45. Bayne’s Eyeball

            “Do we have to stay here?”

            “What?” I screamed over the death metal sodomizing my ears.

            “DO WE!” Oliver repeated, “HAVE TO! STAY HERE!”

            I looked around frantically. We had just walked in off the street to the coffee shop Thad was supposed to be at, but I couldn’t find him. The steamy hot place was packed with thrashing kids as Bayne’s 4-piece band Eyeball blared an oh-so-charming punk version of Rainbow Connection from the back stage. The tintinnabulation of the music ricocheted off the walls in a deafening lightening arch, making it feel like your ears were individually dying. Bayne, who looked like a zombiefied Jim Morrison, danced and waved the microphone before the mesmerized crowd like a banshee out for vengeance.  

            Oliver tugged on my arm and I watched him mouth “Please, God!” but I was unable to hear him over the moaning and the groaning of the ungodly song’s chorus: “…The lovers! The dreamers! And me!”

            I shook my head, ‘No,' and looked around frantically. I wanted to find Thad, just to say ‘hi,’ see how he was, and rub Oliver in his face. The teenage Goth crowd before us was breaking into a seismic mosh pit, which we were in the distinct danger of being drawn into. People began flailing and screaming; one girl genuflected madly before being pulled to the floor by the crush. Out of the crowd at the front, Bettina jumped onstage and began tantrically beating a tambourine  against her crotch like she was trying to kill something.

            The crowd grew and swelled with each screamed note of the song. As the music hit a fevered pitch and Bayne started throwing mutilated Muppet parts out into the audience, I turned to make sure we could still see the door, and just as I did the most beautiful man I had ever seen walked in and everything in my world stopped. He was my age, tall and thin, with sandy ringlet curls and a strong jaw. With a heart-shaped face and pale blue eyes, he drew the last draw off of cigarettes before tossing it out the door behind him, the smoke escaping his sumptuous, red, red lips. There was nothing in the world so red as those lips. Suffer me to kiss those lips.  

            And then I realized it was Thad, my Thad! And I giggled; how silly to not have first recognized him, but how real to know how I felt about him: My God did I love him.

            He saw me and waved and I blushed and looked away, a schoolgirl crush across my cheeks. When I looked back up he was still waving, but this time to follow him back outside.

            Grabbing Oliver, he with his hands covering his ears in sheer tortured terror, I drug us through the pogoing crowd and back out to the Main Street sidewalk

 Thad waited there, smiling “Loud, huh?” he yelled, as we scuttled away from the door and the noise.

            “Good God!” I said, grabbing to hug him, so happy to see him. I had no idea how I had missed him.

            Thad hugged back and whispered, “You okay?”

            I pulled back to look into his eyes, “Yeah, I just didn’t recognize you in there and it was weird. I’m glad it’s you.”

            “Okay,” he laughed.

            “That was just terrible!” Oliver screamed, bumbling up to us, as was his way. “Can they even legally call that music? And if they do, they should be sued! We should sue them. Sue them right now. I know lawyers, I do. ”

“Hello,” Thad said with a sigh and a snide roll of his eyes.

Oliver continued without acknowledging him, “I mean, where do they even get off? I’ve heard the death rattle of feral cats run over by trucks screech in more dulcet tones.”

Trying to cover for Oliver’s snub, I jumped in, “Hey, so how’s your night going?”

Thad frowned at Oliver like he was a bug. I cleared my throat and he looked up to me and smiled, “It’s okay. Bettina is just being Bettina….”

He proceeded to tell us a long story about Bettina not being ready on time, Bettina having to change three times, Bettina drinking too much wine at the house, Bettina falling down on stage,  and so on, but what I listened to was him: He didn’t sound or look drunk. He had been smoking, fine, I was learning to live with that, even though I envied him for it, but he seemed sober.

I told him about our adventures so far and Oliver added things here and there, but mainly just tugged at his ears in an infected sort of way. It was just so weird to run into Thad when he was out with someone else; it was like we were and weren’t together which was a feeling I did not like.

In the midst of another story about Bettina, Thad kinda slurred a word, so I refocused my attention to follow his cadence to make sure there was not a slip into drunkenness. I could not discern one, but the problem was that Thad always talked like a drunken gay puppet, so to tell if he was actually drunk or not, especially in the height of my paranoia,  was a challenge. But by the time we had finished catching up, I had decided he was not, and felt much better. My spy mission was accomplished: he was a good and true boyfriend.    

From inside, the music suddenly came to a crashing halt and people poured outside to smoke. We three moved farther down the sidewalk away from them. 

“So where are you going after this?” Thad asked.

“Oh, probably just back to the car. Maybe go get ice cream afterward.”

“Oh, I just adore ice cream!” Oliver said with his hands above his head.

“Children do.” Thad smiled.

“Now, now,” Oliver smiled falsely.

