Not too long ago I told you about my Facebook Scrabble obsession. Like most of my obsessions it flamed out after three or four weeks of compulsivity, three or four weeks where I had twenty games playing simultaneously with both friends and strangers, three or four weeks in which I rose in the publicly-displayed rankings; out of 400 friends, I placed second or third, depending on the day, an achievement that I will admit warmed my blood.

I have over 400 Facebook friends partly because I have my profile linked to the front page of this blog, and partly due to my low standards. One of these recent guys I’d never met, but I accepted his friend request nonetheless, and soon after he sent me an online invite to a Scrabble game. Yes, okay, I checked his ranking, which I found less than threatening. We started to play.

Now, I’ve played the real, in-person Scrabble many times over the years, usually with my dad, who retired after thirty years as an editor and who has consistently kicked my ass in each and every game, save the one we played when we last saw each other, when I added an R to his “TORQUE,” hitting the triple word square and sending me into paroxysms of poor-winner fist pumping.

In all the years we’ve played, I’ve only once seen Dad play a word using all seven letters. This move nets the player an additional 50 points, and catapults them to near-certain victory. So when this new “friend” played two seven-letter words in a row, my hackles raised.

You can’t cheat in face-to-face Scrabble, but online is a different story. Anyone, in the privacy of their home, can check a word in the dictionary. This cheat I will admit to using, but the second, more insidious form of cheating I try to avoid, for ethical reasons. The second form of cheating is the online word generator. Type in your given letters, and a split second later the generator spits out a list of possible words, 90% of which you could go your whole life never once hearing used in conversation.

I was willing to concede to my “friend” the first word he played, “FOUNDED.” But then he played “ATEMOYA.” I gave the screen the finger, but by now it was too late. If I tried to delete the game, it would count as a “loss” and my ranking would suffer. I had the suspicion that he’d targeted me for just that reason, but then I am prone to moments of grandiosity.

I decided that if I was going to lose, then at least I’d go down fighting. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, I held back from accusing him and instead played the word “PHONIES.”

Then he really started spewing out the bullshit. “GLEEK,” BRIARY,” “AVOSET,” he played. In the end I lost by thirty-five points, and my Scrabble obsession came to an end.

A couple of days later he sent me another invite. “Hey sexy! How about a rematch?”

In most cases, when someone calls me sexy I will do whatever they want. Call it a moral blind spot. Curious, I clicked on the link which took me to the game. He’d played the first word, “CHUKARS.”

“You know,” I typed back. “I’ve got so many things on my plate right now. Don’t have time for Scrabble.”

“I hear you,” he replied. “I’m really busy too.”

Busy being a seven-letter whore, maybe. I ignored the game, and a few days later he tried to FORCE FORFEIT ME. Now, when you FORCE FORFEIT ME, you give me another loss, and that loss pulls down my ranking. I deleted the game.

Two days later: “Hey gorgeous, how about another game??”

I went to his profile and clicked “REMOVE,” whispering to his smarmy grin, “Bitch, don’t mess with my ranking.”

When you grow up with someone who likes to throw back a few drinks, there’s a voice that can stick with you longer than you’d like. It’s the voice that slips up to you in the middle of the night, sits on the edge of your bed and hisses at you with clenched teeth. It rages over the sound of the television, echoes and thumps through a locked door. A voice tossed at you in the backseat of car. The words sometimes change but the point’s always the same: you won’t amount to shit in this life.

After a few glasses of wine that voice sometimes came out of my mom, out of the same woman who loved me and told me I could be anything I wanted. The same woman who “got” me more than anyone else, as Moms sometimes do. She pushed me hard. One day in grade school I came home with a 97 on an English test. “What happened to the other three points?” she asked, without a trace of humor. Still, she and my dad raised me with the expectation that I would make my way to college, and on to good things, in a good life.

That these two voices came from the same woman confused me as a kid, turned me wary and watchful, measuring the heat in every room. Hear it at the wrong time, when you’re too young to know yourself, too young not to believe what others call you, and it works its way into your marrow, growing up with you, hobbling you, lowering your aim in life.

The voice can’t be reasoned with. You can’t show it the proof of your past deeds, your honors and awards. Other people can’t argue it out of your bones. It feeds off the same stuff as nightmares, hiding where the light can’t hit it, growing up twisted and gnarled, wrapping itself around the stronger parts of you.

Later on, I grew up to be a guy who liked to toss back a few, and I heard that voice coming out of me, aimed at someone I loved, and after a while I couldn’t live with it anymore.

I’ve been thinking about that voice lately, as I work away at a couple of projects, the kinds of projects that voice kept me from trying, and though I hear it every day, hissing at me with those stupid clenched teeth (it has no sense of humor, this voice), it’s not working like it used to. You can’t reason with the voice. You can’t outthink it. But you can get to work, acting like it’s not there, whistling like a seventh dwarf, your bones strong and pure.

Every once in a while my compulsive nature seizes upon some new activity. After I moved back home from my little cave in New York, I spent the whole summer and fall wandering the aisles of Bay Area gardening centers, lugging home pots and plants and bags of fertile soil, for my fledging back deck garden.

A year later I bought a Playstation and wandered the streets of post-Apocalyptic D.C. with a number of impressive weapons, protecting myself from marauders, ghouls, and large green mutants.

I keep waiting for the day when my compulsive nature lines up with my professional calling, so I can get a little more writing done. Unfortunately these pursuits are almost always a distraction from writing. Like my newest compulsion, Facebook Scrabble. At first I started playing with the Manly Fireplug, and a couple of friends. Eventually I joined public games with random Facebook strangers, and at one time I counted twenty-two matches in my “Active Games” list.

It’s not really in my nature to socialize with strangers. Hell, close friends would say it’s not in my nature to socialize at all. But clearly I can set aside long-held, deeply-set personal traits solely to feed my compulsions.

Facebook Scrabble even provides a little chat window for each game, so you can make small talk with the random strangers, if so inclined. Of course I’m rarely inclined, but I was raised to be polite to everyone, even to Christian Evangelists who try to convert me through a chat window.

I suppose there were little clues. I started our game with the word, “Urine.”

