When it came to sex, I used to be a closed book. This was due in part to my innate shyness, though growing up in Minnesota probably didn’t help. “Are you having a good time?” was a question I’d heard a dozen times in bed by various men, usually following a bout of what I thought were obvious noises of my approval. I went through life speaking, and groaning, at volume level 9, while the world heard me at 2.

A few twisted fantasies percolated in my head but I lacked the guts to ever talk about them until the ripe old age of 35, when I went straight from a sex life of pure vanilla to dating an International Mr. Leather.

Low volume was never a problem for Joe Gallagher. Even with his mouth shut he was communicating, like the first time I saw him, wearing a t-shirt that read: “I Make Boys Cry.” The T-shirt scared the crap out of me. My fantasies did not involve tears. But still I found him compelling. Some of us are just cursed with a need for bad boys.

We liked each other for more than just the physical. Still, we both harbored doubts about our sexual compatibility. I didn’t know what to make of leather, which seemed to me a world governed by a million mysterious rules, where stuffing a red hanky in the wrong pocket could lead to trouble. Membership in this world seemed to depend upon the right boots, the right chaps, and knowledge of rigid protocols.

As a kid I’d dropped out of private school because I hated the uniforms, and I found these rules stifling. I liked Joe for his irreverent streak – he’d carved out his own place in leather. He wore what he liked, when he liked, and made no apologies.

He showed me some essays written by Robert Davolt, a leatherman who’d died of melanoma in 2005. Davolt loved the leather community, but like all good writers he was a bit cantankerous. Leather, he argued, was a relatively young world, which began as a group of “outcasts, leftovers, the dark secret of the gay community.” He advised its members to question its “traditions,” and to distrust anyone who claimed to be a leather “authority.” He wrote often of leather as a group of people on individual journeys, with no two paths the same.

Like most of us, I looked for role models in all areas of my life, and here in leather I’d found two. Joe and Robert gave me the permission I’d always thought I’d needed, permission it turned out I had only to give myself.

I began my little journey by learning what I didn’t want. A Leathermen’s discussion group taught me that I didn’t want, for example, to walk one pace behind and to the left of Joe at all times, nor did I want to be in charge of his frickin’ Outlook Express. Fortunately, on these matters, Joe and I agreed.

At Joe’s side, I went to a lot of leather events and met a lot of kinky folk, most of whom I liked. Sometimes, though, I’d meet a boy who’d talk my ear off about protocols, questioning whether or not half the people at the event were “real” leather folk, or a titleholder who seemed to have gotten lost in the intricate local leather politics. I had no stomach for politics, and was wary of protocols, but I’d learned that leather was big enough to fit us all.

Prodded by Joe, I began to speak up in bed, to set in motion my fantasies, and to claim the kind of sex I’d always wanted. And though I’d long feared it, the first time he made me cry (during sex, that is) it came as a catharsis. In leather scenes, I watched others challenge their fears and their limits and come out exhausted, exalted, and content.

I felt this sense of liberation spreading into other areas of my life. I was less fearful, less shy, less concerned with what others thought. Still, I considered myself a fringe member at best until I heard an acquaintance dismissing leather as “just another form of drag.” My reaction surprised me with its strength: anger, yeah, but also a sort of protectiveness, for the people I’d met and the experiences I’d had. And pity, too, since the acquaintance was cutting himself off from trying something new. My reaction told me that maybe, in my own way, I did belong.

It was more than a little humiliating. Understandable, yes: common, no doubt. But still humiliating. The next morning I woke light-headed and thunder-pulsed, a dizzy sensation that would cling to me for the next seven days. My dreamy doctor prescribed an echocardiogram and then ran off to Bear Week in Provincetown. I holed up, ate massive plates of pasta for the first time in months, wrote nothing, and watched reruns of Veronica Mars, missing the final practice before play-offs.

I woke the first morning of play-offs still light-headed and quick-pulsed, but determined to at least show up for moral support. The winner of the play-offs would qualify for the Gay World Series in glamorous Columbus, Ohio. But our team had finished the season fifth out of seven teams. To win playoffs we’d have to win six out of seven games over the next two days, a doubtful proposition.

Our first game was against a team we’d been 0 for 2 against during the season, so I figured I’d rest my dizzy head while warming the bench, shouting out the occasional Inferno cheer and offering my condolences afterwards.

Yeah, right. We fucking won.

And watching that felt so good that I played the next three games, poorly again, though the rest of my team did well enough that we won two of them. We still had a shot the next day. The adrenaline seemed to knock the dizziness from my head, and I went home that night feeling pretty damn good.

