Reality Bites

Denim Boy opens up the door to his apartment wearing only his light blue pajama pants. I walk in and immediately start kissing him, touching him up and down, my black leather gloves caressing his skin. I push him up against the wall and his back slams it hard, making the whole apartment shake a little.

“You’re cold,” he says almost whining. It’s mid-December in Chicago. He takes my shoulders and pushes me back gently, and then walks over to close his front door. Meanwhile, I walk to his living room and throw my coat on his leather couch.

“Alright, now I’m ready,” he says and walks up to me expecting me to jump him again. I stand there, facing him with a dubious look. I’m teasing him. Not giving in and doing what I so obviously want to do, pretending like I have no idea what he expects from me. After a few seconds, he gives him and starts kissing me. He wants it too.

I unbutton my long-sleeved shirt, and he pulls me down onto his black leather couch. He lies down, and I get on top of him, putting my hands on the armrest to support my upper body as he writhes below me. His pants were thin, and I could feel his crotch getting hard.

“You have great sexual energy!” he says when we stop for a bit to catch our breath. Feeling like a lion, I drag him up and then lead him to his bedroom. I’m ready to roar.

The following week, I take a flight back to California for winter break. I don’t expect to keep much in touch with Denim Boy, out of sight, out of mind. And I think that perhaps he feels the same way. We’re nothing official, just casual. I like him, but I’m not one to push (unless it’s physically and up against a wall). Besides, I know for sure that I’m going to see him again after I return to continue what we had gotten into.

But Denim Boy texts me every single day while I’m away. Little casual comments turn into full-blown conversations, and before I know it I’m falling asleep clutching my phone and waking up to a ridiculous phone bill. I never thought I would be the kind of boy to have to get an unlimited texting plan.

“I just checked our signs on Wikipedia,” reads one of his texts. “We share a planet!” Towards the end of my stay in California, every time my phone vibrates, I can feel it all the way deep in my heart, and I start getting really excited to see him again.

My phone vibrates one more time while I’m hanging out with a high school friend and her boyfriend at Angels & Kings. It’s Denim Boy. I text him that I’m in the area, and he invites me over.

My heart is bursting with anticipation. But when the door of his apartment opens up, instead of Denim Boy standing there, half naked with his body for me to hold close, I see… some other boy.

“Hey,” Some Other Boy says without introducing himself or letting me know what the hell he is doing here. Confused, I walk in and then find my boy sitting on the couch.

“Hey! How was your trip?” Denim Boy asks right before coming up to give me a hug.

“It was fine…” I say with a tone that hints at my confusion, as if asking, “Am I intruding?” Denim Boy then realizes and introduces me to Some Other Boy, who is wearing a Yale sweatshirt. So to make small talk, I ask, “Oh do you go to Yale?”

“Oh no, my friend gave it to me…” Some Other Boy says.

Wow, why would he do that? Why would anyone wear a collegiate shirt of a school they didn’t go to? So that they have to explain themselves, cause you know people will ask, that they didn’t go there?

“Of course, you don’t go to Yale,” is what I want to say. But I hold back.

Half an hour of awkward superficial conversations later, I’m getting impatient. I catch Denim Boy while he’s getting a glass of water and ask if maybe we can take the after party back to his room—just the two of us.

“Oh… tonight’s not a good day, we’re kind of having my friend sleep over,” he says but I don’t believe sleeping will be the only thing they’ll be doing tonight.

“Oh… so you guys are getting ready to go to bed?”

“Yeah… kinda.”

“And I’m the only person that won’t be spending the night.”

“Not tonight.”

“So I should be getting out of here then.”

“We’ll hang out some other time, I promise,” Denim Boy says as a sort of consolation prize as I’m getting my jacket and ready to leave.

“Actually, no. We won’t. This was kind of the last time.”

Sitting on the El back to campus, I keep going through the moments in my head over and over again. We had a great time in bed, and when we hung out, and he kept making contact while I was gone. Was he bored? Was I just an immediate distraction, and now that he had found this Yale poser, he’s done with me? Squeezed every drop of fun out of me, or so he thinks. And why did he keep texting me, and pretending like he was into me? I would’ve been fine had he walked away after our casual hook-up. I would have scratched him from my boy bank and not have kept investing in what I thought would be a profitable return.

And I was so certain that this real boy would be different. He would care and be kind and not play games, not lead me on and resort to me whenever he wanted, like some plaything that would be available to him whenever he wished. What happened to the good old days when a boy kissed you because he meant it, not to just show that he could?

And then I keep thinking how my most intense flames tend to fade suddenly. What is wrong with me? And it’s happened with both the eccentric, party boys and with the real, down-to-earth boys too. Guys just want to make out with me, and hook up with me and take me home. But when it comes to starting something serious, I fall short. I’m a one-night thing and then expire.

I feel like a toy. So disposable.

