A Brady for all seasons

To every season, there is a Brady.

Thirty years ago, as a wee proto-fag cooling his heels in rural Missouri, I wanted to grow up and marry Greg Brady. I mean, come on. He was Johnny Fucking Bravo! Tell me—the unfortunate perm aside—that wasn't a hot slab of groovy teen.

In 1988, watching A Very Brady Christmas, I realized my folly. My heavens, little Bobby is all growed up. Mike Lookinland, will you be mine? Yum.

Last night, ten minutes into the otherwise insipid Still Brady After All These Years 35th anniversary special on TV Land—will someone nuke Jenny McCarthy for the betterment of mankind, please?—I nearly creamed my jeans. Chris Knight! OH. MY. So cool, so smart, so handsome, so unabashedly geeky, so clearly over the Brady business.

Johnny Bravo? What the hell was I thinking?! All along, what I really wanted was Peter.

Missed connections

Talk about your missed connections.

He was sitting right across the aisle from me, shifting uncomfortably in a cracked plastic seat by the gate at Midway, while I stole long glances -- furtively, I thought -- at him over the script I was reading.

In fact, I was reading the same page again and again, I realized. I didn't realize that my stealthy glances were anything but. Chalk it up to caffeine deprivation and a heart that was racing a little bit in spite of it. But I didn't talk to him, didn't bother to strike up a conversation even though he was glancing back and making no attempt to disguise his attention. He had closed his book -- Eggers, but that can be forgiven -- and held it on his lap. Which is where I was staring with alternate glances. Well, wouldn't you?

I mean, just look at him, in full, as I did not, at least not all at once. Rusty hair, freckled and flushed, trim waist, full torso, jeans and boots, grin and chin. Totally my type, right? Late 20s, maybe, early 30s? Fit as a fiddle and ready to diddle?

Didn't say a word, though. I didn't, I mean, but then neither did he. They called group "B" and I joined the herd and headed home, leaving the handsome boy in the departure lounge to resume his reading -- which he didn't, I noticed in the security mirror by the door, as I watched him watch me -- and then to make his way to his own destination.

Which, as it turns out, was St. Louis, the exploratory trip, first of two, and then to stay, for a while anyway. And then by some miraculous convergence of technology, cupidity and dumb luck, he finally started the conversation we could have had seven weeks ago.

Look before you leap, they advise. I looked but didn't leap. And it seems as though I've been doing that more and more recently, not from maturity, not from fatigue, certainly not because I'm shy or circumspect. (Please!)

But I've been doing it, more window-shopping than buying, more glancing than going for it. I got into a rut and called it a groove, as a friend once said. I needed a little kick to get me back in the game and I'm gonna get one tonight, I think, for the price of a pizza. His name is Derrick and he's bringing the beer.

Libraries are good

I've always been a supporter of libraries, those great repositories of human knowledge, those massive monuments to literacy and achievement. Until they started building one across the street from my office.

Now, while I am still favorably predisposed to appreciate miles and miles of shelves lined with books, I am souring on this particular library. The rumble of trucks and equipment entering and leaving the site rattles my teeth and the dust kicked up, combined with the sweltering temperatures and dousing humidity, are utterly stifling.

I will, however, cease all complaining, for I discovered yesterday that the workmen have begun installing the building's utility conduits and lines, closing the public sidewalk on both sides of the street and, as a consequence, insuring that the only safe route to the pool is right by my window.

All day, lithe young men in skimpy bathing costumes toting towels saunter by and, a few hours later, return by the same path with wet curls plastered to their foreheads and browner skin than when they first appeared.

In every cloud of dust, there is a Speedo lining.

This is now…

They stand there by the door, the campus crowd moving around them. They are close together, but not too close, talking quietly, frankly, laughing now and shuffling feet, moving here and there but always close.

They are young, 18 maybe, 19? All blond and baby fat and backpacks and baggy pants and I wonder: Is it obvious to anyone but me that these two are in love? Well, not in love, maybe, but definitely doing it, shifting awkwardly and naked in a twin bed, ironically named in this case because except for their respective heights, these two could have shared an egg.

I've seen the tall one before, late at night leaving the computer lab and on his way to the library. Lithe and lanky, he's a head above his friend, who is always in motion and who, if I had to guess, was probably on the lacrosse team in high school so long ago, six months, maybe eight in the past.

And the tall one throws his head back suddenly and lets loose a laugh. He moves his hips as he does, in a motion that is 51 percent swish and 49 percent swagger or maybe the other way around. I've straddled both sides of the cocky/nelly ratio too often for too long to retain my objectivity on the matter. But he laughs and puts his hand on the shorter guy's shoulder and with a brief backward look, they part company and go in different directions across the quad.

I watch the little one for a moment, his back and his head bop and his Jansport loaded with Macroeconomics 100 and Honors Seminar precis notes receding as he walks with a decidedly more lopsided butch/fey equation toward the student center. It's 2001 and they barely touched each other and yet it was so, so clear that, for the semester at least, these two would be sharing secrets, revealing pasts, mingling presents, imagining futures, bumping uglies and being boyfriends. Clear to me, anyway, and I seldom call that wrong.

