Every Morning
Every morning the sun rises on the end of an orgy.
The other day I got up at about 6:30 to swim at the Y, to sit in the sauna and drain the beer out of my pores before showing up late to church, and it’s interesting—you’d think it very interesting if you knew me—that one, I actually do go to church and two, that I factored in being late. I didn’t even seriously contemplate being on time.
It’s November, nearly winter, and the years pass quicker and quicker and they seem to be getting harder. Now that we’ve had the time change, as the first hint of light touches the dark sky I think, somewhere an orgy is ending.
Probably somewheres. Not for me. For me, I’m getting up and yawning and sitting on the can and seeing what comes out and not being wholly satisfied with the result, and then I’m throwing on jogging pants and tee shirt and coat and a scarf and looking for a tedious bike lock, the one bike lock I could find th at wraps around and around like a bad question, and is cable covered in rubber, and then I am on my way out the door.
I wish there was an orgy. I could use a good orgy. I believe with all my heart that there is nothing more sacramental than an impromptu sex party. Mass comes close, but Mass is rarely a surprise, not even at Saint Mary’s Episcopal.
I’m biking on a straight line, biking south to the YMCA, but I remember—well, shit it must have been a year ago now, over a year because it was summerish or springish, hell it was warm, and I was biking south, toward the river and across it. That way dips as you leave downtown, headed west, and riding into the apartment complex where all the buildings look the same and where I’d been invited at four in the morning. Up until I was eighteen, and a kid in Ohio, I thought that the only life was a man marrying a woman or maybe a man becoming a priest. You heard the word gay back then, but you didn’t know much about it, and though I’ve sometimes wished for a companion, sometimes almost mourned not having one, I never wanted a wife or kids, and this life has always been a thrill to me.
But sometimes it fails. It fails mostly because men are afraid, or because people are afraid in general and no one needs to tell you not to take your pleasure, not to have fun, not to be happy, not to prize your sex life. That’s already in your brain. You already know you’re wicked. You’ve got one night a week or maybe in a month to sneak away from your wife or your husband or your job or your god and be bad. The ‘70s must have been something, but this new gay world is often less than something. You get online, you get on an app and there’s a grid of men with names like Fillmyhole and FUCK ME 69 and they’ve got little icons of ice cream cones and green leaves or eggplants, burning faces with sweat pouring down them all promising sex and drugs and endless pleasure, and the reality is most of these fuckers never respond, and the ones who do, who invited themselves over, half the time never show up.
I am recovering already from one extraordinarily angry day where three men have introduced themselves to me, spent a long time talking, asked to come over, been invited, and then never shown. The first two simply deleted their profiles after securing and invite and promising to come over, and the last parked down the street from my apartment then just turned around and left, never saying anything. And he had sent me ten thirsty pictures of his ass, him bent over, all of his promises to fellate me as well as the promise of drugs. So, fuck him, and he’ll be seeing his picture posted soon under the profile of ASK ME HOW I GOT AIDS.
But all of that is just to say, the moment when the orgy occurs, the actual moment when the bacchanal finally happens, when the person you’re talking to isn’t full of shit and nonsense and fun really is on its way is so seldom it genuinely is a sacrament.
That last time I was buzzed into one of the several somewhat flimsy buildings of the Spears Apartment Complex, I tied my bike up, then came to the third floor where I was welcomed by decent people and the smell of pot, and the man said he was just putting dishes away. They’d been hanging out all night. You’re not always pleased by the look of people when you finally meet them, but the other one was short with a clean shaven head—I love clean shaven heads—and his shirt was open to a nice chest He was in shorts and we went out to the porch too look onto the night at the grass and trees and the loop of river that surrounded the complex. I’d been here before, actually met a guy who must be staying in the next building probably. He was odd and ruined, but eventually we had a good time. But odd and ruined people are, in fact, ruined, and I never saw him again.
I don’t know if gay men are ruined or men are ruined or Americans are ruined, but here I was, on this porch, talking to this guy and thinking that before the night was over we would end up having some form of sex with each other, and we were passing back and forth a cigarette and he was telling me, as many men who go out to spend the night having sex with other men often do, about his wife. Or his girlfriend, I can’t remember which. And he was saying:
“You know, I don’t think of myself as gay or straight. I don’t think of myself as anything. I just don’t have labels.”
And because I thought he was lying I thought, how fun, I think I’ll lie tonight too, so I said, “Yeah, that’s the way I feel too.”
