Michael Tolliver Lives (2 page)

But then I didn’t die. The new drug cocktails came along, and I got better, and Thack worked up the nerve to tell me he wanted out. When he left for a job in Chicago in the mid-nineties, the house became mine alone. It was a tomb at first, filled with too many ghosts, but I exorcised them with paint and fabric and furniture. Over the next eight years, almost without noticing, I arrived at a quiet revelation: You
could
make a home by yourself. You could fill that home with friends and friendly strangers without someone sleeping next to you. You could tend your garden and cook your meals and find predictable pleasure in your own autonomy.

In other words, I was ready for Ben.

I met him on the Internet. Well, not exactly; I
saw
him on the Internet, and met him on the street in North Beach. But I would never have known who he was, or rather what he was looking for, had my friend Barney not modeled for a website catering to older gay men. Barney is forty-eight, a successful mortgage broker, and something of a muscle daddy. He’s a wee bit vain, too. He could barely contain himself when he stopped me on Market Street one day to tell me that his big white marble ass was now available to World Wide Wankers for only $21.95 a month, credit card or online check.

Once upon a time, this would have struck me as sleazy, but the Internet has somehow persuaded half the world to get naked for the enjoyment of the other half. Barney is a fairly sexy guy, but I squirmed a little when I checked out his photos on the site. Maybe I’ve just known him too long, but there was something incestuous and unsettling about it, like watching your Aunt Gladys flashing titty for the troops.

At any rate, there was a personals section on the website, so once I’d fled the sight of Barney’s winking sphincter, I checked out the guys who were looking for Sex, Friendship, or Long Term Relationships. There were lots of geezers there—by which I mean anyone my age or older—regular Joes from Lodi or Tulsa, smiling bravely by their vintage vehicles, or dressed for some formal event. Most of them offered separate close-ups of their erections, artfully shot from below, so that doubtful browsers could find their way past the snow on the roof to the still-raging fire in the furnace.

What surprised me, though, was the number of
young
guys on the site. Guys in their twenties or thirties specifically looking for partners over forty-five. The one who caught my attention, and held it—CLEANCUTLAD4U—was a sandy blond with a brush cut and shining brown eyes. His actual name was not provided, but his profile identified him as thirty-three and Versatile, a resident of the Bay Area. He was lying against a headboard, smiling sleepily, a white sheet pulled down to the first suggestion of pubic hair. For reasons I still can’t name, he came across like someone from another century, a stalwart captured on daguerreotype, casually masculine and tender of heart.

So how did this work?
Did I have to submit a profile or could I just email him directly? He’d want to see a photo, wouldn’t he? Would I have to get naked? The young can keep a little mystery, it seems to me, but the old have to show you their stuff. Which, of course, is easier said than done. Sure, the right dick can distract from a falling ass, and some people actually get off on a nice round stomach, but who has any use for that no-man’s-land between them, that troublesome
lower
stomach of sloppy skin?

Maybe I could pose in my dirty work clothes with just my dick hanging out? (I could call myself NICENDIRTY4U.) But who would take the picture? Barney was the logical choice, but I had a sudden gruesome flash of him directing my debut and thought better of it. Who was I kidding, anyway? CleanCutLad probably got hundreds of offers a week. It was wiser to stick to my monthly night at the Steamworks, where the goods were always on the table, and rejection, when it came, was instant and clean.

And that’s the way I left it, aside from printing out the guy’s Web page and posting it above my potting shed. It stayed there for ages, curling at the edges, a pinup boy for a war that would never be waged. I might not have met him at all if my friend Anna Madrigal hadn’t called to invite me for dinner at the Caffe Sport.

The Caffe Sport is on Green Street, way across town in North Beach, a gaudy Sicilian cavern that dishes up huge creamy mounds of seafood and pasta. Anna had been going there for over thirty years and often used its peasanty charms as a way of luring me out of my complacent nest in the Castro. At eighty-five, she was convinced I was growing too set in my ways. I needed some excitement, she said, and she was the gal to provide it.

