1
The
music is insipid and too loud and the lighting stinks, but Underdog is the best
bar in town for our Saturday night tandem cruise–the sort of place that can
only exist in a fair-sized Midwestern college town, with enough gay guys around
to create critical mass, but not enough to split apart into erotic niche
markets. Corn-fed blond farmboys (more often than not, they desperately want to
get their legs in the air, but you’ll never read the signals if you aren’t a
corn-fed blond farmboy yourself); willowy, epicene aspirants to the remake of
Brideshead Revisited (one kid, I swear to God, came in every weekend last fall
wearing tweed and shlepping a teddy bear); daddies like my Jim; a gaggle of
drag queens from the music department (who regularly arrive en masse as the
cast of the opera the music school is currently performing); vanilla frot enthusiasts
like me; and several extremely hot transmen (one of whom, with quite possibly
the most perfectly defined chest in town, and almost certainly the hairiest, is
chair of the economics department). It’s a scene that could go horribly awry
with rampant bitchiness: everybody knows everybody, at least by face. But
somehow, it all holds together with good humor and good will, and the gossip
remains if not minimal, then at least mostly benevolent and playful.
It took Jim and me a lot of time and some very rocky
steering to work out the arrangement that had brought us here together every
weekend and reunited us at home by Sunday noon to compare notes, usually to end
up back in the sack together for another hour, getting each other off on common
ground while swapping stories of scenes we couldn’t imagine sharing.
Nearly three years ago in 1997, at the September reception
for new faculty, we zeroed in on each other across a room awash in academic
small talk. Within fifteen minutes we’d sequestered ourselves in the corner. So
much for networking with the other new hires. Jim’s thick white hair, his
close-cropped beard, his ice-blue eyes, the obvious heft of his shoulders under
his shirt, all drew me like a bee to clover. His tanned, thickly muscled
forearms reminded me of my grandfather’s as I sat as a little kid on the arm of
his chair, watching him blow smoke rings while the Cincinnati Reds ran the
bases on TV.
Before I’d screwed up the nerve to ask him back to my place,
he asked me back to his. We tried to be
discrete about it, though the matching bulges in my freshly pressed chinos and
his faded jeans would have given us away to anyone who glanced our way below
waist-level.
We’d barely closed his door before we started clawing off
each other’s shirts....
*****
The full text of Topsy Turvy is available for download here:
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