I came back the next morning, the Manly Fireplug in tow, just as dizzy as before. Worse, in the intervening night I’d had a Mildly Traumatic Event. I need to stay vague about this Mildly Traumatic Event for various reasons, so my apologies to you for kinda sorta leading you on.

I say mildly because no one was killed. I was not hurt. The Manly Fireplug was not hurt. No family or friends or little red terrier were hurt. But the memory of the event clung to me over the night and through the next day, the second day of play-offs. And between the memory of the event and the return of my dizziness, I was one bummed dude. I was sick and scared and stuck in my head, and I did the one thing I’d never done, all season long.

I gave up.

I told the coach the dizziness was back, keeping the other details to myself, and spent the rest of the day avoiding her eye. I hung back.

And watched my team win the whole fucking thing.

Yep, we won the next three games, the last two in a row against the top-seeded team, and we routed them.

It was thrilling. It was heartening in a way I can hardly describe. It was one of the most extraordinary experiences I’ve ever had with another group of people, and I’m so glad that I was there.

The thrill, of course, was tempered, for all the reasons you might expect. I had wanted so badly to take part, to pull my weight and help my team reach that unlikely victory. But I couldn’t do it. I went home that night with a complicated heart.

The dizziness cleared. My dreamy doctor is still, as I write this, at Bear Week, and I have yet to learn the results of my test, but my symptoms have cleared up, and yesterday I drove down to the batting cages and swung until the sweat flew from my arms.

And next month I will travel with my team to Coumbus where no doubt I will spend most of the week warming a bench or two, something I will be happy to do, cheering on my team.

Thank you, D league softball, for giving me a little more confidence, even if I sometimes lose track of it. And thank you Inferno, my team, my comrades, you unlikely band of rag-tag misfits, for proving that you can still come from behind and kick some major ass. Flame on!

Since then I’ve stayed stuck in my head. Sometimes something hurls at you through the cover of night, colliding with you and jarring you awake. Last weekend was like that. I had somewhere somehow once again lost my way.

I’d stopped working on my book, had taken up with softball and the gym and looking good. I get that way sometimes. It’s hard for me to balance the physical and the cerebral, the short-term gains of hot pecs with the long-term gains of creative expression. I don’t do balance well, but then one does not develop a daily affection for crystal meth, say, if one has a talent for moderation. I find it easier to lift weights than to write a paragraph, and sometimes I get lazy.

And though I’ve become a better softball player, in secret I know the score. I will never be a better player than a writer. And I need to write. Which is rather too bad, in matters of paycheck and practicality. But it’s too late now, that die was cast way too long ago.

It took me a few days to get back to this, to get less scared and less stuck. To turn off Veronica Mars and sit down and log off and open a new document, a blank white screen, the blinking cursor that I chase with one word, then two.

“Oh come on,” I said, “I’m not THAT big.”

“I guess I still think of you as that skinny fifteen-year-old,” she said.

“So do I,” I said. “Which is why I now look like this.”

I’d been a scrawny kid, the kind of scrawniness that perfect strangers felt compelled to comment on when meeting me for the first time. My first year of college I was an inch shy of six feet tall and weighed 128 pounds.

I now weigh 190, due in no small part to the gym. I realized the other day that I’ve now been working out over half my life. But it wasn’t until the last couple of months, when I changed what I ate, that I started seeing the results I’ve always wanted. Turns out all those guys telling me to up my protein actually knew what they were talking about. Go figure.

I’ve been kicking around in my head this subject of change for a little while, after something profound happened to me.

That day I was walking from my apartment to the museum lot at the end of my street where I’d parked my car, about 100 yards. Blue skies, the air cool, Finley trotting just ahead of me, sniffing the ground, his little tail wagging. And for a moment I felt a particularly tender love for him, for his enthusiasm and his charming little strut, and that feeling inside me spread out to the day, and to my life.

I realized that I was happy.

This may be the kind of feeling, or awareness of feeling, that other people have all the time. But for me it was a revelation.

Most of the time I worry. I live in tomorrow (a strange position for a memoirist, but I never claimed to be consistent.) I struggle with impatience, full of ambition and thwarted by doubt. I think that I should have met all of my goals by the age of 25. And now I am 39.

But for those 100 yards I felt content.

Of course my next thought was, “Why?”

The most obvious factor was this thing I have going with the Manly Fireplug.  We’ve only been back together a few short weeks, and I’m reluctant to say this out loud, but a couple of days ago we linked our Facebook profiles again so I think I can risk it: today we are happy together. I now recommend breaking up as a terrific method for reflection and re-prioritization. Things are better than they ever were before, and they were pretty damn good before. That goes for sex too. Just sayin’.