And we kept smoking while the other guy finished washing dishes, and I kept looking at this guy’s chest, and then I touched it, because I wanted to, and he liked it, so I kept rubbing it, and then he gave me the last of the cigarette and I took a last drag and tossed it over the balcony, and it as four a.m. dark, and I slipped my hand into his pants and began to work his penis, stroking it while it grew harder and while I kept talking, I kept rubbing him, and then as his penis was growing stiff in my hand, the other man comes out, and says, “Who wants a drink?”
Creatures of habit are boring as fuck, but I am one. Even when there’s no place to be, and this is Friday night, I’m thinking, the sun is coming up. I should be leaving. My mind flashes to another sunrise. A muggy one in summer, in Chicago, in a shitty high rise in a small apartment on Sheridan road, but it overlooks Lake Michigan, and that’s really something, and me and a sweet Mexican are going back and forth sucking this tall guy’s dick, and he’s crucified against the walls by both of us, and now and again he reaches down, takes his torch and sets to bubbling the meth filled bong that’s shaped like a skull. I always look back on that morning with happiness and a little regret, regret not at what I did, but what I didn’t do. Like, I didn’t know shit about smoking meth, so I didn’t do it, and I wish I had. I would have been spun out of my mind. Back then I was only snorting poppers and scarring my nose. There was so much debauchery I hadn’t properly experienced. Straight friends, people who’ve only had sex with their spouse and one other person, don’t understand that you can strike up a friendship with someone you’re fucking, or that while a guy’s dick is in your mouth he can ask you where you come from and what that place is like. But the sun was rising then, and the three of us were actually in someone else’s house. That old man was crazy, so I told my new companions, get up, get dressed, it’s time for us to get the fuck out of here.
The tall guy’s name was Jon, and we ended up going to the beach, and then catching a train together, but he didn’t have a phone and didn’t even have his glasses and I never saw him again, though I think about him a lot. I think, in gay meth head heaven we’ll meet again one day, and we’ll gather around God’s table, and smoke ice for a century or two.
But back to this particular morning. And maybe I’ll tell more of that story in detail too, it is eight a.m. and me and the clean shaven guy are getting dressed, walking through the apartment, making sure we have all of our shit, and in the bedroom, on his stomach, ass up in the air, our host is snoring. I take his underwear, black netting and blue band, and stuff it in my coat pocket as a souvenir. As the sunlight is coming through the curtains, me and the shaven headed guy we’ll call Dave are leaving the apartment, clicking the door shut behind us. I was and still am amazed that this man had no fucks to give about two perfect strangers just wandering around his apartment while he snored naked in his room, hugging a pillow.
The man I left sleeping in the nude was Lon, and I would see him several times again, and he had the quality, like most of the men I’ve been with, of something broken. Frank, who I walk beside as the morning cars go up and down LaSalle and the bus rumples past us, across the bridge, I think would have made a decent friend, one of those who show up every two weeks with a bong, and a pack of cigarettes, who occasionally brings over pizza or beer and before two hours are over you’re both naked, and after two hours you are dressed and smoking and drinking again.
When we cross the bridge he asks what direction Walnut Street is from here, and I point past the theatre that is to our right, and then he heads off waving, and I don’t expect to ever see him again. After all, he posted that profile for just a second and he drives trucks across the country and he says his woman can’t hold him down. I mount my bike and ride in the other direction, toward the old apartment building, and hope I’ll see him in that great gay heaven again, where all your excellent lovers for one night who vanish into the dark will all meet in the end.
But on this particular morning when I think, every morning, an orgy is coming to an end, I make my way to the Y which opens at seven on Sundays and is full of old men for the most part, where the service is bad and today the shower water is cold. I stick my hand in the rain of water and think of having the fortitude to bathe in it, then decide to sit in the sauna instead, but it has just been turned on, and so after a few minutes, I leave, doubly disappointed, get my trunks and head for the hot tub, to wait for heat from both of the places it isn’t coming.
When I get home again it’s an hour and half before church, but I already know I’ll be late, and I can hear Cherry, one of the old women of the church, saying, “Well, now, you don’t have to be late, you could ....” and I’m already turning off her imaginary voice and turning on the coffee maker. It’s true. I don’t HAVE to be late, but I’m going to be late. The prophecy begins to fulfill itself somewhere between when the cup of coffee cools and I fall a little bit asleep before planning an outfit, and the prophecy blooms in full the moment I know I’m going to go to the bathroom, and am not entirely sure when I’ll come out.