So there we sat, awash in colors and aromas, when the impossible happened. Anna was adjusting her turban at the time, consulting the mirror behind my back as she fussed with wisps of snowy hair. Yet somehow she
still
caught the look on my face.

“What is it, dear?”

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“Well, you must have an idea.”

A cluster of departing diners had moved toward the door, obscuring my view. “I think I saw someone.”

“Someone you know?”

“No…not exactly.”

“Mmm…someone you
want
to know.” She shooed me with a large gloved hand. “Go on, then. Catch up with him.”

“I don’t know…”

“Yes you do. Get the hell out of here. I’ll be here with my wine.”

So I sprang to my feet and shimmied through the tightly packed crowd. By the time I reached the door he was nowhere in sight. I looked to the right, toward the fog-cushioned neon of Columbus, then left, toward Grant Avenue. He was almost at the end of the block and picking up speed. I had no choice but to make myself ridiculous.

“Excuse me,” I yelled, hurrying after him.

No response at all. He didn’t even stop walking.

“Excuse me! In the blue jacket!”

He stopped, then turned. “Yeah?”

“Sorry, but…I was in the restaurant and—”

“Oh, shit.” He reached reflexively for his back pocket. “Did I leave my wallet?”

“No,” I replied. “Just
me
.”

I had hoped that this would prove to be an icebreaker, but it landed with a dull thud, missing the ice completely. The guy just blinked at me in confusion.

“I think I saw you on a website,” I explained.

Another blink.

“CLEANCUTLAD4U?”

Finally he smiled. There was a fetching gap between his two front teeth, which only enhanced the fuckable Norman Rockwell image.

“I could’ve sent you my profile,” I told him, “but I figured it was easier just to chase you down the street.”

He laughed and stuck out his hand. “I’m Ben McKenna.”

“Michael Tolliver.”

“I saw you inside with that lady.” He had held my hand a little longer than actually required. “Was that your mother?”

I chuckled. Anna would love to hear
that.
“Not exactly,” I said.

“She looks interesting,”

“She
is,
believe me.” We were rapidly veering off the subject, so I decided to take the bullock by the horns. “I have to get her home, as a matter of fact. Would you mind giving me your phone number? Or I could give you mine.”

He looked almost surprised. “Either way,” he said with a shrug.

We went back into the restaurant for pencil and paper. As Ben scribbled away by the cash register I looked across the room and saw that Anna was watching this transaction with a look of smug accomplishment on her face. And I knew this would not be the end of it; something this juicy could amuse her for weeks.

“My, my,” she said as soon as I returned. “I hope you carded him.”

“He’s thirty-three. Cut me some slack.”

“You
asked
him his age?”

“I read it online.”

“O Brave New World,” she intoned melodramatically. “Shall we head down to the park, dear? Before we call it a night?”

“Thought you’d never ask,” I said.

So I walked her down to Washington Square, where we sat in the cool foggy dark and shared a quick doobie before bedtime.

2

Hugs, Ben

I’
ll give you a moment to do the math. Ben is twenty-one years younger than I am—an
entire adult
younger, if you insist on looking at it that way. But I really haven’t made a habit of this. My first lover, Jon, who died back in ’82, was a year older than I was, and Thack and I are only months apart in age. It’s true that lately I’ve gone out with guys who might be described as, well, less than middle-aged, but it never lasted very long. Sooner or later they would bore me silly with their tales of “partying” on crystal meth or their belief in the cultural importance of Paris Hilton’s dog. And most of them, I’m sorry to say, seemed to think they were doing me a favor.