The second factor was with writing. At some point in the last few months, after a string of career rejections, my approach to writing shifted. I’m giving up trying to impress readers. I just want to reach them. Sure, I still hope to impress  – c’mon, I’m a writer – vanity and insecurity come with the job. But the contortions I twisted myself into, trying to impress, didn’t serve me so well.

Third, I look good.

I guess what I felt, coming together in one short walk down the street, was a comfort inside my skin, a strange sensation for me. And upon further reflection I could trace it all back to D league softball.

I like to poke fun at D league softball, because really, the stakes couldn’t get any lower. But that is why I am continually amazed at what it has done for me. I told you already how bad I was in the beginning, how bad it felt being so bad in front of so many people, and how being so bad in front of so many people made me want to cut my losses and run.

I’d joined in the weeks after the Fireplug and I had broken up, when I’d already felt like a failure; I’d failed at love and I’d failed at writing and now I’d failed at sports.

I needed to flex some muscle. So I stuck it out, hit the practices, hit the batting cages in my spare time, and over the course of the season transformed from the guy who could reliably strike out every time at bat, to the guy who could reliably get on base every time at bat. I’m no D league rock star, just a solid member of the team, which for this season is okay.

That subtle transformation fed my confidence, and that confidence spread into other areas of my life. I had a stronger sense of myself as a man, of what I wanted out of love, out of sex, out of writing. All because of D league softball.

And if D league softball could tap unknown potential inside me, then what else did I contain?

Of course I still harbor doubts, mostly about my abilities. Cynics say, “People don’t change.” But they can, and they do, though only with tremendous effort. For the past three months I’ve watched the Fireplug transform into a more open, loving man, his changes – both big and small – unfolding on a near-daily basis, and that transformation astounds me, humbles me, makes me want to hold on to my front row tickets.

And I keep circling this subject of change, trying to figure it out. I suppose it gives me hope. Maybe, as I close in on forty, I need reassurance that change is still possible, that as long as I draw a breath I can keep throwing aside, year by year, a couple of the doubts that I lug around – buying myself a few more yards of this hard-won feeling.

(This story, or at least a version of this story, will appear in the next issue of Pink Mince. I’ll post links when it’s available. I’ve used a few paragraphs here from previous posts, so that I could create a stand-alone story about my experiences backstage at the Walter Van B show. But most of it is new.)

hey man - came across your profile and im helping a friend restage the walter van beirondonck show may 9th in SF at the berkeley art museum. you’d be perfect to be in the show - its all muscle bears modeling. should be a lot of fun – the team is coming from antwerp. cheers!

Walter Van who? I followed a couple of links and watched a bunch of bears dressed in funny pastels lumber up and down a runway in Paris.

I have a complicated relationship with the whole bear thing. I like to think I’m above labels (I mean, we all went to high school, we all grew up on John Hughes movies). Even my profile on Big Muscle Bears points out that I prefer to be called a “dingo.”

And yet underneath this thin veneer is another very thin veneer. Someone called me a muscle bear – me, the guy who came to college an inch shy of six feet and weighing 128 pounds soaking wet. That was 65 pounds ago, but some things, like high school, stick with you.

About Walter’s clothes: let’s be honest. They’re ridiculous. Cartoonish. I couldn’t see the point of dressing up bears in clothes they would never wear and marching them around the lobby of the Berkeley Art Museum. But then high fashion is a foreign culture to me. I live in laid-back San Francisco, where my only stab at fashion is switching out my Levi’s with Diesel. But like any gay dude familiar with reality television, I know that models don’t get to choose the clothes. Zip your lip, put it on, and make it look pretty.

Aside from a lingering prepubescent need for attention (oh, like you don’t have one, too) I had other reasons for accepting the (unpaid) musclebear model invitation. I’m less adventurer than homebody, so I tend to lack for raw writing material. I figured, looking back, I’d feel more regret if I turned down the invitation than if I accepted it. Plus I’d been racking up a few months of job-related rejections, and my ego needed soothing.

So I went along for the ride.

As news of the model scouting spread through my circle of friends, a kind of guarded anxiety took hold. The prospect of being picked was impossible to take seriously. Everyone made jokes. But underneath, oh, underneath… well, that’s what this story is about.

My first clue of trouble came with the fitting. That’s what they called it, in the beginning, when the Walter crew was still a few bears short. But as the days ticked down the “fitting” day was changed to “casting” day. We’d have to audition; a sure thing turned into one big maybe.

So I showed up for the casting, at a clothing shop in Hayes Valley, with two voice fighting in my head: “Just a goofy fashion show” battled with “Please deem me worthy.” Head versus heart, ego versus id. Big Mike versus Little Mike. I am not proud of the anxiety, the vanity, the keening insecurity, but to tell you otherwise would be to lie.