Bettina and Bayne pushed thought the crowd of smokers and by us, holding each other up, doing a Jim Beam shuffle.

“Hey!” Thad snapped at her.

“We’ll...we’ll….be back,” Bettina slurred, looking over to him. And then glassy-eyed to me, “Hey Mitchell!” She was so loaded. “We’ll be back. Don’t worry…”

Bane looked around and laughed to no one in particular, “We don’t fucking care…”

And they stumbled off, like Oklahoma’s own Sid and Nancy.

Thad looked over at me with sadness in his eyes, and I smiled a kind smile back at him.

“Is she okay?” I asked.

“I don’t think so. She’s drunk a lot now; ever since they got back together… he’s not a good influence…”

“She is so hot!” Oliver yelled, doing a little sex dance. “Hot mamma jamma!”

“Shut-up, Ollie,” Thad snapped, then to me. “Let me go make sure she’s not going to try and drive. I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?”

“Oh, yeah. I’ll see you then…” I said sadly: and with that my previous dreamy infatuation with Thad was again broken as Bettina had won him yet again.

“ Bye!” And Thad sprinted off down the street, where they had stopped and Bayne appeared to be peeing on a park bench in plain view, there on Main Street, USA.

“You ready to go?” I asked, looking down at Oliver.

He was frowning, “He doesn’t like me at all, does he? He didn’t even say ‘goodbye.’”

“You didn’t greet him when you walked up.” I said matter-of-factly.

‘Well, he’s been rude to me in the past. Last time I don’t think he greeted me at all, so this time I decided I didn’t have to greet him…”

“Oh, Jesus Christ, Oliver…” I said just as I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned to see the Gaybor standing right behind me and I gasped like Doris Day seeing Rock Hudson for the first time. 

“Michael?” he said deeply.

“Hey! Gay-a-a-…Hey! ” I said, having no idea what his real name was, but pretty sure it wasn’t ‘Gaybor’ which is what I almost called him. “How are you?”

“Good, good.” He smiled, just as handsome as ever, in khaki shorts and a polo shirt. “I thought that was you. Enjoying the night?”

“Yes, yes, the Art Walks are always fun.”  Oliver sidled up to us and was looking at me expecting an introduction, but I positioned myself between us: he was annoying and I couldn’t remember the Gaybor’s name, so no introduction for him.  “I have always enjoyed them. Did you see any art you liked?”

“There were these really great fish paintings in this one place down the way…”

Oliver guffawed, and I made a side-shushing motion with my hand, while still not publically acknowledging him. “Oh, yeah I saw those, those were great.” I was not sure what I was doing, but I was enjoying it, enjoying the attention. Let Thad chase Bettina and her daemons; I had a handsome guy chatting me up. 

We went on to discuss the end of classes and joke about grading finals, “Totally subjective! I know! I’m surprised it’s legal!” I said. Then, as Oliver’s presence was becoming obvious, I decided I had to cut it short, so I said to the Gaybor, “Well, nice seeing you. I’ll see you around.”

“Yeah, we should do coffee sometime.” He said with a winning smile.

 “Oh, yeah. That would be great.” I said knowing I should not, not, not do this: I was not allowed to hang out with single gay guys I found attractive, it just wasn’t fair to Thad, as if he did it to me, I would blow. But this was a work thing. We did work together, sort of. So maybe it wasn’t all bad. Maybe this was allowable? As his chasing of Bettina was allowed.  

  “Great! Great!” he said with a Ralph Lauren smile.

And before I knew it we were exchanging business cards and then phone numbers punched into our cell phones and he said he would call me in a few weeks after he got back from a conference in New York City and I told him I was going to a conference in Puerto Rico soon, and then we talked about that, and how we would have to do coffee between those two, and how it would be great to get to know each other better, and other things that made me feel that special tingle, you know THAT special tingle-and it felt wrong, wrong, wrong. 

We said out final goodbyes and shook hands. As he walked away I looked down to his card, ‘Steve Banks, Associate Professor of Architecture’ and murmured, “Steve!” 

“And who was that?” Oliver asked, getting as up in my face as much as his petite frame would allow.  

“No one,” I lied.

“Then why are you blushing? And why didn’t you introduce me?”

It was then I thought: was Thad still there? I looked back down the street and there he was, standing as if mesmerized, watching me, I assume having seen the whole thing. Bettina and Bayne sat on the peed-on park bench next to him, slumped over, maybe passed-out, maybe dead. But all I saw was the lost, hurt look on Thad’s face and it made my insides hurt.   

I waved to him and he waved back, and just as I did it, I realized that I was waving to him with the hand holding my cell phone and the Gaybor’s business card.

 Shame.

Turning, I grabbed Oliver, and we trotted off down the street, away from Thad, trying to outrun my guilt.  

  It did not work.