Monday, April 22, 2002

Tim

It's always the nights when I least feel like hitting the circuit which seem to wind up holding the most promise, and this is no exception. Almost as soon as I mount the stairs at The Complex, I see Adorable Dave tipping a longneck at the bar and pass a pleasant half hour chatting before he departs with his date. It is a testament, I think, to my personal growth over the past decade that I spend only five minutes or so imagining them rushing to one or the other's home, ripping off their clothes and going at it.

OK, perhaps ten minutes.

Rob, who I haven't seen in ages, encircles my waist from behind and pulls me into a hug. There's some good-natured, bad-boy badinage; it's flirting that will never go anywhere, because I'm a godless tax-and-spender and he wears his Log Cabin credentials across his chest like the Fitch Bitches on the dance floor wear their tight mass-produced t-shirts.

And there's Tim in the corner. It's been a good year since I gave this the old college try and he smiles when he spots me approaching. We share a beer and a cigarette and I listen as he ticks off the ones who got away. No sex in ages, he says, which must be particularly frustrating for a social worker specializing in sex worker outreach.

We've danced around each other for a half-dozen years or more, Tim and I. In the small hours, I turn to him and ask when we're finally going to fool around. The looks and touching and the four more rounds of drinks have fortified my belief that it might just be tonight.

"I don't want to fool around," he says. "I want a commitment."

"I'm not the marrying kind," I say.

"I don't know that about you."

I do, and it's only just recently that I -- what, discovered? -- no, accepted that about myself. I'm no good in relationships, never have been, really, likely because my concept of monogamy has more to do with emotional loyalty than physical exclusivity and, at some point in the last decade, this view began to diverge wildly from that of my peers.

I liked it much better when I was fighting for my freedom to be a sexual outsider and I bridled when the goal became a "marriage initiative".

I drained my beer and kissed Tim hard on the lips and squeezed his ass and said goodnight. I glanced at the dance floor on my way out, just half past one and still promise left in the night and the sight of a hundred perspiring torsos shimmying to Cher.

A song for lonely, indeed. No, not lonely, not by a considerable margin. Just alone.