“Yikes!” he typed.

“Sorry,” I replied. “That’s all I had.”  He stayed quiet after that.

But a few moves later he popped up again to chat. “Hey,” he typed. “When you get a chance, check out the website, “The Way of the Master,” and take the “Are You a Good Person? quiz.”

Like there was some big mystery as to what I would find.

Way of the Master features the tag line, “Seek and save the lost the way Jesus did.” Kirk Cameron, former star of Growing Pains, is one of its founders.

I don’t know why my Scrabble opponent targeted me. He couldn’t see, in his limited access to my profile, that I was engaged to a man. But he could see that I lived in San Francisco, and that alone might have been enough. Then again, it probably had nothing to do with me. No doubt he spends his days converting random Scrabble strangers regardless of where they live or who they sleep with.

Clicking on the “Are You a Good Person Quiz” brought up an audio clip.

“Almost everyone thinks they are a good person,” the voice said earnestly. “But the question you should be asking is, ‘Am I good enough to go to heaven?’”

Naturally the quiz is based upon your adherence to the Ten Commandments. I quit the quiz after the second.

I’d be hard-pressed to come up with an approach to life more opposite to mine than “Way of the Master.”  This need of evangelists, to spread “the word,” to stand on street corners and interrupt the lives of complete strangers, to me smacks of insecurity and desperation.

Not to mention their condescending nature: bringing their word to “the lost,” who, as we all know by now, is anyone who holds a different world view than Kirk Cameron’s. Naturally, a brief google search of “Way of the Master” and “homosexuality” offers up a variety of YouTube videos featuring Cameron lecturing us helpfully on sin.

I suppose he sleeps at night comforting himself that he is helping others through this relentless promotion, but I couldn’t help but take notice of the many forms of merchandise available to the public on “The Way of the Master,” including a thirteen-episode dvd series retailing for $99. Tuition to their four-day “Training Academy” currently runs for $600. Do the math, and it’s easy to see why Cameron wants to spread the word to as many of “the lost” as possible.

But then his career path hasn’t exactly been stratospheric since “Growing Pains,” and everyone needs to pay the rent.

Even more questionable to me is this “Way of the Master” approach to life. We are raised in the West to consider ourselves masters of our lives, fearless men and women who conquer life through discipline, hard work, and pulling ourselves up by the proverbial bootstraps.

But this is a fallacy. There is little in this life that we have control over, especially when it comes to other people. We can’t get through life very far without their help, and all too often we are at their mercy.

Two days ago the Fireplug and I had a fight, an unremarkable one, ignited by impatience and missed signals on both of our sides. Still, the intensity of my anger surprised even me, but it wasn’t hard to catch the timing; all morning we’d been hearing bad news from the California Supreme Court.

With each passing month, my anger over Prop 8 only seems to intensify. I can barely handle reading an op-ed in our favor, let alone one against us. I stopped reading the comments on blogs and the LA Times and the Huffington Post a long time ago, as they just made me insane with rage.

Consider the damning pronouncements of ministers and politicians and Catholics and Mormons, none of whom have walked a single inch in our shoes, telling us who we are and what we deserve. People who stand on street corners and wave signs telling us the so-called truth of homosexuality, a truth they’ve garnered only from their their churches and Sarah Palin. People who, from the looks of them on the nightly news, roll their fat asses off the couch for only three things: the refrigerator, church, and protesting our rights. These are the people deciding what we do and do not deserve.

These are the people, these are the religions, who use us as scapegoats, so they can avoid examining their own lives.

They use a handful of quotes from the Bible to defend their views, conveniently cherry-picking their way past advice on slave handling and the dangers of shellfish.

I read in the papers columnists reprimanding us for using the capitalist tool of boycotting, the same tool our opponents threatened to use against Apple and other companies who donated to the No on 8 Campaign. We are kicked like a dog and then shamed when we dare bite back.

I listen to people tell tell me that I don’t deserve to use the term “civil rights.” I’m told that marriage is not a right by the same people who take this right for granted, by people who would kick and scream and throw a tantrum if this right were ever taken from them.

I watch politicians who know better, politicians who have the capacity and the resources to lead, instead follow the biases of their constituents. What’s wrong with civil unions? they ask, as if separate but equal was some hot new idea.

And I read the headlines, that our state Supreme Court will no doubt vote to hold up the legality of Prop 8, while also voting to keep intact the thousands of marriages which took place before the election. Two decisions which I suppose make sense, when you dissect the language of law, but which make absolutely no sense when seen from a distance, when one looks at the consequence of these decisions in the big picture: only some gay people get to marry.

So I am angry, and my anger shoves me into insanity, but I suspect that I am not the only one. That every gay person in the country isn’t stalking local Wal-Marts with an AK-47 seems to me a miracle, but then we as a group have rarely tended towards violence, for better or worse.

We are at their mercy, but at least we sometimes have each other. That night the Fireplug and I made up. “We’re on the same team,” he said.

I closed the “Way of the Master” window, and returned to the Scrabble game. And there my fingers hovered over the keyboard, as I fought over the emotions churning within me. I wanted a fight. I wanted to tear him to shreds so badly that I tasted venom.

“I took the ‘Are You a Good Person Quiz,”‘ I typed, “and I failed.” I looked at those words waiting for me to hit “send.”

But in the end I swallowed my anger, no easy task, and I typed a single word:

“Thanks.”

I can’t say I did this out of tolerance, or the goodness of my heart, or any other quality one might find in a “good person.” I was polite to him for my own selfish motives. I may not be good enough to go to heaven, but I’m good enough at something. I was beating him at Scrabble, and I wanted to finish him off.

He said nothing further, but stay in the game he did, and I went on to kick his ass, by 111 points.

Last Friday a couple hundred gays and their friends chased a small group of young Christian preachers out of the Castro, calling them “bigots” and chanting “Don’t come back!”

I wish I’d been there.

The video of the event, or rather part of the event, has now been posted on YouTube, along with a written account by one of the preachers, who claims that they were both physically and sexually assaulted.