So both Mikes met Walter, a burly Belgian bear of a man, who shook my hand warmly. A casting girl asked if I could take off my shirt for a picture. Walter and his assistant looked me over, murmuring to each other in a language I was glad at the time not to know. They had me walk up and down the length of the shop, then huddled together with a binder full of photos from his Spring 2010 line, glancing between me and the photos.

“Would you be willing to come back in underwear?” Walter asked.

“Um,” I said, picturing myself walking down Hayes Street in nothing but briefs. “What do you mean, ‘come back?’”

He apologized for his English. “For the finale. Twenty of the models will come back to the runway in underwear. Some do not want.”

No doubt the wise ones. “Sure,” I said. Another assistant led me away to change into a lime green poncho, t-shirt, and cargo pants, with brightly colored sneakers 18 sizes too big for me. I was led back to Walter, who nodded his approval. The casting girl took my photo and then handed me a sheet of paper with directions to the museum.

“So I’m in?” I asked. She nodded.

Relieved, I drove home and wasted no time letting the online world know about it, in suitably self-deprecating terms. “Who can resist a supermodel musclebear in a lime green poncho?” I asked. “Absolutely no one, that’s who!”

On Sunday I made my way to the museum across the bay. Walter’s crew had set up an impromptu back stage on a loading dock. I like to think I’m at least somewhat unique in appearance, a misconception that became clear the moment I opened the door and found thirty-seven bearded men looking back at me. In the week before the show I’d compromised my usual look, by growing my beard longer than usual, to better my chances at casting. To better fit in. And now, well, I fit.

I joined the guys, a few of whom I knew. Below us, lining the dock’s bay, stood rolling racks of Walter’s pastels. Beside us on a bulletin board hung all of our pictures in the order we’d walk. I noted with amusement my number: 13. Underneath some photos were handwritten notes: “Underwear OK,” or “Haircut.” At the end of the loading dock worked a hair stylist. Next to him a make-up girl began to brush the shine from 38 foreheads. I noted with relief that my page was not marked with “haircut.” The Manly Fireplug would have put the stylist down like an old dog.

We spent the next hour or so waiting in a stairwell between runway run-throughs around the museum’s lobby, its space dominated by an enormous orange sculpture, whose edges we skirted in time to a loud thumping beat. “Faster, please,” an assistant murmured to me. At one point Walter appeared in the stairwell. “That was good. But please this time try not to look like you are being punished.” In between runs we told each other to smile with our eyes.

Afterwards the underwear models had a separate rehearsal. Walter appeared again in the stairwell. “We have bags of cotton balls,” he said. “When it comes time to change you may stuff them down the front of your briefs.”

The models cheered.

“But please, tasteful amounts. The Paris models – they got carried away.”

Back in the loading dock the first few bears changed into the pastels, aided by a small pack of dressers, slender black-clad juniors from the local fashion school, who attended to the naked burly men with admirable professionalism. I wondered if, when signing up, they had expected to come so close to so much back hair.

Three women with pink bakery boxes pushed through the crowd. Some bear yelled “DONUTS!” and, fearing for my life, I ducked out of the stampede’s path. Frankly I was starving, having come straight from a softball game. But I’d been working hard at losing my gut and feared – irrationally, yes – that a single donut would swell my waist during the underwear march. As a gay dude I thought I knew poor self-image, but high fashion modeling was like an advanced placement course in anorexia.

Next to me a friend peered at the bulletin board. “There’s a name here,” he said. “Crossed out.” Under the black marker I could just make out the name of one of his friends, a guy who, my friend whispered to me, had just expressed his anger at the Walter crew in a Facebook post. He’d been cast, then replaced at the last moment.

All day similar whispers had floated around backstage of other friends. Facebook and blog posts, tweets complaining about the way they’d been treated by Walter and the casting folks. Disorganization may have been inevitable – curators and PR folks had taken over the job of model scouting. The casting requirements had been vague and poorly relayed. One announcement – which I’d never received – called only for guys over six feet and 200 pounds. Guys scouted by the casting people online, guys told they’d be perfect for the show, took time off from work to come to Hayes Valley, where they were quickly dismissed as too short. Too thin. Too smooth. Guys pushed onto roller coasters – cast, then fired, then cast again.

All of this par for the course in the world of fashion. Certain jobs – modeling, acting, writing – come with rejection. It’s the contract you sign when you pursue that work. But the men scouted for the Walter show were not models; they were “real men” from the “real world:” software developers, bartenders, ad men. The problem with casting guys from the real world is that they come with real world feelings. Guys who – unlike me – called themselves bears and cubs without a trace of irony, who’d found a home in the beer busts and backyard barbecues of the furry crowd. Guys now told they weren’t quite bear enough.

