Market Nights
Sinister encounters in Chicago.
I jolt awake in my seat to see Jason clutching my phone and passport in his lap. His little shoulders are hunched forward like wings, mantling my effects from invisible predators. I immediately deduce what happened and feel the familiar twinge of guilt when I realize a person I am supposed to be taking care of is actually taking care of me. I look into his eyes, wide, round, on alert, though not categorically different from what I call his “resting troubled face.” The only other person on the train is a lone black guy across from us, facing the direction the train is moving and seeming to pay us no mind.
What happened? I whisper just to acknowledge that something did.
Twenty minutes before I was taking photos of his outfit on the platform while we waited for the train: oversized crop top with a Nike swoosh, jean shorts that cover his knees and don’t cover the waistband of his black Nike jock strap. He looks little and naked.
“You were G’ing out.”
Obviously, I think, but I was the one who asked. Another question to which I already know the answer: “Why do you have my phone?”
“You kept dropping it.”
I do penance by letting him hold it and assuming the exaggerated sobriety I effect when I’ve just embarrassed myself by being not sober. I sit up straight and still and try not to blink erratically—endeavors that, to be honest, have required strenuous effort my entire life, drugs or no drugs. I smile at Jason and pull him close to me, kiss his forehead and lips, feel a prick of fear that I’m only in a dream.
It seems absurd to be taking the El in the middle of the night. After being away from New York for a decade, I’m no longer used to being exposed to the harsh light and the public gaze when I’m in a state of advanced decomposition. On the other hand, it also seems absurd to pay $25 for a ride that could be $2.50 and, we quickly learned, takes the exact same amount of time. I also realized earlier this afternoon that I had only reserved the hotel, not paid for it, so now I have another thousand less in the bank account than I had anticipated. I propose some gay math: “If we take the El every time we go to Boystown, we can almost pay for the hotel.”
I stand up to look at the map, feel the wooze in my legs, and am suddenly intensely conscious of everything: the time, our clothing, the other people on the train or lack thereof. I am not the type person who worries, but I do experience waves of what I call worry about not worrying when it dawns on me that I have taken something insufficiently seriously and I then panic at the possibility that my obliviousness will someday have consequences all the more bitter for having being preventable. It never occurs to me, for example, that we might be in danger, either in general or specifically because we look like fags. Other gay guys I know are hyper-conscious of how they present in public, turning their gayness up or down like a knob depending on the perceived hostility of the environment. I can’t even imagine the mental energy it would take to think about that, and rebel at the very idea. Trans women of color died at Stonewall so we wouldn’t have to think about that shit.
We realize we’re long past our stop.
“I’m sorry,” Jason says, constitutionally apologetic. “I wasn’t paying attention.”
“Well neither was I, to put it mildly,” I offer, but he seems to consider himself responsible since he was conscious.
He stands up next to me, and the black guy looks up at him. He gives Jason’s outfit a once-over and says, “Pull up your pants.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Jason says. He slides his shorts higher on his waist and they immediately fall back down.
I feel of rush of something to the head; it’s not immediately clear if it’s rage or fear. I say loudly to Jason, “You don’t have to do that!” The guy doesn’t look up again.
We move further away from him, toward the doors, but I keep speaking loudly enough for him to hear. “I don’t know why people don’t mind their own business here.” I’m picturing the New York subway, where it seems unimaginable that even the prissiest old white woman would comment on the rise of someone’s pants. I wonder why I didn’t say something back to him, Um, excuse me, can you mind your own business? I realize that part of me wants to experience a homophobic incident in order to see how the new me would react. I also realize the only two physical fights I have ever been involved in, if they can even be called that, were with other gay guys.
This is not even the worst act of public aggression we’ve experienced in the past hour. At Charlie’s, which is open until 4AM and one local gay described as “the end of the night place,” a short young man, hardly older than a teenager, tried grab one of the three Gatorades the bartender had lined up for Jason to pay for. I felt a commotion at my side and turned to see Jason snatch a bottle back from the guy, and then to see the guy go for a second bottle that was still sitting on the bar. It was so quick I couldn’t make out any of the movement; he walked back to his friends a few feet away and stared at us. I glowered back. But it was dark and the Gatorade bottle wasn’t in his hand or anywhere I could see. I quizzed Jason on the details I had missed.
