Gray Matters

The sun, so naked in summer, the shedding of a suffocating winter, it always feel like it could last forever like good sex. In Chicago there’s only winter and summer, only young and old, no in between, no warnings.

I found seven gray hairs in my crotch. I knew it wasn't there yesterday. Tom wanted to have an argument about potatoes chips. I sat on the side of the tub with a flash light and mirror contemplating my virility. It felt just as cold when the cashier from Whole Foods called me sir. I had known her for five years; she never called me sir before. She was old enough to be my grandmother. Tom wouldn’t shut up about the potatoes chips. I frowned as his serious hollow face and rolled my eyes. I think he was just trying to pick a fight. That’s what happened after ten years when you’re no longer tearing each other clothes off and steaming car windows, you pick fights like to crash, to feel some heat, friction. I didn’t want to argue. I didn’t care where Lay’s potatoes chips were manufactured vs. UTZ. I was premature gray. I needed to get rid of the evidence. I was only thirty one years old. I still had a swimmers flat stomach. I didn’t like the gray reminded of the Chicago winters, murderous and unforgiving, where everything looks frozen or suffering. I told my psychiatrist that it wasn’t the cold in Chicago that depressed me, it was the gray, how it hovered, its fog pulling you under the cold Lake Michigan. She prescribed light therapy which felt stupid because I had a lamp at home, didn’t need to buy a brighter one. I told her just give me the drugs and I’d make it through another dead winter. I sat on the side of the bathtub looking at my own private winter frustrating my suffering youth. I wanted to know what it meant. I was afraid to pluck because I didn’t want the cousins coming to the funeral. I told Tom about the gray he just laughed and started going on about how they make Laffy Taffy. He saw it on the Food or History channel. I decided to pluck, silence the inevitability for the moment.

I didn’t have to worry about light therapy anymore because it was summer. I decided not put my clothes back on and went to lie on the balcony and pretend the bumpy gray concrete was green grass. I wanted to go to the Lake; Tom said the water was still too cold, he complained Chicagoans got too excited at the beginning of summer. I just knew I liked the warmth in between my toes and tickling my closed eyes. He said I was a fool lying on outside on the balcony. In that second I hated him, we were still young, he told me to put on clothes before somebody saw me. He was beginning to feel like my father not my lover. Maybe lovers become fathers. He was only two months older than me. I felt like an aging housewife and it sickened me. I decided to go back to the bathrrom and shave my crotch baby bare.

I thought it never happened to me because I was too young, I was too sexy, I wouldn’t fall in love, but I did. I didn’t have a plan. I guess we never have plans. I remember when he didn’t care about anybody seeing us. I remember when he used to get drunk and piss off that balcony, daring he could reach Sheridan street but we were too far away. We would laugh and run through the apartment like two kids, fall to the kitchen floor and I nurse his uncut pride with tender kisses against the refrigerator as he drank a beer or smoked a joint. He used to dance with his shirt off, the sweat vaporizing like steam on his starved stomach. He used to get high, now I hid it from him., did it the bathroom with the water running like I did when I was living at home with my parents.

After I was smooth, I stared in the mirror at my naked body and I was bored. I tried jacking off but couldn’t find the energy or concentration. I remember just being naked used to get my dick hard. I was tired of remembering. I didn’t want to become one of those people complaining about the glory days. Summers now had become broken promises like an unused gym membership.

I told Tom I was heading out to the gay bar. I knew he frowned. He told me not to come home drunk and wake him up. He sat on the living room couch, he looking more beige than it in his gray Northwestern jogging pants, both he and the furniture so damn clean. I wanted to piss on him. I wanted to spit in his face. I wanted to jerk my dick in his mouth, in his ass, and eat out. Something nasty. Something unclean. I knew I should be happy. We had a nice apartment and things. He held me in the winters. I knew most people dreamed of staying home on a Saturday night cuddled on the coach with a beautiful man watching old movies. I paused at the door admiring him; he was still beautiful but so damn boring. I didn’t know when he became so damn boring. He actually wanted to argue about potato chips.

*********
I got to the bar. The same assholes. The same dark lighting like vampires robbing graves of skeletons, no life. He was a stripper at the local bar on Wednesday nights when we first met. We flirted often. The local bar wasn’t known for the best looking strippers, more strippers on a budget, most of them were plain looking but friendly, aging, fell on hard times or high school drop outs looking for extra cash. He was in-between, a little older than the high school drop out; too nice to have ever been an escort and his pretty green eyes were too white and alert to have been a hardcore party boy. He wasn’t money hungry for tips but always looked as if he enjoyed being on the stage in his underwear in front of strangers. He was cute, probably in his thirties, very slender, shorter than average but he made up for it with his smile. I liked that he often made eye contact with me, but then again, I didn’t figure myself anything special because he was a stripper, a sexual entertainer, which meant he flirted with anything that looked like it had a job.