Here in San Francisco fashion culture had collided with bear culture, and these guys were the roadkill. “Get over it,” you could say. “It’s just a stupid fashion show.” Oh but underneath. Who among is immune to the pain of rejection– whose soul wasn’t forged in the howling gymnasiums, bitter playgrounds, and drunken keggers of our pasts?

These guys – some of them my friends – clouded my thoughts, as if someone had thrown Walter’s pastels into the wash with a bunch of darks. In the two days between casting and runway, I’d had time to measure my growing discomfort, and to mull my complicity. Was I condoning all of this, by taking part?

The relentless focus on appearances was wearing me down. I wanted to get back to my little life, back to words, which I could rearrange on my own, putting forth an image – a self – I could control.

I dressed while an assistant stuffed paper into the toes of my clown shoes. I pushed cotton balls down the front of my briefs and closed my eyes while the make-up girl blotted my face. I pulled up my cargo pants and Walter adjusted the cuffs. I tugged at the lime green poncho.

We lined up, and the music began. The lobby was packed with fashion folks, fashion students, and friends of the models. Some of whom no doubt had been deemed “not quite right” for the runway. I had expected the quiet reserve of the runway audiences I’d seen on television, but as we marched down the ramp the crowd roared. They cheered for our goofy spectacle, for the cartoon clothes, for their friends.

The show flew by. Backstage the dressers ripped off our clothes in time for the underwear finale. We pulled up our socks and patted our guts. We checked our postures. And we marched out, half-naked, into the void.

I felt liberated. Once you’ve walked around a crowded museum in cartoon briefs, nothing can stop you.

We circled the lobby, raw, uncovered, acting braver than we really felt. Cheered on by bears and cubs and wolves and otters. Guys who’d showed up for their friends, wanting to be bigger-hearted than they really felt. Dingos and twinks and art fags. Guys with bald spots and bad tattoos. Guys in flannel, guys in black. Guys with day jobs and no jobs and unspoken dreams. Guys who thought they’d left all that behind. Guys cut down the middle between scared boy and grown man. All of us, I mean to say. All of us crashing the show.

Leslie Buck, the designer of New York City’s most iconic coffee cup, has died. The Times summarized the appeal of the cup – the Anthora, it was called  – in today’s most-emailed article:

It was for decades the most enduring piece of ephemera in New York City and is still among the most recognizable. Trim, blue and white, it fits neatly in the hand, sized so its contents can be downed in a New York minute. It is as vivid an emblem of the city as the Statue of Liberty, beloved of property masters who need to evoke Gotham at a glance in films and on television.

A few years back I wrote here about that cup, explaining its effect on me in the years before I’d moved to New York:

I would see those little blue cups on the big screen and burn with quiet longing; a desire that I knew I’d eventually realize, if it didn’t kill me first. And now I’m here. And for the first month I’d catch sight of them, in a woman’s hand on the subway, laying near the top of a garbage can, and the sight would fill me with deep satisfaction. I wanted one for my apartment, so I could look at it everyday and remind myself of my accomplishment; if nothing else, I’d at least tried my luck in the greatest city on earth.

Afterwards a couple of very nice readers sent me porcelin versions of the Anthora, which I brought with me when I realized that New York was not for me, and moved back to San Francisco. They sit on my desk; I use them for pen holders and loose change. In the movies the Anthora symbolized to me my future in New York; now those cups on my desk represent my past, those two years I struggled to acclimate, two years I won’t ever regret.

San Francisco is home now; the place I’ve lived the longest. It fits me like an old flannel shirt. There’s disadvantages to such comfort, when a city stops challenging you. But for me they’re outweighed by the rewards. I can write here, for one. But mostly I can breathe, a basic necessity for life.

I tried to think today of another symbol, something that summed up San Francisco to me before I ever moved here.

My then-boyfriend and I visited San Francisco in the spring of 1995. We stayed with his ex, who lived in an apartment on Twin Peaks, with a view of the city so stupendous that it worked its way into my marrow. I thought everyone in this city must have such a view, the kind of faulty logic that overcomes you when you visit a place on vacation.

Those cool, easy mornings, the million varieties of foliage blooming in the narrow yards and cracks between the pale Victorians, the walk down the hill to the Castro. All those handsome men. I’d just emerged from another Minnesota winter, and I was susceptible to this new city’s charms. How could a place be so beautiful?

We stayed out all night dancing at the Universe, and that morning as dawn broke we stopped into a bakery just down from the Castro Theater. On impulse I picked out an apple fritter – it was, in that moment, the most delicious thing I had ever tasted.

