THE BOYFRIENDS

Boyfriend 007 / The Waiter

He had murdered a boy for me once. Knocked that faggot right the fuck out. We were in our twenties and Samuel Myers (that ASSHOLE) made a rude comment about my body. My knight in shining armor ignored his years of good breeding and waiter etiquette (did I mention this all went down in the twenty-four-hour diner hellhole we worked in together?), ripped off his apron, and socked that asshole Samuel Myers in the face. I owed him—that Valentine’s Day I put a fifty-dollar bill in his tip jar with a note that said YOU MURDERED A BOY FOR ME .

Boyfriend 99.5(%) / The Dreamer

He explained to me (and he was VERY drunk), “I’ve never wanted to be a star in the sky. They all die anyway and I’m too vain for death. I’m ether, or whatever you call it. That negative blank space the stars float around in. Olbers’ paradox at play, you could say. The place that was there before the stars and will be there long after. Untouchable but you’re surrounded by it. It’s quicksand, I guess. I can explain more … Have you ever noticed how things in life always wanna leave you? Men will leave you, your looks will leave you (this is why I often practice looking like hell), your money will leave you. This is all fine. BUT. Something you build with your own two hands, that is (sometimes) always yours to keep. Let’s say you write a book. Let’s say the book is so good it outlives you, its toughest critics, and also several generations of people unaware of its existence. Maybe what I’m asking is unanswerable, but it gets back to that first feeling I was talking about—like, your immortal-ass book and the words within it are just floating forever on the page, sailing on this forever, just like a certain terrain Diddy Bopping all along the same kind of sea. Untouchable, unreachable, yet, it’s everywhere, there’s a ‘there, there’—can you imagine?” He smiled, but I was already asleep.

Boyfriend Zero / The Fashion Editor

The silence was deafening but that wasn’t the only cliché present in the room. The man hadn’t changed his make-out music since the nineties—it was all Cibo Matto tapes and other artifacts from his old hipsterdom that he carried around like duffel bags. The time they spent together felt like it was always in between sunsets; the red-orange final glow of the final minute of the day had not quite mixed in with the new purple of night. The sex was stuck within that same standstill. “I don’t feel like it tonight,” they both said at the same time, and giggled upon doing so. With no other reason to oppose each other, and nothing really to prove, they hopped into bed and held each other even after their skin pressed together and the bed got uncomfortable and sweaty, but neither of them bothered to change the sheets because it just didn’t feel that serious.

Boyfriend #77 / The Chef

He invited me to his headquarters. He cooked for the Kings and Queens of Art, making expensive vegan shit inspired by nineties rock musicians. He explained to me what my feelings were, often. Oh my god, he was everything I couldn’t have but the second I did have him I knew I didn’t want it anymore. It was like wanting a shot of whiskey and letting it sit on the bar in front of you for entire minutes, mouthwatering. It wasn’t about the whiskey per se but more about letting the anticipation build. Sooner rather than later I was knocking back shots of him like a fucking prizefighter.

Boyfriend 2.0 / The Firefighter

He said he wanted to set me on fire like a cigarette—he inhaled me with vigor, indulgence, and did so really, really carelessly. I was part of a pack, you see, or by knowing him I was in a carton, and most mornings seemed the same to him no matter who was there the night before. I don’t think the boys meant much to him. His chain-smoking seemed in unison (disunion?) with the other facts. He was a firefighter, a big strong one. He had muscles from the time he was barely a teenager. He showed me video clips of him skateboarding on a suburban Southern California cul-de-sac, it had made his body strong and blessed with that lean, cut muscle pattern, probably how he got so fucking cocky. I met him years ago—I was living in a warehouse near downtown. He would follow me up to my room like a puppy and it would happen: semen flying everywhere. He was way taller than me so I fit neatly into him after the squirting epic semen battle we would have. He went away at some point, lived up in the Northern California woods. He was the one who kept rural California from turning into a chuck of ashes.

He had just finished fighting a stint of fires in Mendocino. He got naked. I could see the places where the backpack equipment was irritating his skin. But he still had it. “Sorry I didn’t give you any dick last time I was in town,” he said. (We had never really fuuuuuuuucked before.) But this time, this was the test. It all felt—and heaven help me for saying this—“sweet,” like we had waited. He was the only man I knew whose sex was that fluid: boy, girl, everyone in between, whichever race, that boy was sticking his dick in everybody and I admired the caliber of slut he was. He showed me pictures of his baby daughter and we read to each other all afternoon. He left after that for good.

Boyfriend #33 / The Hairdresser

I needed asymmetry, so I wanted to bleach my hair from side to side. I was disconnected from this one (spark) plug I needed to fully realize the projection. I was a filmmaker, I was about to finally find it and dream big and lucidly. What could not be imagined? Nothing, I decided. I started on my hair—it was still nonbleached. My hairdresser was sexy. Chubby angel face with a chubby angel dick. I noticed one time that his hands were cracked and calloused from all the chemicals, and the colorings, and the sewing weaves in till 2:00 a.m., as he had the only shop that took walk-ins past ten. He would sometimes take people as late as 1:00 a.m., and for a Black woman’s hair salon, goddammit, that was of note. But he was fast, could sew in a weave in like forty-five minutes flat (I saw him do it once). I watched on the movie screen in my head, from my throne of the director’s chair (but really, I was in his salon seat), as he slapped purple goop across my head. The chemicals sat so long I started to feel dizzy. “The longer you keep it on, the blonder it will be,” he said. I didn’t come to wuss out—I came to be blond, goddammit. I sweated it out. He conditioned my head and we fucked in the back of the shop. He filmed it. The next day my hair turned the color and texture of cotton candy and all fell out.

Boyfriend #40 / The Gentleman

They were the weirdest couple I had ever fucked. They made me slightly uncomfortable. They drank wine and fought a lot but did it in a way where you could tell deep, deep down they literally hated each other. One boyfriend was this white top who had a big-ass dick, and thank god he was hung because he was dumb as fuck. He didn’t know what calculus was. He had a deep-ass country accent and was telling us a story about how he had woken up in a jail cell covered in feces one night and he almost went to jail for longer but luckily his mother loaned him $12,000 and it all got cleared up. His boyfriend was this Mexican artist boy who kept eyeballing me like he wanted to cut me because I was fucking his white-ass boyfriend. The top got drunker and had to go to bed and it was late so I stayed over and slept on the couch. In the middle of the night the Mexican boyfriend woke me up because he wanted to fuck, and I couldn’t get my clothes off fast enough. He came and then stood over me. I could feel the inside of my butthole, that wet squishy thick feeling, like he had left factual evidence that he had been there. He politely started folding my clothes and setting them beside me. He kissed me on the forehead and very passionately on the lips and then he whispered, “You have to go now.”