“It wasn’t long before the violence turned to perversion. They were touching and grabbing me, and trying to shove things in my butt, and even trying to take off my pants – basically trying to molest me…”

Unfortunately for him the video doesn’t capture any of this particular “molestation,” but our little gay uprising has predictably garnered both scorn and ridicule, and our community is accused of hostility and intolerance, and all weekend I wrestled with my conscience over the primal anger that still sweeps through me when I watch this video.

Why so angry? Why so hostile? The reasons may seem obvious to us, but since all of the preacher’s buddies on YouTube keep asking those questions, let me take a stab.

We grew up wondering what the hell was wrong with us, why we were so different from everyone around us. We observed and learned how to act, and some of us could hide that part of ourselves and pass, and some couldn’t, and those are the ones who were mocked and beaten on playgrounds and in cafeterias and gymnasiums.

We started to figure out how we were different, and how we were perceived. And for the rest of our lives we were told that we weren’t good enough, that we were sick and immoral and doomed to Hell.

Sometimes we made it out of adolescence without slitting our wrists, and we grew up and started looking for each other but we could only find each other in bars, because any other place was too dangerous. And those bars were raided by the police and we were rounded up and thrown in jail and our names printed in newspapers.

We were thrown out of jobs, out of schools, out of the military, out of churches. We were disinherited and shunned from our own families.

Our own bedrooms weren’t safe, according to our government.

When we got sick and died by the thousands we were ignored, and then told that it was all our fault. “God’s punishment,” they called it.  Only when Magic Johnson revealed his HIV-positive status, after thousands and thousands of us had already died, did the media treat AIDS as a legitimate story.

We couldn’t join our friends and partners in their hospital rooms, or at their funerals, because we weren’t considered family. Or we were allowed at the funerals only to see Fred Phelps and his followers show up to console us in our grief with signs that read, “God Hates Fags.”

When we asked for the same rights that everyone else enjoys we were castigated for wanting “special privileges.”  Our fight for the same rights that straight people take for granted was called the “Homosexual Agenda.”

We were blamed for threatening the institution of marriage by people who drunkenly wed in Las Vegas chapels, people who committed adultery and beat their wives and their children and then preached and pointed fingers from pulpits on television every Sunday.

We were the scapegoats and the punching bags for Catholics, Mormons, Muslims, Evangelicals, Fundamentalists, and Born-Again Christians, to name just a few. And our supposed allies couldn’t stand up for us because they might be mistaken for one of us, and that, as everyone knew, was the worst thing you could be.

We were barred from adopting the children of people who weren’t capable of parenting themselves, let alone someone else. We watched as people wrung their hands on television and cried that their children needed to be protected from us, that children needed to be sheltered their whole lives from even realizing that we existed.

Each and every one of us grew up surrounded by images, in magazines and television shows and movies and on every street in every city in the country, of straight people kissing and fucking and holding hands. But when we demanded the right to marry we were “shoving it down their throats.”

We were told by our families not to bring our partners home for the holidays, so we left our partners and flew home and sat around the dining table with people who pretended that we were something we weren’t, and that everything was fine when it wasn’t.

We read in newspapers  that “I-killed-the-faggot-because-he-made-a-pass-at-me” is a legitimate legal defense.

We were allowed to dress up straight men on television, and listen to straight women recount their relationship problems while we nodded sympathetically and told them that their shoes were fabulous. They let us plan their weddings. But the idea of a gay wedding was just too much, too soon.

We were told  that our love for each other was sick and immoral and undeserving of protection. They placed our love in the same category as incest and bestiality.

We were even blamed for Hurricane Katrina.

People who haven’t walked an inch in our shoes told their followers with unwavering conviction that we chose to be gay. That this distinction (this lie) therefore separated us from all of those who fought for their “legitimate” civil rights. That we didn’t even deserve to use the phrase “civil rights.”

We were told, decade after decade, by the political allies that we elected and supported, that we needed to be even more patient than we’d already been, that our time hadn’t come, that Americans weren’t ready for us to have the same rights as everyone else.

So we retreated from the scorn and the violence, and we built little communities, neighborhoods in cities where we could feel some measure of safety and belonging, however fleeting or illusory, where a few of us could feel bold enough to hold our partner’s hand when we walked down the street, in our neighborhoods, just a couple of square miles, here and there, scattered across the country.

And still they came. Over and over people who claimed that they were led by God came into our lives, came into our funerals and our bedrooms and our relationships, called us immoral and disgusting, arrested us, beat us, robbed us, and killed us.

And still they came. After we’d been given the right to marry, after we’d stood in line at City Hall, after we’d baked each other cakes and made cards and bought presents, after we’d taken each other’s photos and stood and witnessed our love for each other while surreptitiously wiping tears from our eyes, after all of that, they still had to come. They came into our private lives, and stripped away our rights.

And Friday night, after we’d lost at the polls, after we watched the entire world celebrate the “dawning of a new day,” after our rights had been eliminated, after we’d crawled back to our neighborhoods and licked our wounds and talked to each other about what we should do next, they came again, into our neighborhood, into the Castro, to try and save our souls.

They were just stupid kids, with the worst sense of timing ever, but they were led by “love,” right? They came into our neighborhood, after we had suffered such a defeat, to “worship and to sing.” How innocent it all sounds.

But why us, why the Castro? They came into our neighborhood because we’re still not good enough, we’re not worthy of respect, we are immoral and wrong and in need of their salvation, and their compassionate, Christian beliefs somehow prevented them from questioning the wisdom of their timing, in such a neighborhood.

And it comes as no surprise that after our backlash, after we’ve chased them out of our neighborhood, after we’ve gathered at their temples, and marched around their churches, after we’ve made public the already-public record of their campaign contributions, they wring their hands and cry to the cameras that we are the intolerant ones, we are the hostile ones, we are the ones denying them their simple human rights.

What’s surprising to me is that we waited so long to chase them out of the Castro.  That we haven’t chased them out a thousand times. What’s surprising to me is how tolerant we’ve been, for so many years.

Let me put it blunty. We’ve taken their abuse, and we’ve taken it some more, and then, just when we thought we’d taken enough, we took some more.