We moved to San Francisco the next year. My boyfriend and I only lasted a couple more years together, and that bakery closed long ago, but I can still taste the apple fritter, I think of it and all the romance of that week comes rushing back, the way this place worked on me, and into me.

“Like Marcia Brady?” I asked.

“Exactly. Then I’d never be a teen model.”

Somehow this all ended with me taking on the personality of Jan Brady, left at home while the prettier one was off modeling in the desert of Joshua Tree. But since part of our unconventional romance means that I can still spend time on sites  like Big Muscle Bears, I went there to soothe my lonely soul.

Then I received a message:

hey man -
came across your profile and im helping a friend restage the walter van beirondonck show may 9th in SF at the berkeley art museum. you’d be perfect to be in the show - its all muscle bears modeling in the show. should be a lot of fun – the team is coming from antwerp for the show. cheers!

Walter Van who? I followed a couple of links and watched a bunch of bears dressed in funny pastels lumber up and down a runway in Paris.

I had no idea why they were restaging this show at the Berkeley Art Museum, but I didn’t really care: his invitation included the words “muscle bears,” “modeling,” and “you’d be perfect in the show.”  Now, I have a complicated relationship with the whole bear thing. I like to think I’m above labels and categories (I mean, we all went to high school, we all grew up on John Hughes movies, we all know categories.) And even though I have a profile on Big Muscle Bears, it points out that I prefer to be called a “dingo.”

And yet underneath this thin veneer is another very thin veneer. Someone called me a muscle bear – me, the guy who came to college an inch shy of six feet and weighing 128 pounds soaking wet. That was about 70 pounds ago, but some things, like high school, linger.

They wanted me, Jan Brady, to be a runway model. And since it’s inevitable that designers everywhere, after seeing this show, will instantly grasp the benefits of using ONLY muscle bears in the future, I’m confident that this will lead to a whole new career. Screw the waifs. We’re taking over.

Of course I’ve only been approved by the Berkeley team. The Antwerp team still needs to weigh in. And since they are still looking for muscle bears, you too could be an unpaid furry runway model. Just send me an email and I’ll point you in their direction. But if you take my spot you will go down.

Marcia texted me from the desert: Whew, what a long day. Being a model is HARD.

In about two seconds I texted her the details of my new career. Jan, I wrote, Will rise.

Since I’ve been a part of the D league all of two months, I’m steering clear of that can of worms. But it did make me realize that I have no close straight male friends, and I haven’t had any since college. Due to living in San Francisco, where you can make your life as gay as an Easter bonnet.

Back in college I met Jake, a straight guy who drove a pick-up and took off one weekend a month for the Marine Reserves. He wore a crew cut and wife beaters, and liked to poke fun at his fish-out-of-water reputation at our school, known for its retro-hippie culture. He came from a Florida town called Jupiter, which he made sound like a glorified trailer park, and he spoke with a small-town drawl that didn’t quite count as southern.

He’d transferred to New College during my third year, and I used to watch him walk around campus with his bow-legged gait. Our school had all of 600 students, and there wasn’t much else to look at. By fate he was given the gayest roommate ever, a hairdresser from Jacksonville, whom I’d befriended. I invited myself over to their room a couple of times and did my best to charm Jake with my gay-but-totally-non-threatening demeanor.

That year Act-UP boys were shaving their heads and walking around the East Village in hot pants and combat boots, and I followed them through the pages of magazines. When I told Jake I’d been thinking of buzzing my head, he insisted on helping. Every week or so I’d sit in a chair in his bathroom. Jake would grab a pair of clippers from his regulation footlocker, strip down to his olive-colored boxers, and work on my head. Every once in awhile he’d absently brush his formidable package against the back of my neck.

That was pretty much how it went for us. I spent the next couple of years lusting after a boy who genuinely liked me, a boy whose motives I often had reason to question. He liked talking with me one-on-one, picking me up in his truck and driving me out to some deserted beach at night, where we’d joke around and trade war stories from our dismal love lives. Sitting next to me under a tree he told me that I had a very distinct scent. I don’t think he found it offensive.

He didn’t do such a great job buzzing my head; I bought my own pair of clippers to trim down the rough patches when I got home, but I never told him. Those weekly cuts were among the most erotic moments of my young life – the seed for my later love of barbers.

Jake knew how I felt about him, and one night after he’d had a couple of beers he confessed that he’d been having strange feelings. He told me how much he liked me and that he found himself wondering what it would be like to sleep next to me. Not sleep WITH me, NEXT TO me. Of course this thrilled me, but his own confession troubled him – I think it made him question too many things, and he got so anxious that he nearly threw up. I thought our friendship had come to an end that night.