And I just want to say, I feel like it’s more edifying to write about my asshole on the can with a cup of coffee, on my way to church because it’s not much of a plot, truly, and it’s not much of anything, but it’s got to be better than all of this writing about my sex life. I’m not guilty about it, don’t get me wrong. I don’t have a sense that sex is bad or beneath me or any of that, but it just seems rather plotless, and like: haven’t we done this before? I mean its like Proust—and we’ll probably get back to that boring motherfucker in a moment—and how he is always writing about that goddamn cookie or the taste of tea or the his mom kissing him and this memory leading to another memory only my memories are like: I was eating this donut, a long john per se, and it reminded me of a time at a bath house where I was sucking Darnell’s cock, and this in turn reminds me of my very first sexy party and... And I despise those people who tell all, who want you to know everything about their sex life—usually white men—who think there’s nothing better to do than write an essay—or post a video essay nowadays—about all their proclivities, so here I am, wishing I could write about something else.
Except this: picture me now, in the blue shirt and beige pants that look decent on this autumn day, and I have selected the right rings and a bracelet to wear, and suddenly take them all off, judging that the opening hymn, which is always unsingable and way the fuck too long, is just starting, and I’ve got a Gloria and an opening prayer to get through. Picture me rolling my bike out of my apartment door and doing that paranoid double check that the door is locked, and then picture Macarius, best friend and neighbor opening his door, knowing I am headed out and nodding because this is not the time for talking.
Now, imagine, as I ride, that in a few minutes I will be in a church with well intentioned liberal mostly white friends, and we’ll be hearing a sermon by Father Mark, our new gay priest, and imagine none of this is particularly interesting. You’ve heard about full church and dull sermons. And so, for this reason, I return to those other narratives, the ones of all night sex parties and surprise meetings of would be lovers. Because these are the things you’ve never heard.
We could talk about the lovely people of Saint Mary the Virgin, and how Matthew just learned how to swing the thurifer over the altar and fill the sanctuary with smoke, but I bet you’d rather hear about that day when I led Jon and the other boy out of that crazy apartment, and how even though it was barely eight a.m. it was muggy, but it was summer and we were feeling young, so it didn’t matter, and Jon kept blinking and at last told me he had lost his glasses, and I remembered him blinking and looking around yesterday. For not the first time I was amazed at the ability of meth heads to lose anything. He had lost his phone too, and as we headed down Sheridan he borrowed mine.
“You’re in Evanston?” Jon said.
“Yeah. I mean, my family is. I live in Edgewater.”
“I’ve never been.”
“It’s okay. I mean, its more than okay, but it’s not some place you just have to go.”
“But you like it.”
“Well, it’s home. It’s where I was born.”
“I hate where I was born.”
“You could come if you wanted,” I said.
“I’d like that,” Jon said.
“Evanston,” he said, as if he were saying, “Heaven.” Or “the Vatican.”
Briefly, I thought of a story Jacen had told me about? He was on Sheridan, and it was the middle of the… Something like that, something.
Between bites of pork chop, Macarius asked, “So how was church?”
“Everyone was disappointed about the election.”
“Um,” Macarius nodded.
“How were things at Saint Anne’s?”
“Quiet,” Macarius said. “Catholics know how to shut the fuck up and not discuss things. You Episcopalians…” he shook his head.
“Now, you’re just being funny,” I said.
One thing Macarius had found out very quickly was that I grew up with an Anglican mother and a Catholic father, just like me, but unlike me, he had taken after the Catholic side of things.
“It’s all the Catholic side of things,” he would say. “After all, they stole everything from us.”
But now I’m saying, “That’s one liberal bubble, and they get surprised by every election and every twist and turn. Damn, these pork chops are fire!”
“Thank you.”
“Anyone else could have seen the way the wind was blowing from ten miles off.”
“But how do you feel about things?” Macarius said as he poured more juice for me and some for himself.
“The same thing I always say. Democrats—of which I reluctantly count myself cause there isn’t anything else to be—are always running shit candidates and then telling the country, look, this person isn’t the other person, and if you had brains you’d know this boring fuck who can’t articulate policies was good for you, and if you don’t do it, then you’re an idiot and a racist. And then everyone ignores them—rightly—and the morning after the election, the whole country wakes up, blurry eyed and hung over and says, “holy shit, did I vote for that?”
Macarius burst out laughing, and I said, “I’m not wrong.”
“No, Max,” Macarius shook his head, “you’re not wrong at all.”