I’ve read on more than one gay blog that our anger is a dangerous emotion, that we shouldn’t act on it, that we should just ignore it. But if a bunch of drag queens hadn’t gotten pissed off and thrown some bricks nearly forty years ago, none of us would even have a gay blog. They’d put up with the scorn and the violence and the police raids for so many years, and something that night put them over the edge. Instead of meekly surrendering to yet another raid, something that night pushed them in a new and exhilarating direction. The first to fight back were the drag queens, hustlers, butch dykes, and street kids, who threw pennies, bottles, and bricks from a nearby construction site. The same types that some of us still want to push to the margins and keep from television cameras.

Just like some of us want to pretend that we can only reach our goals by acting like Ghandi.

The anger of the crowd at Stonewall swelled and turned, over the following weeks, into an urgency for broader activism. Within two years there were gay rights groups in every major American city. We’ve continued their work but grown complacent, and overestimated our so-called assimilation.

But Prop 8 is our flashpoint. For the first time we had a right taken away, one that we had enjoyed and honored for five short months. After 18,000 weddings a simple majority of Californians, preached to by their church elders, persuaded by deceitful commercials funded in part by non-Californians, stripped us of that right.

Lately, the conventional wisdom in the Castro said that the neighborhood was changing, losing its character, its gay essence. Too many straight people were moving in, with their children and their double-wide strollers. And really, wasn’t that to be expected? As we were more widely “accepted,” as we were assimilated into society, our neighborhoods were bound to change. To disappear.

Friday night reminded some of us, at least, how important our neighborhoods still are, and that we all have our flashpoints.

In a perfect world we could walk down the streets of the Castro and pass the preachers with only a glance, and continue on our way, and let them sing and worship and maybe even convert a desperate soul or two. In a perfect world we could all sit down at a table and talk peacefully and reach some diplomatic compromise. We could work with the communities and the religious representatives that have opposed us, and come to a better understanding of each other, and reach our common goals.

I’ve never seen that world, and I never will.

Sometimes it takes anger, along with diplomacy. Sometimes a few drag queens need to throw a few bricks for things to finally change, or for things to at least begin to change.

We are human, with human emotions, and one of those emotions is anger.
And sometimes we need to fight back before others begin to see that maybe we’re stronger than we appear, and maybe they need to back off, and question their methods. We need our anger. We need our outrage. We need to fight back. Our anger could take us farther, in the next few months, than we’ve gone in the last few years.

Most of the time, when we live in the gay ghetto, our oppressors are abstract: a flickering image on a television, a cluster of words in the newspaper. Rarely do we get to see them face-to-face, as some of us did that night in the Castro.

I still wrestle with my conscience. I don’t know what I recommend. I don’t know what, exactly, is the surest road to our goals. There is a part of me, maybe the larger part, that feels only relief that I missed out, the part of me that knows that what happened was ugly and divisive, the part that questions if our backlash served our goals.

But it’s the other part of me that’s writing this, the other part of me that scares myself, the part I want to let loose, if only in words, to give it room to stomp around and fume. The part of me that looks back over the history of civil rights, to search out what role anger played.

That part of me wishes that I had been there, that night in the Castro, to have, for a few minutes at least, real, flesh-and blood examples of our oppressors, to feel the rage ignite within me, and around me, to watch in both surprise and elation my peers shake themselves out of that quiet place of resignation, to watch everyone around me cross the line that we’ve kept ourselves behind for so many decades, despite what the world keeps handing us. For one night, for a few short minutes, to chase our enemies from our home, and watch them flee, flanked by cops in riot gear, until they disappear from view, and we can turn back to each other and celebrate.

I shared about thirty minutes of joy last night with the Manly Fireplug, eating at Blue restaurant after he got off work, both of us checking our phones throughout dinner for updates on the election, toasting each other with glasses of cream soda and strawberry lemondade when Obama won.

But when we joined the gathering throng outside Harvey’s restaurant, and as passing cabs honked their horns for the crowd, and as the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence flirted with my Fireplug, I scanned the televisions inside Harvey’s for news on Prop 8, and, well, we all know now how that one turned out.

For thirty minutes I dared dream that we would get everything we wanted last night. But of course we rarely get everything we want. I wish I could feel a little more of that joy that I see expressed in people’s faces on the front pages of every newspaper of our so-called “transformed” nation. I wish I could feel a little more a part of that audacity of hope that everyone’s talking about. But I don’t. It’s not that I need the stamp of approval from straight people on my relationship with the Fireplug. Nor do I care, despite my earlier post, about china patterns and bridal registries.

I do care that we continue to be scapegoated by others, that we get blamed by straight people for their own inability to save their marriages, that the Yes on 8 people used the pathetic “oh-what-about-the-children” argument to camouflage their bigotry. That we will continue to be expected to participate in, if not fucking plan, straight people’s weddings, while they continue to believe, deep in their hearts, that we’re not good enough for marriage.

Fuck domestic partnerships. If we learned anything from the civil rights era, it’s that separate but equal never means equal. By definition, to call marriage something else is unconstitutional.

It’s hard to swallow the fact that a good percentage of Californians who voted for Obama also voted for Prop 8. That other minorities checked “yes” on “eliminating the right of same-sex couples to marry.”  That no prominent politicians really came to our aid and proved themselves a leader. Including our new president-elect. That everyone wants to distance themselves from the homosexuals. That more people in California voted to protect animals than to protect the rights of gays.

And five, ten, twenty years down the line, when some of you people have your fucking epiphanies and realize that you were wrong, that you had indeed participated in discrimination, and that you have now changed your minds, well, spare me your tales of conversion. Go fuck yourselves.

So yeah my heart is heavy, and I’m beyond angry. My anger is my consolation and my fuel. Because we’re obviously going to need some fuel over the next few months and years.  Some days, this day in particular, I hate that we need the help of straight people to win our rights. I wish that we could do it all for ourselves, and take care of each other. I wish that we had more political power on our own, which is why I live in San Francisco, where at least the local politicians need to win our favor.

