A Dark Existence—The Wandering Small Fish, Two Halves of the Same Pond

It happened on his fifth night there, the boy’s first Wednesday there that second trip. His friend, Fate, decided to work that night because her work ethic was undetainable even during vacation. The boy admired Fate for that and so much more considering her tragic childhood. A similar childhood to the boy’s.

He arrived at the same bar where he had met the man: the man who proved to be nothing like the boy despite him uttering so many times over that they were “the same person.” That man was slowly but surely placing himself within the memories of the first trip, and nothing more. It was painful for the boy, but he knew it was for his own good. The boy needed to grow past childhood ruminations turned into repeated adult cycles of abuse.

The boy sat, alone, like every other time he had visited that bar. He looked around, taking in the crowd for that night. It was a slow Wednesday night, but not as slow as Monday and Tuesday. The boy didn’t want to drink but also didn’t want to be a loiterer of space. Especially a space that had shown him such kindness throughout both his stays in that big city. The boy sat alone for an hour before seeing him, alone at the bar. A new man. The boy had managed to strike up a conversation with a group of people, a very nice trio that were enjoying the drag show happening. The most beautiful queens in all of New York City: raunch: verbal sexual liberation: liberation. These queens of the night were entertaining the small crowd of men and some women present; a small but appreciative crowd as they threw five and ten dollar bills at the performing dieties of gay nightlife; the crowd was much more generous than the bar flies back in the boy’s own city.

“Where are you from?” asked Johnny, the one guy in the trio that had approached the boy. The boy’s radar wasn’t that faulty; Johnny was interested in him but the boy couldn’t reciprocate the sentiment even before spotting the new man. Despite the trio’s generosity, the boy knew he had to take his chance, so he did. He waited for the signal; the new man’s friend getting up for a bathroom break after his third Stella. The boy proceeded to slowly walk up to this new man and ask, offer with uttermost fear consuming his already feeble confidence, “Want a drink?” The new man just looked at the boy while consumed by the darkness of the bar; the new man too was darkness; dark pants, dark shirt, dark, wavy hair coated with gray streaks, dark eyes. “You want to buy me a drink?” he finally responded. “Yes,” the boy responded, his confidence still taking a back seat to fear. The man looked at the boy a few more minutes before finally responding “Ok, sure.”

The boy gently waved to the bartender, who the boy sensed didn’t particularly like him; the boy understood why. In his attempt to not follow in his dead father’s footsteps, the boy had only consumed Diet Coke the entire night and the bartender had no reason to suspect his next drink would be of a different type.“What do you want?” asked the boy, as the bartender stood before them both. The boy knew so little about the new man, including his preference in drinks. The new man looked at the boy, and with the same soft and heavy look as when they first locked eyes, he answered “Jamo.” The boy turned to the bartender and repeated the exact same words, the bartender simply answered “Ok” and got to work. He looked fazed, a sudden eyebrow raise, by the boy’s change of heart in ordering.

“I’m Andy,” the boy said as he extended his hand to touch the new man’s. The new man extended his own hand slowly, but confidently; his skin was soft and his knuckles hard. The boy couldn’t help but remember the man from his first trip and his similar feel to this new man’s. “I’m Boris,” the new man answered as he looked at the boy. The boy was mesmerized for no apparent reason; he knew nothing about this new man aside from the outer darkness shrouding him. Nevertheless, this darkness drew the boy in. It was inviting; intoxicating; addicting.

“Enjoying the drag show?” the boy asked. The boy knew it sounded like small talk; the boy loathed small talk; the boy knew small talk was the golden ticket to annihilating a possible connection from its roots. But the boy also knew this connection was rooted in the utter smallness of his confidence, one that was hanging by a thread as the new man looked straight ahead without batting an eye back in the boy’s direction. But the boy was relentless. “It was alright,” said the new man as he took his shot, then took a sip from his Heineken and added “You’ve seen one drag show in New York, you’ve seen them all.” The boy simply sat, took a sip from the water glass he had been nursing long before walking up to the new man, and continued to sit speechless for almost a minute before asking “Are you originally from New York?” The man turned to the boy and answered immediately “No, I’m from Philly.” “How many years?” the boy pressed forward, determined to know more. Know anything more about this man and the darkness he originated from.“I’ve been here twelve years, or so...”the new man answered and took yet another sip. The boy could feel the knots in his stomach eating away at his insides, a warning about the impending, greater pain this new man posed; this new man and his darkness within.