A Real Boy

After one too many times riding the roller coaster that is dating boys who think they’re the biggest thrill you’ll ever find, I was ready to leave the amusement park. For a couple of weeks, I was on a self-imposed boycott so I could straighten out my life. Three months short of graduation, I still had yet to find a stable entry-level slave camp that would take me solely on the fact that I’d overpaid for my education.

The last thing I needed was the twists, turns and inevitable bumps of a new guy, especially since I’ve noticed recently I tend to attract men who rely on me to carry on a big chunk of their baggage. Eccentric like from another planet, if not completely psychotic, my previous paramours had the tendency to drown me in drama when all I wanted was to stay afloat.

I’ve often wondered what it is about my personality that makes me a magnet for extremity. Perhaps, I’m too accommodating to their demands, or maybe a more suitable explanation is that I’m the one drawn towards them. I do admit: I’m like a month flying mindlessly towards the flickering light in the dark until it gets burnt. I find something oddly alluring about a boy engulfed in his own flame.

So if it’s me, then it’s a behavior I can change, I thought. No more game-playing, ego boost-craving, manipulative boys. When everything is covered in starry facades, a down-to-earth attitude is what really shines. And so I made it my mission to look for that, a real boy.

It was this ongoing quest that convinced me to make one exception to my boycott and head down to the Gold Coast to meet my latest fling, a guy I had met two weeks before at a clothing boutique in Lincoln Park while looking to purchase a new pair of jeans.

“Hi, do you work here?” I asked pretty sure that he worked there.

“No, but I’m sure I can help you,” he said self-assured that he could work there.

“Ah, I don’t know about that. I’m pretty picky when it comes to jeans.”

“Everyone should be; it’s hard to find the right pair.” And with that he walked over to the wall where all the jeans were hanging and offered his advice on several styles. As it turns out, he’s somewhat of a denim connoisseur who hunts down rare denim through thrift shops and on eBay.

We exchanged numbers that afternoon and had been texting incessantly ever since. I’m weary of sparks that stem from impersonal communication like texts or online, but when I started getting all giddy whenever my phone vibrated, I knew it wasn’t forged.

I perceived this guy to be somewhat of a different breed from the self-aware, superficial fireflies I had encountered in the past. In the many conversations he initiated, he illustrated an aversion to the Boystown merry-go-round: mind fucking, disposable eye candy and all things crafted to impress. He was just comfortable staying in his apartment, cooking dinner for his friends and watching a Tim Burton flick. Which is what he had planned for me that night. A date at his place, exactly the type of real boy behavior I longed for.

I arrive at his Gold Coast apartment building, and I’m initially taken aback by the high-priced décor of the building. I wonder how a junior in college has the resources to indulge in such a lavish living arrangement. After signing in as a guest, the doorman calls him up, says my name, and after a subtle nod lets me through to the elevators.

Denim Boy opens the door to his pad and gives me a hug. He had gotten a hair cut since we had last seen each other, his curly black hair is now more rectangular in shape, but his light blue eyes had stayed just the same. He is delighted to see me carrying a brown bag with not one but two bottles of red wine to complement the penne pasta with vodka sauce he has prepared especially for the occasion.

After dinner, we sit on his black leather couch perusing though old issues of fashion magazines while Batman Returns blares on his television screen. Our favorite Batman movie, we concur. After the scene where Michelle Pfeiffer trashes her modest secretary apartment and turns it into a twisted Hello Kitty fetish bordello, I grab his attention and point out the new Louis Vuitton ad with a very naked Marc Jacobs decorated in bright neon pink lettering.

“You know I’m really good friends with his ex-boyfriend,” he says assuming I had no idea about Marc Jacobs’s personal love life.

“Jason Preston?!” I ask knowing every detail.

“Yeah, that’s who I stay with whenever I’m in New York.”

Real boys don’t associate with Marc Jacobs’s ex-boyfriends, I thought. So then I have to ask, “How do you know him?”

“Well, for a while… I was seeing this guy… who… you know… used to model for Diesel,” he says quite aware of how ridiculous that statement is on a first date. How ridiculous this whole conversation is in general.

I make a face to indicate to him my utter lack of words. Like there’s no way I’m going to compete with a Diesel model. But I’m partly just playing up to the ridiculous scenario. It doesn’t really get to me. What I do ponder is whether Denim Boy has any other secrets that propel him further out into the stratosphere, where fashion models, reality TV stars and lunatics reside.

So maybe he isn’t as ordinary and uncomplicated and real as I had hoped, but we’ve been having a great time and social circles don’t necessarily dictate the true nature underneath. Besides, if I ran away from every guy with connections to the glossy glossy lifestyle, I would be stuck somewhere between Nebraska and my own private Idaho, and I can’t even tell you where those states are on a map. My only concern now that I had learned of my predecessors is to… work it. Better than a model.

Which to me, at that time, drunk on red wine, means to start making out hard core on the couch to the very loud sounds of Danny Elfman.