“I didn’t! He ran into my door!” When were people going to believe me?
“Uh-huh. You should have just asked him out if you wanted to get his attention.”
“I didn’t want his attention.”
“Bullshit. You’re just as head over heels as he is. The difference is you hide it better underneath all the remarkable bluster you have sometimes. But since I’m your daddy, you can’t bullshit me. I’ve known you for far too long to get fooled by you, Paul Auster. Vince may not see it yet, but you can’t pull the wool over my eyes.”
I sputtered at him for a good minute or two until he went over to his perch on the balcony to man the spotlight and the camera. I took my usual place beside him, but this time, instead of watching Helena, I immediately searched for Vince. It didn’t take long to find him standing with the same jocky boys he’d been with the week before. I shouldn’t have been surprised to see him standing next to Darren Mayne. And I probably shouldn’t have been surprised to see Darren wrap his arm around his shoulder, his mouth close to Vince’s ear as he said something to him. The drag show hadn’t yet started, but it was noisy enough that I couldn’t make out what was being said. All I knew is that Darren seemed to be standing way too fucking close to Vince, and Vince was doing absolutely nothing to push him away.
Darren Mayne. What a lot of people might not realize is that gay bars are exactly like high school, in that there are cliques. Tucson isn’t big enough to have multiple gay bars to cater to specific groups of homos. Instead, they all converge on this one place. Sometimes they mingle with one another, but mostly they stick to themselves within their own groups.
You’ve got your bears, your Muscle Maries. You’ve got the twinks, the ravers, the leather crowd. You’ve got the models, the lesbians (who, to be fair, have their own subgroups, but since I don’t have a vagina, I’m not privy to them). There are the queens, the transsexuals, and those random guys who just like wearing skirts. There are daddies and their boys, masters and their slaves. You’ve got the older and the younger, the middle age. There’s even a small group that comes out every now and then consisting of married couples with children, though they’re usually exhausted and leave by nine o’clock.
And then you’ve got the jocks, of which Darren Mayne is the king. I’d never spoken to Darren before, aside from the usual, “Sorry, sir, I totally didn’t mean to be breathing your air even though you seem like a big asshole,” that I would mumble under my breath every time we passed each other. There were a couple of times we’d pass each other and he’d catch my eye and I’d be convinced that he was about to say something, but either he thought better of it or it was my imagination. I didn’t know what possible thing Darren Mayne would have to say to me, so I figured it was always me misinterpreting.
But regardless, he was the king of the jocky gays, his little muscled boys around him like they’d just walked off one of those gay college porn sites that I’ve never, ever subscribed to (you know, the ones where the cookie-cutter hairless toned frat boys sit next to each other on a random couch and go through the cringe-worthy banter with the camera man who tries to convince the audience that the two dudes both have girlfriends and that they’ve never tried anything before with another guy, only to watch them proceed to fuck like bunnies. Very, very experienced bunnies at that).
Darren himself was probably around the same age as Vince, which put him slightly younger than me. And of course he had great blond hair that did whatever he wanted it to do. A killer body that looked like he spent every waking moment in the gym. He had a smile that could make your insides feel a bit loose and a great laugh, from the one time I’d actually heard it. I’d always heard that he was a bit of a slut (those jocky college boys tended to be like that), but he was never cruel, at least that I could see, and even more, he was always at Helena’s shows. Thinking back on it, I couldn’t remember the last time he hadn’t been there on a Wednesday or a Saturday, grinning at her while slipping her fives and tens rather than the usual one-dollar bills she got for tips.
But now I hated his stupid fucking face because he was standing way too fucking close to my fucking boyfriend who wasn’t doing a fucking thing to move back. They looked awfully chummy standing next to each other, their muscles bunching together like they were going to be sitting on some couch in their near future, talking about how their girlfriends didn’t know they were there, that they’d never really thought about doing anything with another guy, and then deep-throating each other like they’d been sucking cock all their lives.