Before Ben I’d had little experience with daddy hunters. I knew there were young guys who went for older guys, but I’d always assumed that it was largely about money and power. But Ben claims he’s lusted after older men since he was twelve in Colorado Springs and began jerking off to magazines. He remembers rushing home from school to search the latest issue of his dad’s
Sports Illustrated
for the heart-stopping image of Jim Palmer in his Jockey shorts. And several years later, in the same magazine, he read a story about Dr. Tom Waddell, the retired Olympic decathlete who established the Gay Games. The very
fact
of this aging gay gladiator filled him with the hope that
some
of the men he wanted might actually want him back. And all doubt was finally removed when he moved to San Francisco after college. The daddies Ben met down at Starbucks or the Edge were sometimes slow to read the gleam in his eye, but given half a chance and a little encouragement, they could leap whole decades in a single bound.

God knows
I
did. Ben called me the very next morning, and I invited him over for dinner the following night. I told him I was making pot roast, just in case he didn’t consider this a sex date. And just in case he
did,
I popped a Viagra half an hour before his scheduled arrival. He appeared at the door exactly on time in well-fitted Diesel jeans and a pale-blue T-shirt, bearing a bottle of Chianti that clattered to the floor as soon as I grabbed him. When we finally broke from the kiss, he uttered a sigh that suggested both arousal and relief, as if he, too, had worried that we might have to eat pot roast first.

“You should know,” I said, releasing him. “I’m positive.”

He looked in my eyes and smiled. “About what?”

“Don’t get smart with your elders,” I said, leading the way to the bedroom.

“You know,” Ben said afterward. “I think I’ve seen you before.”

He was lying in the crook of my arm, thoughtfully blotting the wet spot, his fingers arranging my chest hair with serene deliberation, like a Zen master raking sand.

I asked him what he meant.

“I think you do the garden at my neighbors’ house,” he said. “No kidding? Where?”

“Out on Taraval.”

“Not Mrs. Gagnier?”

“I don’t know her name, really.”

“French-Canadian, right? Prematurely gray. Makes jam out of her lavender.”

“Well, I don’t know about the
jam
part, but…”

“I do. She gave me some last Christmas. Tastes like shampoo.”

He chuckled. “Do you always work with your shirt off?”

I scolded him with a playful yank on his ear. “Only when I think someone’s
spying on me in the bushes
.”

“I wasn’t in the bushes, I was on my roof.”

“Why didn’t you yell down or something?”

“I dunno. I couldn’t tell if you were queer from up there.”

I gave him a puzzled frown. “How high is that roof, anyway?”

He laughed, snuggling into my side again. After an interval of uncomplicated silence he said, “So how do you know the lady you were with?”

I explained that she had been my landlady years ago when I lived on Russian Hill. I told him about her backyard marijuana garden and her huge collection of kimonos, and the rambling old house itself, tucked away in the alps of those high wooden stairs.

“How does she manage that now?”

“She doesn’t. She had a stroke a few years ago, so she moved down to the Dubose Triangle. There are people who help out, you know, in the building, so there’s a number of us to…share the load.”

“Well, that’s good.”

“Not that it
is
one,” I added. “I love being with her.”

“Sure.”

“She affects a lot of people that way, which is good. She’s still got it going, you know? She still gives a shit about things. Most trannies never make it that far.”

He blinked at me for a moment. “You mean…?”

I smiled in the affirmative. “She was the first one I ever knew.”

“She pulls it off pretty well,” he said.

I told him she’d had some practice, that she’d been a woman for over forty years, almost as long as she’d
not
been a woman.

Ben took that in for a moment. “I’d like to meet her sometime.”

Already that sounded so right to me.

After that first pyrotechnic night, we saw each other about twice a week for three or four months. Ben was kind and bright and appreciative of everything about me I’d recoiled from in recent years: the thickening trunk and silky butt, the wildfire of gray hair sweeping across my chest. Some people think we finally become adults when both our parents have died; for me it happened when someone desired the person I’d become. For years I’d been in a state of suspended boyhood, counting every crow’s foot as I searched for the all-loving man who would finally set things right. Ben made me think that I could
be
that man. Not as some father figure, if that’s what you’re thinking—Ben was way too independent for that—but simply as someone who knew how it felt to be cheated of a father’s comfort and tenderness. Someone who could give you all that.

Loving Ben would be like loving myself, long ago.