beautiful boys and public transportation

andy pink, brighton, mass —

hello to the hicks from the sticks!

i was coming home by subway from my psychiatric appointment this morning and sure enough hopped on board at the front of the train (where i was seated) was a lovely boy. he was wearing a gray short skirt, i could not make out the shoes, he had a gender-ambiguous purse (may have been cataloged as a “satchel,” not sure) and he had a tinge of make-up, blush rouge, perhaps eyelash extensions, a perfect slender nose, and a bit of an adam’s apple still lurking. his eyes saw everything that i was not able to see and vice-versa. together, we would have been god.

by the end of our excruciatingly hot engagement — which was but silent, he was on the phone with an interlocutor who i imagined as a woman — by the end of our exhaustively lovely time together — it was as if i had given birth — after all of this heavy breathing and morphine, i decided that he was indeed just a simple boy, with beautiful eyes and a model face, a boy, not transgender, not even ambiguous, just quite beautiful. i felt so ugly and 37. he refused to look at me as far as i could see. inside i felt 14 and ready to commit to him and to his every word. i do suppose that if he had asked me to marry him, right then and there, in the smokey mist of an unlikely subway car at the corner of an untoward forest, in the midst of a foreign metropolis — i imagine that if he had gotten down on his knees or refused, ring or flowers or but a grunt — i would have said yes and felt myself for a moment to be the luckiest superhero in the galaxy, possibly too good for even this perfect boy. i was taken especially by the rouge, it was soft and light rose and entirely undetectable except that i clearly saw it there, right here, on his jaw line.

although i sense that i have only been in love once i find myself falling in love with men all day long. i don’t think it is a crush because i don’t know these guys at all. what i am able to do is very quickly concoct elaborate stories about each of them, their names, at the start, but where they grew up, the kinds of parents and siblings they had to endure, their socio-economic status and achieved education — it’s usually: humble beginnings but properly advanced degrees — i can imagine the several traumas that these distant men endured (many seem to have lost parents, quite early, quite quickly, though often i am unable to decide whether it is a simple car accident or perhaps an unsolved murder; a beautiful boy that i never spoke to in the spring and in front of the public library in hillsdale had lost his father in an elevator accident). i do not imagine them naked at all, i never think of their chests or their arms or their penises, these all seem to be beside the point. most of these men that i fall in love with in my pathological scopophilia wear the right clothes, this seems to be peculiarly relevant and, as a homosexual fetishist, i am convinced that i could fall in love with fabric and, if i dared to, i think i could penetrate a j.crew button down shirt, if i tried.

to have sex with madras or poplin is the kind of social advance that modern psychiatry is unable to properly classify nor even to understand. such a meagre and primitive scientific hermeneutics is mum at the sight of the future of sex. to make love to fabric is to design your own soul mate. why wait?

in the end, the lovely boy with the rouge departed a stop before mine. i felt that i had lost him forever. perhaps i will stalk his neighborhood coffee shop and obsessively look for him on grindr, but even that is far from healthy or useful. i cannot tell whether rouge-boy has bettered my day. perhaps i would be even more depressed without his fleeting part of my life, today. i hope that i never forget him. we would have been perfect together, forever for sure, if only i had stayed in my seat, he had stayed on the phone, and the trolley had decided to never make a final stop. i do love public transportation around these parts — to enjoy a bus stop outside of one’s log cabin is quite a gift of local governance — but the rouge and the fair would have been happy enough to sit, phone and eyes, wondering who was to the right and the left, even if i was the only one who wondered.

in other news: i am fixing up the syllabi for the gender and the sex classes. it is a long haul. the new bipolar friend that i mentioned in my post a few days ago will meet me at the old oak tree at the center of town later today. we will watch a moving picture tonight around 7. he has requested a pre-dinner that is “not fancy” (which i suppose is puerto rican non native code for “cheap”) — it has become so easy for me to speak world languages from this small hamlet in the undergrounds of spain. perhaps we will hit the applebees, then spend at pennys, the supercuts for matching up-dos, and then home, separately to bed, queen to twin xl, and watch the world dissolve on the picture-tube. i shall like to one day be an actor but it might suffice to be a writer.

on days as swollen and sweaty as this it is only fair to be rare.

pink