I reached for the pack of cigarettes at the middle of the table and took out one.
“Here’s the thing, I don’t claim to be the greatest example of Christianity—”
“I think you’re an excellent model of Christianity,” Macarius said, while smoke flew out of my nostrils.
“But if you have any spirituality about you, how dependent upon a political party should you be? I mean, at the end of the day politicians are politicians and they care about their own power. Trying to change the world and twisting your hands over what politician is in power, or thinking one is your man or your woman is like the Israelites in Egypt hoping for the next pharaoh when what they really need is Moses.”
“Ah, yes,” Mack observed. “But who is Moses?”
I smoked the cigarette until it was half ash, and only when the ash fell to the table did I say, “Maybe you? Maybe me? Maybe you have to be your own Moses.”
“By the way,” Macarius said, “How’s that boyfriend of yours?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The one who goes to your church.”
“He doesn’t go to my church. He’s a university adjunct and sometimes he comes ot Saint Mary’s.”
“Do you do know what I’m talking about.”
“I know what you’re talking about, but he’s not my boyfriend, and nothing’s going to happen because he’s never around. I haven’t even had five minutes alone with the motherfucker because he’s always jetting off to do something. He’s s always heading out the door.”
“That’s the whole thing, isn’t it?” Macarius said. “You’re supposed to find a nice philosopshy professor with good Christian values or some shit like that, but that motherfucker is always busy gazing at his navel and running from thing to thing. Meanwhile, the bad person you shouldn’t have has sent you six pictures of his dick and asshole and has a bag of weed, and a pipe full of meth and wants to know if he can come over right now and fuck.”
“That is the truth of our predicament,” I agreed. “That is the very truth.”
After Sunday lunch, there is nothing to do but doze. Once you’ve stopped living a normal life, Monday has no anxiety. The weather is getting colder now. Fall is in earnest. I stay with Macarius, dozing in the rocking recliner under a blanket. There is a heavy wooden door that is sometimes locked and sometimes not separating our apartments. On the edge of dozing, I remember a warmer time, heading down Sheridan Road in Chicago with Jon, after we left the apartment, and he was still squinting, wishing for his glasses and I was wondering how one loses their glasses and is also content with leaving the house where he left them. We are a block north of the El stop for Loyola’s campus, and now I wonder how on earth I didn’t realize the walk from that high rise on Sheridan to the Morse street was stop was so long. It feels like it should have ended a while ago, and even though it’s only eight in the morning, the mugginess of the day has set in.
“Here we go!”
And now we’re crossing Sheridan, and even though Jon is taller, he’s not a quicker walker, and that’s strange cause so many people are. They’ve got a long block and then they’re at the park, but we’ve got to cross the park to get to the beach, and the not too distant deep blue strip of water fills me with that old excitement. All the way, Jon conscientiously picks up bottles which he’s taking away to recycle, and as we walk to together, splashing in the sandy water or the watery sand, and the sun rises over Lake Michigan, the gulls land as well, trotting like little soldiers on the shore. At sunrise people come walking their dogs, but sunrise has passed, and me and Jon are practically alone, Jon in his cargo shorts and striped shirt, long body, brown hair and brown skin who looks sweet and kind and whose dick I was sucking just forty minutes ago.
As Jon picks up bottle caps and I look through driftwood for a promising stick, I hear him murmuring a song and it’s a moment before I pisk up on the words.
“Yemaya Asesu
Asesu yemaya
Yemaya olodo
Olodo yemaya.”
I roll up my trouser legs, gets on his knees in the watery sand, cups the warm morning water and spills it over my head once, and then twice and then again.
Jon, seeing this, sings a little louder this time.
“Yemaya Asesu
Asesu yemaya
Yemaya olodo
Olodo yemaya.”
This time, I pour water over his head, feeling the sand on my unshaven head.
“Yemaya Assessu
Assessu yemaya
Yemaya Assessu
Assessu yemaya.
Yemaya olodo
Olodo yemaya
Yemaya olodo
Olodo yemaya.”
Now, his sweet, reedy voice rising in power, Jon sings
“Ide were were nita ochun Ide
were were Ide were were
nita ochun Ide
were were nita ya Ocha
kiniba nita ochun
Cheke cheke cheke
nita ya Ide
were were!”
At that moment, the foamy waves wash up at my hands and leave a long double pronged wand of smooth drift wood. As my hands close on its weight, I look up at Jon:
“Would you like to come back with me to Evanston?”
In my imagination, Jon says, “Yes.”
THE END
