HE WAS SURROUNDED BY BORING (yet STRONG) stray thoughts; they were clogging his ability to fix the mess. The mess of his room surrounded him.
“When did I get all this bullshit?”
It wasn’t anything a bunch of clear plastic office-store boxes wouldn’t fix, but it made him nervous nonetheless. He had been to the houses of responsible adults before and didn’t really dig it; adulthood all seemed to be about boxes, mostly boxes, actually. He didn’t want to compartmentalize anything else, and unlike all the people he knew, he felt he lacked that synapse in the brain that could easily label stuff. Most objects in his head were beyond classification, anyways. For example, a picture you didn’t want to hide away but didn’t want to be confronted with every day—where the fuck do you file something like that? Dear god, everything was like that and therefore deserved its own special place, and god forbid you ever own enough stuff, eventually there are special things covering every inch of everywhere and you become some well person trapped deep in the earth suffocating on sentimentality. A normal person would detest this room but the boy wasn’t normal.
He preferred the choose-your-own-adventure stylings of a junk drawer or, even better, a junk room.
If you lived in a junk room, every so often you would look under something and find something else—an important memory you lost, and say, “AH!” or “Awwwww!” It was a lottery where you just kept fucking winning.
The summer before, he had worked as a mover and discovered the secret lives of the bachelors who lived in Tiburon. So many male bachelors in their fifties! Single men who lived in two-story duplexes packed to the gills with straight-up bullshit—this one man whose garage was all old answering machines and water skis that hadn’t been fucked with since the eighties. The boy with the messy room wondered if this was the fate of all bachelors; does a lonely man just keep buying shit? Would we really all just go shopping? Rad, he thought.
He looked at his room and calmed down a bit; he had only one room’s worth of shit, not two stories and a basement. It was all Fred Perry polos, Levi’s, records, records, records. He lived with six roommates whose rooms looked the same. “I don’t feel like an adult,” he accidently said out loud.
But messy rooms were fine. He liked the two weeks it took to clean it up. He liked watching things go from chaos to order. It was godlike.
He was aware how the room had got into this mess. The month before had been the breakup. Supposedly it started over a missing Troggs record but really it was about the boy cheating on the other often. It turned violent and they took time apart. Three days ago, the attempted reconciliation turned violent again when his ex-boyfriend, Matthew, had come back over to talk it out. It didn’t work.
At the end of the day he just figured he was no good for Matthew—the man wanted other things. He could look into Matthew’s eyes and see that he wanted a white-walled, white-doored, white little house in the New England countryside. They would make their own jam together. Every time Matthew crawled on him at night he could see in his eyes how he wanted to make sweet boyfriend love. It made the boy sick. He went out at night and had nasty whore sex behind Matthew’s back. Their circle was small—he knew who Matthew knew. He could say he was sorry but it was a lie. It was the only way he could get off. He still loved the previous man. It would never work.
The main problem with Matthew was that he had an English accent, so everything he said “sounded right,” or at least reasonable. Unlike Matthew, everything the boy said sounded less than feasible and was punctuated with “like” and “you know what I mean?”
Again, it escalated and again one of his roommates came to intervene and again he was left alone in a dirty room.
That was three days ago. “A fight with my ex, and a walk to calm my nerves,” he said, putting his bag in order.
He put a notebook in his tote bag and some pens. He was going to get wasted then get some writing done.
He trotted up the street fast, chest forward, and heavy-footed like a man who was trying very hard to walk away from a fight he had just lost. No one looked him in the eye.
Now up on the corner was the old bar, the place he used to go—he’d even DJed a party there. Like every goddamn thing else on the old block someone had bought it, painted it an offensively inoffensive earth-toned color, put salvaged wood and air plants every fucking where (the “newest” modern), and charged ten extra dollars for drinks.
All the drinks had names now.
He wandered in. What was once a whiskey and soda at this bar was now called a “Peter Paul” and made with in-house barrel-aged whiskey and in-house fermented aromatic bitters. The poor boy could only stomach so much “newness.” A drink that had once cost five dollars and took fifteen seconds to make now cost eleven dollars and took two minutes. Just how far were they going to take this bullshit? He was afraid to ask.
He remembered the days it had been a “punk” dive bar (i.e., a shittier and cooler version of itself). He remembered when all the booths had holes in them and there was graffiti everywhere, some of it even dating back to the late eighties. It looked dirty, it felt dirty—it was dirty. His mind switched quickly to how ok the “newness”—and the gentrification in general—felt, but then on the flip side was the flawed reasoning of loving something or thinking it “authentic” just because it seemed to be surviving neglect and abuse. He wondered if this was how he saw himself. Then the scene in his head switched back to the fight with his ex-boyfriend.
He noticed that he and Matthew acted the way one would expect two weathered queens dating in adulthood to act. He couldn’t characterize all the dysfunction exactly, but he could calculate that it was a mix of compulsion, exclusion, obsessiveness, jealousy, infidelity, always wanting to “outsmart” each other, and, amid all of this, an extreme sense of separation anxiety when the other was away.
He turned to a page in his journal he had written about Matthew while he was asleep next to him—Matthew had somehow passed out and the boy was still high on drugs.
March 22, 20__
My heart is beating out of my chest and Matthew is sleeping. I want to wake him, confront him, and accuse him of taking the last Xanax but I know that it will lead to trouble. I see him heaving his chest rhythmically like an angel—I fucking haaaaaaaate him. I hate how comfortable he is in the world. He derails all my concrete thoughts with platitudes, like “everything happens for a reason” or “that’s just how the cookie crumbles,” and, my least favorite, “you’re just high on drugs and paranoid.” I don’t know how to explain to him that I’m not just high on drugs. I AM DRUGS …
He was maybe beginning to see Matthew’s side.
No sooner had his thoughts stopped on drugs than who should walk into the gentrified bar other than Martha, everyone’s favorite dyke drug dealer. He hated that bitch. She represented newness in the same form that overtook the once cool, now spruced-up bar. He remembered when drug dealers in the city were plentiful and you could just drop by their house, collect, and get the fuck on with your life. Martha was a particular breed of drug dealer, one that insisted that in order to sell to you, the two of you MUST be friends and sit and gab. Normally it grossed him out but he needed to unload about his failed relationship, and who better to talk to about a failed relationship than a dyke high on coke? The two of them sat there until the bar closed and the boy scored a bag as he was leaving, on his way to the apartment of one of the boys he cheated on Matthew with, or maybe he would just walk around aimlessly, like a story or love affair that had a strong start and stake at the beginning but toward the end just meandered.