“Did you drop it or something?”
“No, he just took it from me and I grabbed it back!”
“Is he drunk?”
“I don’t know. But I’m so pissed!”
“Whatever, it’s not worth making a big deal out of.”
The guy is still standing a few feet away. The Gatorade is nowhere in sight; he hasn’t taken it out of his pocket or handed it to someone else. I feel more puzzled than angered. Bar conflicts almost always begin with wild misperceptions of other people’s behavior; stealing something basically worthless and then standing directly next to the person you stole it from, acting like nothing happened, makes zero sense.
Jason’s face is flushed with violation. “Can we at least move away from him?”
“He must have been wasted,” I say a few minutes later on the dance floor, and then again as we walk to the train. “Is there any possibility he thought it was funny or was trying to flirt with you?” It’s funny how your mind demands a rational explanation even when none is available.
“It makes me so fucking mad,” he had said as we walked to the train. “People think they can just walk all over you, and it it it it it it triggers me because I let people do that to me my entire life.” His stutter is worse when he’s high and it makes me want to scoop him up and carry him.
For a second, half-listening, I think he’s referring to one of the two old men who had been circling him like vultures right before we left. “Who do you mean, the old guy at the end?”
“No, not him! That’s fine, that’s just gays on drugs. I mean the Gatorade guy.”
Gays on drugs, definitely not a category of which we have any right to install ourselves in judgment. What feels so odd is that this stuff never happens to me; in this many years of being around gays on drugs, very little of it has turned even mildly unpleasant, much less violent. Gatorade guy had to be on drugs, too. You don’t just do that if you’re sober! Right? “Right,” I say. I feel like I should affirm his feelings but don’t know what else there is to say about the Gatorade guy, so I wind up some philosophical pablum superficially grounded in lived experience: “That’s how I felt when the guy punched me at Battle Hymn. It’s unsettling to realize that that other people can just be crazy in a way that makes no sense.”
Jason seems less perturbed by the pull-up-your-pants comment than I am, and we get off the train to switch to the other direction, back through the Loop to our hotel on the river. We get onto what we think is the opposite-direction train, which we then begin to understand is also going the wrong direction. What the fuck. I give up trying to untangle how we got turned so badly around and order a Lyft. The wait is 15 minutes, and Jason sits down on the curb. I find our hotel in the app, but the driver takes us to the wrong hotel—a different one with the same name. We walk another fifteen minutes to the right one, and I marvel at how fast one can go from being ready to make out with the entire planet to feeling ready to die if you have to be on your feet another thirty seconds. In the back of my mind I hear a voice call out, Hey! A few minutes later I hear it again, louder. Jason is staring at a black car on the other side of the street.
“He’s he’s he’s following us,” Jason says. “He keeps pulling up.” He clutches his elbows as if it were cold even though it’s nearly eighty degrees. I watch as the car speeds down the block and waits for us at the next intersection. The window is rolled down, and the driver yells, “Hey!”
If the night didn’t previously have a surreal, menacing air, it does now. We keep walking and don’t acknowledge the repeated interpellation. At the final crosswalk before the hotel, the two corn cobs from the cover of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot looming overhead, the car speeds around the corner into the crosswalk and halts violently, with a cartoon-style screech it’s impossible to believe we’re hearing in real life, as if a group of thugs is about to burst out and whisk us inside. But we don’t even have time to panic before the car abruptly accelerates again and disappears down the block.
“What the fuck,” we say, not quite in unison but close.
In the elevator a pair of circuit husbands are holding hands; they grin at us like indulgent parents even though I’m probably their age. In our room, through the crack in the curtains, the sky is turning white. I wrap my body around Jason, relieved to find that, no thanks to me, he has survived both theft and vehicular pursuit. It’s 5:45AM and I’ve been awake for 24 hours. Day one.