But we do need fucking straight people. And with each passing month, with each passing year, a whole crop of aging bigots die off, and a new crop of kids, who don’t see the big deal with gay people marrying, come of voting age. The truth is that the tide has already turned, and that all of the Prop 8’s will eventually die a horrible death, and the bigots will see that their numbers are actually dwindling, and that nobody cares anymore about the homosexual threat. Gay people will marry.

That day is coming. But it’s not today. So many people today will talk about transformation, and hope, and the dawning of a new era. But for some of us, nothing much has changed. Yeah, we’ll get there eventually. But today I have no patience.

Note from Dogpoet:  I’m happy to report that this post will be published in Fourteen Hills, a literary magazine put out by San Francisco State University. As part of that contract, I’ve agreed to truncate the essay and leave you just a taste, so that you’ll be more likely to buy the magazine when it comes out this winter. And for those of you in the Bay Area, I will probably be reading the essay at the publication launch in  December. Details to follow. And for those of you who’ve read the whole piece and commented in the last couple of months, you rock. Special thanks to my friend and fellow writer, Matthew Clark Davison, who helped usher this piece to Fourteen Hills.

I prop open the door to Folsom Street and blink against the sun for a second or two before retreating through the black leather curtains. Happy hour will be slow today, and an hour later only one customer, a regular who often dj’s at the bar on the weekends, keeps me company, sitting across from me on his bar stool, sipping a Jim Beam and Coke through a straw.

His lazy eye looks over my left shoulder as he tells me stories of the previous night. In his stories he is a fierce presence, whipping rowdy customers into shape with a single look, or a bullet-quick line. I sometimes wonder if these retorts aren’t shaped by wishful thinking after the fact, the kinds of things we think to say hours after the interaction, when our blood is only just beginning to cool. For in person he is a tad awkward if unfailingly helpful, dragging full kegs across the bar, checking coats, watching over the register when I need to take a piss.

A few minutes later both of us – anxious for more customers – catch sight of a movement just beyond the gap in the black curtains; a strange movement, slow, methodical, made by something that neither one of us can quite make out. There is a flash of leather, and of the bright petals of flowers, and what looks like a billowing cloak.

“What the hell is that?” I say.

“I have no idea,” he replies.

I take a step towards the door when the curtains part and she walks in…

“So there’s this guy I know,” says the man on the bar stool, his elbows resting on the scarred wood between us. “Let’s call him Frank. And last year Frank went to the White Party.”

It’s the man’s birthday, and he’s sitting with some coworkers, two women and another man, and I’ve just served them a dollar draft, a Corona with lime, a Newcastle, and a glass of Cabernet. His coworkers smile the way you do when you’ve already heard the story.

“Anyway,” he continues, “at some point during the weekend Frank meets this hot Frenchman, and the two of them go back to Frank’s hotel room. But of course Frank’s spent all his money on drugs and a plane ticket to Palm Springs, so he’s sharing the room with a couple of friends, who are trying to get some sleep. So Frank and the Frenchman slip into the bathroom to have sex.”

The man at the bar takes a sip of his draft. After his coworkers call it a night he’ll stick around, like usual, for a few extra hours, hanging out in the back room, having a smoke, bullshitting with the other regulars, watching the occasional blowjob, appearing every so often again for another pint.

“So after only five minutes, Frank’s friends, who aren’t yet asleep, watch as the Frenchman slips out of the bathroom, and out the front door. Frank emerges from the bathroom with a sheepish expression.

‘What happened?’ they ask Frank.

‘I’m so embarrassed,’ Frank says. ‘The Frenchman got down on his knees and was about to blow me when he got this strange look. Then, still kneeling on the floor, he looks up at me and says, “I am sorry to tell you, I don’t know how to say, you have…er…leetle animals.’”

The man and his coworkers laugh, repeating that last line to each other, “leetle animals,” one of their running jokes.

A moment later they’re laughing at the video playing on the front bar’s televisions, some tape I’d thrown into the VCR, of oiled musclemen in unitards and cowboy hats, working out on gym equipment in what looks to be someone’s unfinished basement.

“Yeah,” says one of the girls, deepening her voice, “after I put up some drywall in my unitard, I like to do a few dips on the machine, you know, get a pump going.” We don’t get too many women in the bar, and their energy changes the place, shedding a harsh and comical light across everything.

It’s only my fourth shift back at the bar where I worked nine years and another lifetime ago, and I have yet to master the VCR/dvd player, let alone get a sense as to what’s on each tape scattered on the back shelf, half of them with torn or missing or outdated labels. “Each tape is a new surprise,” I tell them, and they like that enough to want to buy me a drink.

But I gave that up nearly eight years ago, and despite the qualms I had about throwing myself back into the fire, I hadn’t once craved a drink. I only realized this later, after I’d left the bar after each shift. The thought to drink had never occured to me, despite being surrounded there by the gleaming bottles of Jack, Stoli, and Absolut.

I’d run into my old boss during IML, and told him I’d been thinking about bartending again, just to make some money while I worked on the book. Freelance writing hadn’t worked so well, using up the same kind of energy that I applied towards the book. Bartending used a different energy. And though he didn’t have any regular shifts for me, he hired me on this past week to help out during Dore Alley, and for Folsom in September, and now and again one of the guys would call and ask me to cover a shift.

I’d forgotten how nice it is to make money. Throughout graduate school I’d lived off savings and some money my mom left me when she died. Which should have been like heaven. But the burden – the guilt – of not working wore me down, and got in the way of a lot of pleasure.

But now I had a tall stack of twenties on my desk at home, and looking at that stack, and counting through it, and sorting them until all of the Jacksons faced the same direction, gave me immense satisfaction. Each shift I could literally watch myself earn money, as my tip bucket filled up over the course of the night, as I changed out a stack of ones for a crisp twenty during a lull. I earned that money, I’d think to myself, and that knowledge gave me a solid satisfaction that lasted throughout the next day.

Nine years ago, when I first started working the bar, the alcohol board cracked down on us because of our notorious back room. So the back room closed, and our clientele went down the street, to another bar whose back room stayed open, and my tips went with them. Those early shifts, from 4 to 10 pm, were long, dark, and lonely. The meth I snorted back then didn’t make for the best company.