But that awkwardness faded pretty quick. Another evening, before a party I was hosting, he came over to my place and suggested that we take a nap, so that we’d have the energy to stay up late. As we lay side-by-side in bed he stroked his bare chest and remarked on the curliness of his chest hair. “Here, feel it,” he said, and grabbed my hand. He laid it on his chest but after a second I snatched it away. So close to what I’d been wanting for so long, and so scared to fuck it up, I rolled over on my side, away from him.

I graduated in the spring of ’93. The night before I left Florida for good he drove us down to the bayshore. “There’s been so many times,” he told me, “that I wished I were gay, because I get along with you better than any girl I’ve ever known.” I silently cursed our fate, but his words weren’t lost on me. They made the night and its memory bittersweet.

Over the years I’ve regretted the moment that I took my hand away from his chest, sure that I’d blown the only chance he’d given me. A couple of times in a fit of nostalgia I tracked him down and we exchanged emails. He’d ended up with a nomadic life, working as a federal firefighter, hanging his hat in various cheap motels long enough to put out wildfires. As far as I could tell he’d stayed straight, and though I always wanted to ask him about his motives with me back in college, I left the subject alone.

I think I might have done the right thing, taking my hand away. Jake wanted something other than sex from me – he wanted a kind of intimacy, the kind rare between men, the kind more easily pursued in college, after we’ve left our families and younger selves behind, and before our identities have calcified. He’d given me a type of affection I’d never felt before or since, something made sweeter by the boundary between us.

Slugger is what the Manly Fireplug called me after the game yesterday. I’m pretty sure Slugger is reserved for those who hit homers, but I’m taking it now and running with it. Sort of a wish-fulfillment thing.

I left the Fireplug out of the post about hitting my first single, but for the casually observant reader it should have been clear a few weeks back that he hasn’t exactly disappeared from view.

But I’ve been cautious, holding back from stating the obvious: the Fireplug and I are…doing…something.

Avoiding labels, mostly, which is probably easier in San Francisco than anywhere else, since the insanity of the local real estate market tends to keep gay couples in various stages of proximity. They break up and then morph into roommate/brothers, a path straight couples never seem to consider an option.

But that is one of the beauties of being gay. You can fuck with the status quo, and I think the Fireplug and I ran into trouble trying to emulate straight couples. For a few months a couple of years ago marriage mania swept the California gays, those six short months when we had access to…well, you know the story by now.

I like to think of myself as a hardy individual, immune to fads and frenzies, but in retrospect I think we both got a little caught up in the mania. Add to that the romance of a medical emergency, and marriage seemed like the right path. We meant well.

We had other dynamics at work, too, which is why I’ve been cautious. We all know couples who split, get back together, and then split again for the exact same reasons. All I can do is muster some courage and hold tight to at least one reliable cliché– one day at a time – while letting the ice around my heart melt a bit. Who knows where this will go, but if nothing else we have a lot of love for each other, and for that some people would, like, donate a kidney.

In yesterday’s post about hitting my first single I told you about the moment just after crossing home plate, when I stood in the dugout, turned away from the field and my teammates as I tried in vain to hold myself together. What I left out was the Fireplug, who stood on the other side of the chain link fence from me, who gripped my fingers through the fence as the tears got the best of me. I didn’t have to tell him why.

Yes, we are talking D league gay softball – the stakes couldn’t have been lower. The D league’s just for fun, right?

At 39 years of age I’ve come to the conclusion that you can either beat your head against the wall trying to turn into one of those “just for fun” guys, or you can channel that ruthless bastard and deal with the sometimes painful fallout as you go.

So I hit every practice with focus, if not finesse, and hit the batting cages on my own time three weeks in a row. I listened to my coach and the other players. I tried my best to learn while exhibiting a lot of failure.

I steadily, if very slowly, improved at practice, hitting and fielding a little more reliably each time. But that was at practice. Games were another matter. My breathing changed at games; all my air came from the top of my lungs, tight, like my demented heart was wringing out my chest. I never got on base.

My goal was simple: hit a fucking single. One base. One little base, and we’d go from there. Our next two games were rained out, so I had a little more time to both practice and freak myself out with building dread.

At today’s game I got two times at bat. The first time I walked; my one success there was that I didn’t swing at any bad pitches, but the relief was minor. It was a spectacular day in San Francisco, warm, blue-skyed, at a field down in the Marina. I barely noticed.

My second time at bat came in the last inning. We were down by four runs. We had runners at first and second, with two outs. If I struck out the game would be over. If I popped up the game would be over.

I stepped into the box, my mouth dried out. I racked up two balls and one strike. After each pitch I’d take a look at the bat in my hands and try to fill the bottom of my lungs. Then I’d breathe out and look at the pitcher. Eye on the ball, eye on the ball, all the way in, see the ball hit the bat…

The ball hit the bat.