“Where are you from? California?” asked the new man, leaving the boy mesmerized for the second time that night. “How did you know?” the boy immediately responded. The boy’s immediacy came from a place of absolute panic, almost making him reconsider his dry streak as he took a big, alcohol-free sip. “How can you tell?” the boy finally asked as the water swimming down his throat provided no liquid courage.

“Just something about your demeanor, not a bad thing,” the new man said as he took another sip. The boy couldn’t help but think the new man was lying; seeming very “L.A” was never a positive attribute. Seeminy very “L.A” meant snobby: slow: entitled: passive: very passive. Granted, this new man thinking the boy was passive wasn’t deal breaker; it could certainly be a benefit in another area of their future interactions.“Explain,” the boy asked; he was determined to know the new man’s exact implication: his judgement. Above all, the boy was determined to know the new’s man perception of him. Was he being defamed or categorized sheerly by his city of origin? “It’s something very L.A about you, like I said, not a bad thing,” the new man pressed, sipping. A long sip that drowned their conversation in silence for an eternal minute. The new man proceeded to wave down the bartender and order another Heineken. Then he turned to the boy and asked “You want anything?” Yes, the boy wanted something. The boy wanted something badly. Very badly. But it wasn’t something the man could offer him through financial generosity. The boy desired another type of generosity from the new man.

The boy and the new man continued their conversation for an hour. They talked about their favorite TV shows; their favorite foods; their star signs. The new man loved Shameless and Dexter; Dexter was the boy’s favorite TV show ever, and Lip Gallagher was his favorite Shameless character, which the new man resembled in his brooding, grungy demeanor; the boy loved exploring the big city’s food scene; the new man was a restaurant manager with impressive Instagram takes of his establishment’s best dishes; the boy was a Pisces; the man was a Scorpio though he claimed he didn’t “believe in all that stuff.”

“Last call,” the bartender announced as he looked around the bar and the remaining garbage, and the dirty glasses, too. The crowd had dissipated, and unlike L.A, the big city’s bar crowd was obedient when “last call” came around. The stumbling and virtually incoherent men and their lady frends started to exit one by one until only the boy and the new man remained to keep the bartender on his toes. “Lance, get us two more shots,” the new man said, giving a name to the bartender who had otherwise remained nameless that whole night. Not that the boy had cared to learn the bartender’s name or any other man’s since learning the new man’s: Boris. Boris. The boy had only met one other Boris throughout his life and he and the boy did not root for the same team.

“Jamo?” the bartender asked as he looked at them both. The boy was hesistant. The boy had been so disciplined in only sticking to non-alcoholic beverages that night. The boy had been so disciplined in not reverting to old habits throughout that second trip. The boy had been so disciplined in his self-preservation throughout that whole meet aside from his transparency as a city slicker from a whole different universe from the new man’s. “Sure...”the boy finally lost his will power to the new man. The new man was unstoppable; inviting: intoxicating: addicting. And the boy wasn’t afraid. Though he knew he should be. There’s a reason most people sleep through the darkness of the night. There’s a reason the bartender that now had a name—Lance—let men into their sixth beer and third shot of the night stay past closing.

“How old are you, anyway?” the new man asked the boy as “Lance” poured their final drinks for the night. “Thirty l-one,” the boy answered, sheepishly. The stigma of thirty in his community had began to creep in on the boy in the recent year. “Guess how old he is?” the new man said to Lance, completely redirecting the course of everything. Lance turned to the new man, disinterested but still pretending to the bare minimum because, after all, he was still awaiting the new man’s gratuity. But the boy was left to ponder “How gratuitous was this new man?” as the only physical touch he had given the boy was that introductory handshake. “Please, I don’t want to know,” Lance said as he started to wash a stack of dirty glasses on the counter. “He’s older than us!” the new man pressed more for a reaction. “I wasn’t sure he was even legal since he wasn’t drinking,” said Lance, corfirming what the boy thought: the boy was nothing more than a loiterer of space to the bartender.

