Thursday, February 28, 2002

The name game

It's nearly 2 a.m. on Saturday night and I'm standing by the railing overlooking the dance floor at The Complex, fervently hoping that the roof will collapse, a beam from the support structure will strike me on the head and kill me instantly.

I do not ordinarily have a death wish, but it's simply that when you've been forced to stand in more or less the same position for three and a half hours listening to Jeff recite his recent sexual résumé and offer a detailed dossier on every dancer who removes his shirt, you begin to pray for a swift release.

I decide that I am not even particularly picky about the afterlife, since I believe that heaven is, as Libby Gelman-Waxner said, a place where everything fits perfectly without alterations, and that hell is very likely the only place left where it is socially permissible to smoke.

I haven't really been listening to Jeff for the past half hour or so, though. I've been too busy watching this guy on the dance floor — his name is "Paul", Jeff says -- the most recent to shuck his shirt. It wasn't even a shirt in the way we mortals are accustomed to thinking about club wear. No, this was merely a diaphanous, swirling suggestion of a shirt, containing just enough material to muck up my view of his chest, comprising pecs the size of a sectional sofa and a stomach you could use to slow down runaway trucks on mountainous roads.

So, yes, I'm glad the shirt is gone. I don't even see or much care where it has disappeared to; unlike most of the guys who go topless on the dance floor, "Paul" has not tucked his top into a belt or back pocket. It has vanished or, perhaps, evaporated like the mist it appeared to be.

I consider briefly suggesting to Jeff that he might want such a garment for himself since, based on his recitation of his latest conquests, he seems to go for things that are small, white and insubstantial.

Just then I notice that the DJ is playing what sounds very much like a dance mix of the theme song from The Price is Right and this realization, combined with the diverting dichotomy of hearing a woman's voice sing "Come on down" through a nearly visible miasma of inhalant stimulants, detaches me from my awareness of Jeff altogether.

I am now focused almost entirely on watching "Paul", mesmerized by his movement, graceful for his size. His name is not "Paul", I know, or at least it wasn't. When we were introduced five years ago at a friend's pool party, his name was "John" and he was a shy but charming conversationalist, the boyfriend of a local doctor and on his way to a nursing degree.

Sometime later, when the relationship ended and he — obviously — hit the gym, I happened across his personal ad on a local website where the attached photographs indicated he had shed both most of his inhibitions and the name "John". He was "David" by then.

Jeff is aware that I have tuned him out and touches my arm to gain my attention. He's leaving and I say I'll be sticking around, probably until closing time. "Paul" has captured my attention, and I want to study him a bit longer. Jeff makes a wiseacre remark about the man's body, the same one I would have made were I not contemplating very seriously whether he is playacting, lying or actually reinventing himself.

For the next half hour or so, "Paul" has my full attention and seems to know it, although our eyes never meet and I make no effort to attract his. I stand there and wonder if I am capable of doing what he has done, of changing my life so radically, of altering my appearance, personality, behavior — my very perceptions and others' perceptions of me — in the way that he has.

I wonder, too, what my name would be if I did.