But nine years later that bar down the street is gone, and our back room is open again, and I’m making good money. Still, the first few minutes are always a little strange, one or two lone figures shuffling through the black leather curtains, pausing while their eyes adjust to the dark, quietly ordering a dollar draft from me, then shuffling to the back bar, where real porn – not the musclemen in unitards – play on the screens, or to the back room, where they smoke and wait for the other regulars.

But sometimes they linger at the bar, like my first customer last night, an elderly Asian man in a raincoat who, I imagined, had stumbled into the wrong place. But he ordered a Seven-Up and sat down at the bar and watched the television screen, which showed a dvd someone had made, a slideshow of thousands of photos taken at the last Folsom Street Fair. Watching those slideshows – there must have been a dozen of those dvds on the back shelf – was always a little surreal for me, as I realized how many of those guys I knew, either by name or face, San Francisco growing smaller and smaller by the year.

I asked the man how his day was going.

He smiled and said, softly, “it could be better.”

I asked him what he meant.

“Oh, you know…” he said, smiling wistfully. “When you live alone, it can get very lonely. There is no one to talk to.”

Shit, I thought. Some lonely old straight guy wanders into a gay bar and I’m going to have to listen to his bullshit.

Of course I kept that to myself, and told him that I understood what he meant, and I stayed there with him, pulling out a bag of limes and a cutting board, because bartenders are, if nothing else, companions to the lonely.

He told me he lived just down the street, in a home for the elderly. I had to lean over the bar to hear him over the house music blasting over the speakers. I asked him how long he’d been in San Francisco. Nearly twenty years, he told me. He asked me where I was from. Minneapolis, I told him. His eyes lit up, and he told me that he went to med school at the university there. Turned out the guy’s a retired radiologist, who also taught at Harvard. I could tell from his smile that he liked to talk about those days. Less so the present time. I asked him if he had any friends where he lived and he shook his head.

“We always say that there are only two places you can go after living there,” he said.

I smiled and told him that I could guess those two places.

“Yes,” he said, watching me slice up a lime, “the hospital or the funeral home.”

A moment later my second and third customers of the day walked in, and the next time I looked up the man in the raincoat was gone. I imagined that he had slipped back out onto Folsom Street, but nearly an hour later he appeared again from the back room, his glass of Seven-Up now empty. He placed it on the bar and extended his hand, which I shook. He asked me my name, told me his, and thanked me for talking to him. He told me he hoped to talk to me again someday soon, and then he buttoned up his rain coat and pushed back through the leather curtains, out into the dusk.

Thanks for all the comments and emails and well wishes. It’s hard for me to believe that only two weeks have passed since that visit to the vet and the three-month diagnosis. The vet started Louie on three separate meds for his heart condition, at which point he pretty much stopped eating. Since he’d always been crazy for food, I couldn’t help but worry. I tried everything: peanut butter, hot dogs, eggs, salami. Sometimes he’d eat broiled chicken, so I bought a couple bags of frozen chicken breasts.

Nor did the meds seem to help much. His back legs continued to weaken. I started carrying him up the two flights of stairs in my apartment. Pretty soon I had to carry him down, too. But he was able to walk down the block to the park, and he’d wag his tail when I’d come home.

But he kept getting weaker, and pretty soon he couldn’t walk more than half the block on his own. On Friday I was home all day with him. He still hadn’t eaten, and I could literally see his heart pounding in his chest, off-beat and irregular. I don’t think he slept at all that day. He had a couple of miserable moments trying to navigate his weak back legs when going to the bathroom, at which point the Ex and I took him to the vet Friday evening.

The three vets on duty, two of which had seen him before, all agreed that there was only one option left. My gut had told me the same all day. Their consensus made the decision easier; still, I was prepared to dislike the vet who would give him the injection. But since she cried, too, it was hard to hold a grudge.

We signed a form asking for him to be cremated, and his ashes returned to us. And then we held Louie while he died. The only thing harder than that was leaving him there.

When I came home, I saw that the light in the stairwell, where I had carried Louie every day for the past two weeks, had burned out. And when I turned on my bedside lamp, the bulb flashed and burned out as well.

I’d had Louie for twelve years. He’d outlived most of my friendships, and all of my boyfriends. He’d seen me sober, then not, then sober again. I’d adopted him when I was twenty-four, which seems like a different lifetime now. In some strange way, his death felt like the death of my younger self, that optimistic boy in Minneapolis. I admit I can be a little dramatic.

For the first week after his diagnosis, I felt like I was drowning in regrets, for the ways in which I had not been a good dad to him, when I was drinking, when I had left him for grad school in New York. At one point during that first week, we were out on my back deck, and he hopped off the side to pee in the bushes, and his back legs gave out on him and he fell in the grass. I tried to lift him up, but he looked as though his pride had been hurt and he wanted to just lay there for a while. The phone rang inside, and for a minute I stood at my bedroom window, looking out at him. His back was to me, and he lay in the grass, in the sun, and my heart was breaking because I felt like there was already this line between us, over which I could not follow him. I wanted to know what he was thinking or feeling, but I’d never really know, because he was a dog, and he couldn’t tell me. Nor could I tell him how sorry I was for my past mistakes, and be sure that he’d understand.

After a couple of days, though, I could see how wallowing in regret was just a form of self-indulgence. No doubt he had forgiven me a long time ago. Still, I needed those last two weeks to forgive myself. Every time I carried him up and down those stairs, my heart broke a little more. But in that moment I was nowhere else; I was carrying him, I was with him, my mind focused on the task at hand, at holding him in a way that was the least discomforting to him. And it filled me with a sense of purpose. For the last two weeks I waited on him hand and foot, and treated him the way I wished I had always treated him.

There is a part of me that can’t imagine a world without Louie. There’s a part of me that still wants to believe, against all evidence, that if I love someone enough, they will be exempt from illness or death. There’s a part of me that winces when I get this sentimental. But Louie was one of a kind. Everyone says that about their dog, but in this case it’s true.

That night I replaced the bulbs that had burned out. I threw away his meds. I put his water and food bowls in the dishwasher. But I left his bed in my room for a little while longer.