A nice solid grounder – I dropped the bat and took off, pumping my legs, running through the first base. Safe.

I did not strike out. I did not end the game. I hit a fucking single.

The next batter got me to second, and the next batter got me home. I crossed that plate feeling like a D league God.

We lost the game by one point, but I hardly cared. I stood in the dugout, my legs trembling. All of that pressure I’d put on myself. All of that work. All of that worry. I’d merely hit a single, in D league gay softball. But this wasn’t ever just about D league gay softball. It was about taking a risk at something for which I had no natural talent. It was about courting risk: the risk of disappointing others, the risk of looking stupid in public. The risk of working your ass off towards a goal but still failing.

I felt like I’d broken a curse. I’d proved to myself that I could hit a ball at a game. It was all a bit much for me; I’m here to tell you that yeah, I got choked up. But I turned and faced away from the field, since there’s no crying in softball.

I’d moved in there out of desperation, the first place to take both me and my dog. A co-worker whom I had disliked on sight was the master tenant, and he took me in with an equal lack of enthusiasm. He moved through work, and the new flat, like a black hole, sucking up all the surrounding energy. He practiced for his role in an amateur opera company (emphasis on “amateur”) in his little bedroom across the hall, then would sit down in the living room, on the other side of the pocket doors from my room, and catch up on reruns of the Golden Girls. He rarely spoke to me, but every day he would cackle in front of that television.

He’d adopted two cats and two dogs from the animal shelter where we worked. His dogs were skittish and annoying, so the cats spent all their time in my room. My roommate rented out the third bedroom to a couple who also adopted a dog, this one with severe separation anxiety, who would howl and chew through their bedroom door every time they left it alone. The cats were old, and one night while the dog chewed on the door down the hall, one of the cats up and died while lying in my lap.

Sober all of six months, I was one raw boy. My mom was dying and in a couple of months I’d test positive. In the past three years I’d burned a lot of bridges and had little to show for my thirty years besides my dog and a case of undertreated depression. I didn’t have a car back then, and after work I’d walk the stretch of 18th Street, from the Mission to the Castro, South Van Ness Avenue to Diamond Street, eleven blocks, to the 12 step meetings I attended every single night. I went there as much to escape the apartment as I did for the solace of sobriety. To clear for a minute or two my cluttered head. Eleven blocks, from Spanish language billboards to billboards for Stop Meth campaigns. From check cashing stores to lube-and-porn joints, from Mexicans to white boys.

After the meetings I’d walk home, slower this time. Around Guerrero Street my mood would darken again. I’d pass Linda, a tiny side-street where my meth dealer had once lived, always with my breath held, my dread building until I hit South Van Ness again, slid my key home, and opened the door into my little corner of hell. (I was a tad melodramatic back then.)

A few months after I moved in I started this blog. Two months later my mom died. I lived there for a year and three months, when a room opened in a friend’s place in Corona Heights, on the hill above the Castro, a room I still rent. My 12 step sponsor said that I started beaming the day I moved in, and didn’t stop beaming for another six weeks. When my opera star roommate found out that I was moving, he left a note for me demanding that I vacate his place within 30 days. Kind of a you-can’t-quit-I-fire-you situation.

This month marks nine years that I first moved into that little nightmare on South Van Ness, a fact I only just realized, writing this. Since then I got the depression treated, worked a few different jobs, went to grad school, got a degree, wrote a book, fell in love with two very different men.

In those nine years 18th Street changed too, as most city blocks do. In 2002 the Tartine bakery opened on Guerrero. Delfina opened their pizzeria in 2005, a couple of doors down from their main restaurant. In 2007 the Farina restaurant opened after gutting the old danish bakery. Bi-Rite opened their ice cream shop and the weekend crowds at Dolores Park increased tenfold. Bread shops and tea shops and nail salons opened around Sanchez.

Sometimes the Manly Fireplug and I would ruin a good work-out by hitting Whiz Burger after the gym for their damn good hot dogs. We’d sit at one of the picnic tables out front, and I’d look down the street, to the auto shop across from my old apartment, with hub caps hanging from its chain link fence. As we ate I’d tell him the story of when, nine years ago, I’d been sitting on the back steps when a young Latino boy poked his head over the neighboring fence and scanned our yard. When he spotted me he said, “Hey mister, have you seen a chicken?”

I told the Fireplug that story every time because it made us both laugh, and I guess I wanted to dispel the ghosts. I didn’t like sitting there for very long. Some streets, no mater how much they change, stick in your blood. The ghosts linger but weaken. They help me measure the distance I put down between me and that time.  I moved in there a scared kid but after a while I’d grown up, walking those eleven blocks.