The new man turned to look at the boy, then called out to Lance again, even though the bartender was technically done with his job for the night, and asked him “Can I have one more Heineken.” Lance simply gave him an eye roll and grabbed a Heineken, put it under the bottle opener below his well, and handed it to the new man. The boy proceeded to look at his own shot, untouched though the bar had long since closed. He looked at it and debated. Debated drinking it. Debated and debated even after the new man had long since downed his own. Even after the new man turned to stare at him with those dark, impenetrable eyes, waiting for the boy to join in the downing and drowning.

“You drinking this, baby?” asked Lance as the boy still debated, his eyes fixated on the brownish liquor before him. Lance couldn’t care less at that point; he just needed to add that glass to the stack of filth surrounding him. The bartender was desperate to get rid of all the remaining filth. The boy didn’t want to seem like a loser. He didn’t want to make himself left out. The boy wanted to be at the same level as the new man, desperately, so he succumbed. Succumbed to down the shot and endure its burning down his throat in such a consistently unpleasant way. An ugly consistency, but an uglier unpleasantness would have been to lose this new man’s interest. An interest the boy had temporarily secured.

The conversation continued for another forty minutes. And just like the darkness of that bar after the stage lights were turned off and the glorious queen had taken taken their leave, their words took a darker tone. The death of the new man’s mother; the death of the boy’s father: bonding and more bonding. Bonding over the man’s constant need to escape to that bar after a long day of work and his non-existent social life, which reminded the boy of when he led a similar, self-destructive routine in his early twenties; more bonding over the genderless universe, and how it always found a way to take care of them both. Man, woman, fluid; this higher power always made sure people didn’t get in too much trouble, and sometimes, it brought together two halves of the same pond in the most unexpected circumstances.

“Baby, we’re closed, you have to go,” said the bartender, who the boy assumed was acting out of spite, but the reality was that he was also just a new man in the boy’s life he knew nothing about; a new man with his own life to live outside that bar; just like the boy; just like the new man. “Sorry,” said the boy as he started to stand; something the new man had no intention of doing as he sipped on his sixth Heinken and sat still, his eyes intent on the bar and dead space.

“Mind if I get your number?” the boy finally blurted out the question that had been burning his mind since the bar closed. A different, stronger burning, devoid of ugliness. The new man looked at the boy and smiled, almost a smirk without maliciousness. He responded three seconds later with “You can have my number,” but instead of saying any numbers, he grabbed the boy’s phone and started entering. Entering deeper into the boy’s universe. “By the way, you might want to think of a more difficult password,” the new man added as he continued to possess the boy’s phone. An observance kept secret by darkness, but an observance that brought light into the boy’s heart.

“There, texted you,” the boy said as he texted the man his full name. The man simply read the text, put his phone down and took another sip. A small, slow, assertive sip. The boy, knowing he had extended his stay to the point where he might get permanently banned, finished standing up, and then did what he had wanted to do for what seemed like hours instead of just one. The boy put his arms around the new man; he was warm, his sweat slightly perfusing through his dark shirt, and he was soft. Soft to the touch despite his assertive exterior. “We should grab drinks tomorrow, or before I go home,”the boy said, an unaccounted for confidence suddenly taking over. The man looked at him, then with a small smile, not a smirk—a smile—responded “That’s cool, I usually get here around one.” The boy stood up, looking at the man for one last second before heading off towards the entrance, not turning once to look back despite his every desire.

The boy replayed every event of the night as he strolled on. Replayed sitting in the darkness of that bar, alone despite being surrounded by that friendly trio. Then seeing the man, across the bar as he drank in his respective darkness; consumed by darkness, an inviting darkness that lured in the boy and ended his loneliness. Just like the sun replaced the loneliness of the night. Replacing the darkness of that big city as the clouds drifted above the boy, watching him as he wandered on from West 13th street onward. The boy wandered aimlessly. Like his aimless wandering into the darkness of this new man, the aimless wandering through his emotional ambiguity, and that of the man of before him, and the emotional darkness of every new man the boy had encountered in that pond that was the big city.