I kept thinking the veterinarian looked awfully uncomfortable, kneeling on the hard cement floor before our little bench in Exam Room B. Granted, it was beautifully treated cement, in a beautiful clinic in a renovated warehouse down on Alabama Street, the same clinic where Louie had gone for his throat surgery not so long ago. In spite of the beautiful floors, and the exposed brick, and the gorgeous wooden support beams, however, they neglected to give the vets themselves decent chairs. Or so I imagined. Maybe they were only missing from Exam Room B, on this particular night, last night, the night she told the Ex and me that Louie had about three months left to live.

“Of course we can’t be certain,” she said. “That’s just based on the medical literature regarding his specific conditions.”

We nodded soberly. I had a small notebook in hand on which I had dutifly scrawled three symptoms of heart failure, after which I had grown a bit distracted and left the page blank. Later the Ex and I, driving back to his place with Louie in the Ex’s Scion Milktruck, agreed that we had both hoped that the dog we’d raised since he was twelve weeks old might live until he was fifteen, and not just twelve years of age. Somehow we’d both had “fifteen” in our heads, separately, I suppose since fifteen years sounds like a reasonable age for a good, healthy, ridiculously sweet dog to achieve. Or maybe we’d just hoped to keep putting off this kind of conversation for another year or two.

The vet was pretty, a young intern with her hair pulled back in a ponytail, who kept adusting the rims of her glasses as she spoke, looking down at her notes, then back up at us, dividing, I noticed, her eye contact equally between the two of us, rather admirably. She reminded me of someone that I couldn’t quite place. Louie, she said, had right heart failure and left heart failure. One filled his stomach with fluids, the other filled his lungs. Those were the two contributing symptoms. But the main, underlying problem was nearly elegant in its simplicity; Louie had an enlarged heart. In the cold exam room I was struck by the metaphoric connotations: my dog was dying because his heart was too big.

Later the Ex and I split a barbeque chicken pizza at his apartment on Twin Peaks. The Ex had carried Louie, all seventy pounds of him, up the two flights of stairs, since our dog’s hind legs were growing too weak. I myself only carried a ziplock baggie filled with three prescription bottles, and a print-out of instructions. I walked behind them up the stairs. Louie’s tail wagged underneath the Ex’s arm, the whole way up.

Louie drank a lot of water, ate his dinner, and then spent the next half an hour throwing up. I grew more than a little discouraged, seeing him that way. But when the pizza arrived he gazed up at me with those big brown “I would like to help you with your barbeque chicken” eyes. Clearly he still felt all right, especially once I gave him a bit of crust.

Tonight he’s at my place, a dog in high demand, licking his lips after a frozen liver treat.

And today it hit me: the vet reminded me of Diana Prince, Wonder Woman’s alter ego, as played by Linda Carter. The way she’d slip off her glasses and let loose her hair before spinning around like a supernova. Here she’s gotten herself into a predicament:

Sort of like our vet, seated on the floor. Any gay boy in his thirties can tell you that Diana Prince needed her arms and legs free in order to spin herself into Wonder Woman. Things are not currently going her way.

Of course today, three decades later, there are a ton of super heroes running around on big and small screens all over our tiny global village. This probably has less to do with an aching need for real-life heroes, and more to do with the universal desire to Have a Secret Super Power. Whether one uses it for the greater good or not is, of course, a matter of personal choice. But wouldn’t it be nice, to live in that world, to find, through clever means or just plain luck, a way to slip your bonds, to slip off your glasses with one hand, let down your hair with the other, and to spin, and spin, and spin, transformed with an explosion of pure light, into someone else, someone with enough power to change an unfortunate course of events.

I flew home over winter break, and found Bearbait at the baggage claim, where he’d been when my mother had been dying and I’d flown back from Minneapolis. During my time away I had missed him terribly. He had been, and still remained, my AA sponsor, and it wasn’t until I was thousands of miles away that I came to understand how much he had saved my life. And it wasn’t until I was in New York that I had what felt like a stunning revelation; Bearbait had come into my life six months before my mother died, and he’d taken on her role gently, unobtrusively, and faithfully. It was such an obvious connection, yet I’d missed it for over four years.

Now he waited for me at the bottom of the escalator, dressed in an absurdly tight black t-shirt. Since I’d been away he’d hired a personal trainer, something he’d been considering forever until one day, just before I’d moved away, I interrupted him in the middle of a conversation.

“Can I say something? As your friend?”

His eyes widened. “Uh oh.”

“You’ve been talking about getting a gym membership for four years.”

“Ouch.”

“God knows you’ve helped enough people. Go be selfish for a while.”

And he had. And I knew that he was wearing the t-shirt to show off his progress, because he wanted to impress me, and I was deeply, immeasurably touched.

“What the hell are you benching?”

He giggled, turned bright red, and hugged me.

A minute later I tried to extricate myself from his embrace. “Bearbait…”

“I’m not letting go, so shut up.”

He dropped me off on my little dead-end street on the hill. And when I stepped out of his truck and stood on the sidewalk outside my old apartment, all I could hear was the wind through the trees, and I breathed in the smell of damp eucalyptus leaves, and for the first time since I’d been away, I relaxed.

Bearbait rolled down his window. “Sweetie?”

“I’m having a moment.”

“I can see that. Pick you up in the morning?”

I nodded, and watched as he turned the truck around. All of that revelation business, about him being my mother, could wait.

Rain fell the entire week I was home, but I didn’t care. I sat on the couch in the living room looking out at that view. Across the way was a lush green hill, sparsely scattered with pale Victorians. Against the green hill the rain fell in curtains, twisting and curling in the wind. I watched for hours in the warm and quiet house, and I felt things settling within me, as if I’d been a jar of dirt and water shaken continually for months on end, and finally I’d been set down and left alone, and the layers of sediment could slowly drift down and fall into place.

And with the sediment other things drifted into place. With time I could build another family in New York. But I was tired, finally, of starting over every five years, tired of losing touch with people. What would it feel like, I wondered, to know friends for ten years? Fifteen? Louie yawned and stretched out across my feet, and I leaned forward and rubbed his ears. He was nearly eleven years old already, an old man. Where would I be when he died?

