1990s and
early 2000s and this had throttled me in all the ways that are too commonly detailed now—the bullying, the name-calling, the
lost friendships—so common it’s almost embarrassing to give them credit for their formativeness, but I suppose multiplying
layers of shame is what makes the injury so effective. It scars you and then you’re embarrassed of the scars.
I remember when I was around eleven years old, I lost all my friends. I don’t remember the details, but I remember having
friends one day and then the next day not having a single one. I remember the frost-covered grass at the playground at school,
how much of an expanse it was, and not having anywhere to go. I was shunned and I was devastated and this happened more than
once as I grew up. I’m sure it was something effeminate in me that I could never quite taper to anyone’s liking, or the best
friendships that would turn too-best, or football—just everything about it.
Of course later I learned that the depression and anxiety disorders gleaned from those early years were universal, shared by a generation of millennials who all more or less went through the same ringer of gay-bashing and unrequited crushes, leading to pop culture hyperfixations as coping mechanism, sexual disfunction as trauma response, good relationships, bad relationships, no relationships.
As I came into adulthood, came out, gained friends, finally gained a few gay friends—ones who shared a similar degree of malaise—I always felt like they had really made something of their childhood injury and I had not.
They had overachieved in education, landed six-figure salaries in media, finance, tech; had bodies of the kinds of gods they were bullied by as children; were savvier and quicker than me.
My success had been marginal: mid-five-figure salary, wobbly relationships with fitness and boyfriends, perpetually renting everything.
I was still so unconfident, and this matured form of alienation was almost more dangerous because it was directed inward, it was a threat against my own core, as if my childhood loneliness hadn’t been a result of my gayness at all, but that there was something intrinsically wrong with me that peeled me apart from even the other outcasts.
I still so desperately wanted to fit in and I feared I wouldn’t recognize the feeling if I ever finally did.
I met my boyfriend through an app, and maybe that was the first mistake because I’ve never believed in the idea of a chosen
family. The definition of choice negates the nature of family (and also because there never seemed to be one that chose me).
Yet, for three years I was welcomed into my boyfriend’s fold of successful, curated men and I felt truly welcomed. My calendar
became pockmarked with birthdays, weddings, Pride events, gallery openings, West End shows, and Sundays spent shirtless in
parks, selfies, Frisbees, brunches, gossip, bad TV, and the denial of any sort of aging at all. Any suggestion that these
“mannerisms” (I’ll call them that) were becoming gauche as we all entered our mid-thirties had to be dismissed as one’s own
internalized homophobia. Our inner childs were wounded, so these raves, these vanity fitness regimes and drug dalliances were only our stunted rebirths.
We were actually only teenagers, one could argue, rocking back and forth on whatever queer god’s timeline we were on, delirious to see which age fit best, and so we had to dress up in our Hockney/Haring sludge merch and go to that concert, that club, that dinner party, that half-marathon.
I didn’t feel attractive, I didn’t feel reckless. My impressive job at the hedge fund helped, but I felt attractive only in
the sense that I felt pulled along by someone else. I dressed up, I dressed down, I always seemed to be teetering and maybe
that was what the banker bros at work sniffed out when they came calling. They knew simple brotherly camaraderie was easier
for me to obsess over than the complicated mind games of my boyfriend and his ilk who were actually gay. It was easier to
fantasize about enjoying football than about whatever I would look like in a swimsuit on a beach in Spain.
And I ended up looking good. One September we all went to Sitges. (I told the boys at work just Barcelona.) Ten of us—but
it felt like ten thousand—rented a house on the beach and spent a week under the scorching sun. The sea was as purifying as
old bathwater. The men that frolicked in it were skeletons plagued with varying degrees of bloat. My boyfriend had adopted
a sneering fitness and fasting routine that had rendered him childlike and hairless, freakishly lithe in bed like an eel,
but with a body that lay over me like a sentient pile of bone spurs. I struggled to come.
Every couple in our group seemed unbalanced in their wariness, one partner always sheepish about how they knew someone else in the group, every connection’s origin story kept intentionally vague.
I constantly felt like I was being roped into something, and anytime I got a grasp on what exactly it was—a nefarious tango, a curiosity flirt—I was roped into something else, my read on everyone completely thrown.
But of course everyone made a grand show of stability. I missed my boys at the office.
These undercurrents flowed throughout the whole week, poisoning our days in the sea, haunting our nightly drunkenness at clubs.
We’d stand in circles and bob up and down, drink and smoke, take cheap drugs, look at phones, look at strippers going about
their lazy routines.
One night I became hyperaware of how surrounded by men I was and had some kind of allergic reaction. It wasn’t a headache