I got to the bar not in the best of moods. I had every plan to get drunk and wake Tom up when I got home. It was my weekend entertainment. The bar was nothing special, the same damn people every week. I hoped to see him, the stripper. It was a casual flirtation, nothing serious. I liked that he was young. I liked that he saw me as young. He never took my tips and joke that he knew I was a struggling college student. I laugh and want to tip him more but he never took the money. It was friendly. I never saw him after the club.

Except that night. I was walking when I saw him getting out of a car. Maybe he changed his mind about the person he decided to go home with that night. Or maybe he was an escort and just finished his business, letting the guy suck his dick for a hundred dollar bill and was being dropped off at the nearest corner. I didn’t know or cared. IT felt weird seeing him fully clothes. He looked normal: a button up shirt and jeans. I imagined he only wore jock straps or harnesses.

I kept walking hoping he wouldn’t notice me. We only flirted when he was in a g-string, the cruel night moon would’ve just made our relationship unromantic.

I was walking when I felt someone come behind me. He tried to scare me. I didn’t think it was funny. He said he just wanted to walk with me because we were going the same direction. As we walked he told me he had a crush on me. I laughed. It’s so hard to take strippers serious. I made a joke that I didn’t have any single dollar bills. He hit me in the arm. I hit him back. We kept walking. I asked him how long he’s been stripping. He told me he just got started but was thinking about quitting. He hadn’t planned to stay in DC that long. I was drunk. And when I’m drunk I usually think I’m a psychic, it’s psychotic. So I asked if I could read his palm, get to know him better. He agreed to my insanity, which meant he was a fool and probably looking for answers that were elusive as the July wind blowing through the trees. We stopped, I took his right hand, looked into his eyes, ran my left palm across his palm trying to absorb his energy and then I begin to read his lines. Most hands have an “M” shape and depending on the deepness of the “M,” supposed to be an indicator of that person’s love, life and career. The creases in his hand weren’t that deep and telling by the sadness in his eyes, his life was in trouble. Again I was drunk, and despite the advice of many police offices, I was listening to the voices in my head, so I told him with tears in my eyes that he was going to die soon.

I was just playing with him or projecting. I could only think about the gray hairs I found in my crotch earlier that day. I felt the entire world was dying. I expected him to snatch his hand back or cry, but he just smiled. He believed me. I hadn’t had anyone believe my inebriated visions about their lives before. When I called my sister at three o’clock in the morning and told her she was fat and a bitch and her husband was going to leave her, she never believed in my gift, instead she usually cursed me out and hung up the phone.

We started walking again, but we didn’t let go of each other’s hand. I felt nervous. I was flirting too long. He told me his brother just died, and I told him about the problems I was having with my boyfriend at home, that I was planning on leaving him, so we kept walking, just two souls that at the beginning of the night had decided to hide our sadness in liquor but had found comfort in each other’s loneliness in the early morning. We were in the middle of crossing the street when he just stopped. He kissed me. I kissed him back. There were no cars. It was three o’clock in the morning and we just kissed in the middle of the street like so corny Hollywood movie. I kissed him back. The street was empty like we were the only two people in the world, and we didn’t stopped kissing. We fell to the street and if it was mid-day, traffic on that street would’ve been backed up, but it was early morning and not a single person disturbed or groove, the traffic light turned green, then yellow, then red, then back to green. We fell to the street; he ran his hands across my naked chest. I took off his shirt; he went to unbuttoned my pants while running his hand down my crotch. I unbuttoned his pants, slipped my hand down his back into the crack of his ass, then played with the tip of his hole, but we kept kissing, dicks rock hard and we tugged aggressively at each other’s heat. We didn’t stop, didn’t care about time, if the sun was rushing to awake, if somebody was watching and calling the cops. We didn’t stop kissing and we must’ve been in the middle of that street for almost a hour, grinding in each other’s sweat and saliva, pants pulled down, dicks rock hard, our minds trying to decide how far to take our passion, seconds away from penetration when the tiniest rock I was laying on begin to work itself into my flesh and release blood. The rock was like the pea in the mattress, it brought us back to reality. But we weren’t finished yet. We saw an empty alley, he gave me a look, I knew what he meant, so we pull our pants completely off, leaving them in the middle of the street, stripping ourselves completely naked except for our socks, not caring if anyone saw us, not caring at all. We ran like school kids to the alley, falling against the wall. I grabbed him and we started our lust again, letting our nakedness breath in the early morning breeze. We fucked. Our bodies collided like a wave throwing itself on the beach, each moment more intense than the last, each wave of heat more devouring and crashing on top of each other, our flesh melded into ecstasy, we became one, so sure of ourselves. I thought I might drown in the intensity.

After lust, me pulling the condom off my dick, we picked up our clothes from out of the middle of street. We dressed. Nobody caught us. Nobody got arrested. It seemed like the perfect crime. He walked me home. I saw him get in a taxicab. We kissed goodbye one last time. It was almost sad. I had a boyfriend. I had no plans on leaving him or telling him. He had a brother’s death to deal with. I didn’t wake up Tom when I got home.