One night the Manly Fireplug and I squeezed into Bearbait’s pick-up and the three of us drove over to Cathedral Hill for an AA meeting. When we climbed out of the truck I glanced at my watch. “We have an entire hour to kill.”

“Let’s go save seats,” Bearbait said.

“Oh my God, an hour early?” I said. “You’re kidding right? They don’t save seats in New York meetings.”

Bearbait and the Fireplug glanced at each other. “Listen to him,” said Bearbait. “Like he’s a New Yorker now or something. I suppose we could grab some coffee.”

“You have to move back to San Francisco,” the Fireplug said as we set off towards Polk Street. “And keep Bearbait and I from turning into a couple of old women.”

Polk Street, a commercial strip on the edge of the Tenderloin, had been the city’s original gay ghetto back in the sixties and seventies. After the emergence of the Castro, Polk Street had grown tarnished, though gray-haired men still bought drinks for the hustlers at Rendezvous and the Giraffe until recent years, when the bars closed to make way for straight nightclubs and tapas bars. Here and there the last decayed storefronts remained. Trannies, meth dealers, young professionals, and immigrants shared the sidewalks. As we turned the corner we saw fire engines blocking off an intersection. Thick clouds of black smoke spilled from an old fish and chips restaurant and rose up against the night sky. I’d never seen a fire in person, and I lingered among a crowd of onlookers. The Fireplug disappeared around the corner and came back with a greasy slice of pizza, and the three of us leaned up against the outer wall of a laundromat and watched the building burn. The firemen aimed a hose at the roof, and sheets of water ran down the plate glass windows. One fireman swung his axe, the wooden storefront cracked open, and smoke pushed through the fracture. The Fish-n-Chips sign blackened before our eyes. Windows shattered, the firemen called to each other, and red lights spun in patterns over the street and across the faces of the crowd. Two cops waved cars through the intersection, bellowing at the drivers who twisted in their seats and gaped at the spectacle. The firemen leaned a ladder against the one-story structure, and a half dozen in full gear climbed up and lumbered across the tarpapered roof. They moved steadily, without hurry, their movements obscured by black smoke. Slender flames curled up along the doorframe.

The Fireplug turned and silently offered me a bite of his pizza. I shook my head and turned back to the fire. “That looks dangerous,” I said. Bearbait was quiet beside me, his shoulder pressed against mine. Standing beside my friends, I knew that I had already made my decision.

Back in New York, I found work as a research assistant to an author who’d written a biography that had sat on my bookshelf for several years. He’d recently been named one of New York magazine’s “Fifty Most Beautiful New Yorkers,” and I’d spend a few hours a week with him at his apartment in the Village. Patti Smith was his next-door neighbor. Once I showed up a few minutes early to find a film crew interviewing him for a documentary about gay artists who’d died in the AIDS epidemic, and while I waited I glanced through his bookshelves. Propped against the cracked spines of Isherwood and Cunningham was an engraved invitation to his fiftieth birthday party, hosted by Diane Von Furstenberg and Barry Diller. Another time he showed me a ballot that Vanity Fair sent him, to vote for the city’s “Best Dressed.” Later that afternoon we discussed my post-graduate career options.

“Well, you could go to Milan and be a model,” he said.

“I’m sorry?”

“I’m kidding,” he said. “That’s what I did.”

“Oh, right.”

“What are you doing this weekend?” he asked, as I pulled on my jacket.

“Reading.”

“You’re always reading.”

“I know. What are you doing?”

“I’m going to Kurt’s birthday party.”

“Kurt?”

“Kurt Vonnegut.”

“Oh, right. Tell him hi for me,” I said.

The next week I asked him about the party, and he pulled up a website on his computer: “New York Social Diary.” And there he was, a glass of red wine in hand, smiling next to Kitty Carlisle, Kurt, and Billy Collins.

What would Rick Bass do?

“You’re name’s in bold print,” I said.

Later that week Columbia sent me an email, asking if I planned on renewing my lease at the end of May. I wrote back, “no.”

The dream – of a new life in New York – burned quickly. Its death was surprisingly painless. I only felt relief, as if I’d just shed an enormous burden. I’d carried that dream with me for thirteen years, everywhere I went, and everywhere I went I’d held a tiny part of myself back, saving it for the dream. “What if I lived in New York?” I’d always wondered, looking at my surroundings with disdain. What a relief to know that I no longer had to “live up” to a city. I’d already found the one I wanted. Looking back, I wonder if I moved to New York not so much to pursue the dream, as to put it to rest.

The Manly Fireplug, of course, had cut my hair while I was visiting San Francisco. The barber in the second chair, Jeff, grew up in Brooklyn, and had a rugged, Harley-driving exterior, though I’d always suspected that there was something tender underneath. As the Fireplug buzzed my scalp, I asked Jeff how he was doing, and if he was dating anybody. “Nope,” he said.

“If I moved back to San Francisco, would you let me take you out on a date?” I asked.

He paused for a second or two. “Well, you know, there’s so many kinds of ‘dates’ in the gay world.”

“Like what?”

“Well there’s the coffee date, which could be just between friends. Us sober guys go on a lot of coffee dates. And then there’s the sex date. Self-explanatory.”

“Jeff…”

“And then there’s the date-date, which would be dinner and a movie with the possibility, but not the guarantee, of sex. And then there’s – ”

“Jeff…”

“What?”

“Just tell me what the fuck I should ask you when I move back.”

I’d never seen him speechless before. He may have actually blushed. “A date-date,” he said, quietly.

“Alright,” I said. “But just so you know, I don’t put out on the first date-date.”

He nodded. “That’s fine.”

Looking back, I realize now that my request contained a hidden motive: to make the Fireplug – who had sworn off boyfriends after his last relationshiop – jealous. I glanced in the mirror, to gauge his reaction. But if it did the trick, he hid it well, looking down at the back of my neck, clippers in hand. A moment later he caught my eye in the mirror and patted my shoulder. “New York’s been good for you,” he said.