Fifteen years ago, they would have been Eric and me, brown instead of blond, with tighter pants but still the same young lust given new lease. We would not have been satisfied with a touch and a laugh, that guy and I, though. We were about getting out there, making it clear, producing public displays of affection with the alacrity of Busby Berkeley given a newly built pair of staircases. We kissed in public a lot, I remember, very in-your-face and in love for a semester or two, and in his pants and in my twin bed.

Fifteen years ago, I guess we had something to prove and we held hands when we walked through the mall and we went country line dancing because that's what you did then and I made sure that everyone knew we were in love.

Everyone but him, as it turned out, but the point is that we were flamers, flaunters, 51 percenters who showed off. A declaration of esteem. A demonstration of love. A money shot in the last battle of the waning hours of the sexual revolution.

We did it with a kiss and a lingering touch, and everyone noticed and none dared call it wrong. They do with the a laugh and a passing embrace, and everyone knows and none care. What will it be like, I wonder, 15 years from today?

Satellite conversations

I suppose you could say the date went well, but conversation with Jerrod was a halting struggle. Talking with him was like having a satellite conversation. You know the sort I mean?

A satellite conversation is one where you feel as though your words must first travel across a vast space before reaching your date. You say something or ask a question and there's a pause, during which the other person just sits there absolutely still and stares at you blankly for a few seconds before responding. Several times over dinner, I'd make a comment and there'd be an appreciable lag time while my words were transmitted around the world, and then Jerrod would respond.

I felt as though we were playing CNN. Jerrod was Christiane Amanpour — smart and stylish, a statuesque beauty — standing in the middle of some desert and I was Wolf Blitzer — rumpled but probing and interested — back in the studio. If there's going to be another date, I hope we can arrange to be on the same mental continent.

His hair is red…

His hair is red. His skin is warm. His eyes are deep. His mouth is wet. His voice is low. His face is flushed. His breath is shallow. His gasp is music. His body is religion. His kiss is hard. His gift is distraction.

These days, I am grateful for distraction.

Baby got backpack

A back-to-school observation: You wouldn't think it to see them just dangling on a department store rack, but you should never underestimate the erotic possibilities suggested by a Jansport backpack, especially when it is yoked across a back corded with muscle and hanging over tanned calves dusted a downy blond. I'm just saying.

Observed

Sexually-oriented chat rooms are perfect for guys who find that phone sex involves way too much intimacy.

Observed

It's a sure sign your date is not well-versed in pop culture or camp when you mention Peaches and Herb and he thinks you're talking about a Clinique facial scrub.

The holistic view

Brian turned 23 years old last week, and I ran into him toasting the occasion with friends at The Loading Zone. I've been seeing Brian more often these days; coincidence or fate has brought me into the company of the young man who calls himself "my biggest fan" more and more frequently for some reason. It's hard to think of Brian has being a man, grown up and even mature, since my overriding memory of him is as a gangly teenager asking me if I wanted fries with my order.

But then I see him out like last week, in a business suit and tie, and Brian looks like a man. In his "casual drag," -- a t-shirt pulled tight across his chest, jeans or shorts and a baseball cap, usually worn backwards (and he's somehow able to make that work) -- he looks the world and all like a little boy. Last night, at the gym, we finished our cardio training at nearly the same time and, naked beside me in the shower...well, there was no question: he looked very much like a man again.

The greatest gift of all

I just want to make one thing absolutely clear right up front: I really thought he was 18.

At least, that's what I thought after my heart stopped skipping beats when I spotted him on the other side of the room. I mean, that's what I thought in between thinking "Gosh, he's been staring at me for a long time," and thinking "Which stars are appropriate to thank when an attractive and intelligent teenager asks you out for coffee?".

I really, really believed he was 18. Just barely, but still.

I continued to cling to this belief right up until the moment many, many hours later as he pulled the covers close around both of us, flashed a toothy grin and turned so the candlelight illuminated his flawless olive skin and deep, dark eyes, bright with youth, and casually mentioned that his birthday was tomorrow and would I like to see a movie with him to celebrate.

"Sure," I said. "Actually, my birthday is in a couple of weeks, too."

"How old are you going to be?" I had been dreading this question, not because I feel older and infirm but because I am fairly certain they still teach math in high school and 32 minus 18 is 14 and I'd just rather not think that I'm currently exchanging postcoital pillow talk with someone almost half my age. I told him anyway.

"Really?" he said. There followed what felt like a two-hour pause in the conversation. He's not 18 at all, I thought. Dear God, I'm going to jail, aren't I? My mind catapulted across possibilities, doing subtractions and long division to plumb the severity of my presumed pederasty.

"You're two years older than me?" he said incredulously. "All this time I had figured you were younger than me."

Another two-hour pause, observed because I'm struck dumb and moon-eyed by this revelation and by the knowledge that this young man -- this 30-year-old young man -- will spend a short time with me and then go home and not pass this way again for some time. He's attractive, intelligent and charming enough to say I seemed younger than he, even if he didn't really believe that at all. A few weeks early, it's the nicest birthday gift I expect to receive.