The Kingdom of Sand Read online

  So it was doubly disappointing that afternoon to go into the video store and see that everyone there was as old as I was. How many artificial hips, replaced knees, and pacemakers were in that room I could only imagine—one man just inside the entrance had, evidently, such severe arthritis that the person he’d just had sex with was giving him a hand to help him up. The expressions on the customers’ faces were all so blank one could only explain them with old age and weariness, unless it was the experience of having been rejected countless times. Everyone looked like a dog in a pound hoping to be taken home, but with none of the eagerness dogs exhibit in that situation. No barking, no wagging of tails, no jumping up against the wire partition—instead a face from which all emotion, even longing, had been removed. Yet here we were—searching, I suspect, for more than sex could give us. The ancient Greeks thought old men obtained virility by ingesting the semen of young ones. Nowadays you take a multivitamin. So why were these men still coming here? I’d always wondered why an older friend of mine named Earl had gone to the boat ramp in his seventies to “get with,” as he put it, someone in the men’s room, since it had nothing to do with his having an orgasm. He didn’t even bother to unzip his pants. Like Earl, these men at the video store were here for some other reason—habit, loneliness, something they could not name. They made me think of Santayana’s definition of fanaticism: redoubling your efforts when the goal is lost. I wasn’t even sure why I was there, unless it was the mist drenching the strawberry fields on the other side of 301 in a soft silvery light, the emotions engendered when winter finally arrives in North Florida.

  The prosperous farmer I finally spotted in the last cubicle on the right, though he was standing with his back to me, looking down on someone I couldn’t see because the farmer was so tall. The only sound in the entire place was something between a whimper and a moan coming from the man on his knees. But that didn’t last very long. A few minutes later the farmer gave me a little smile as he passed me on his way to the bathroom. So that’s all one has to do, I thought—park your truck, get blown, and leave. The man who’d blown the farmer was a short, shapeless fellow who slinked past me with his head hanging down, rushing to the exit before the farmer could emerge from the bathroom, which made me think: No, that’s the secret—not just having a nice cock, but not caring who adores it. And with that I drove home, thinking there could be no greater loneliness than the one I was feeling as the raindrops splattered on the roof, wondering why the need to touch another human being had to be played out in such a sordid place, in so humiliating a manner.

  Nevertheless, I was back the next day. The weather was no longer that gray, misty, wet stuff that had made me so emotional, and I told myself I was stopping off just to see who was there on my way to the gym. Once a week I went to Gainesville for a “spa day,” which meant taking a high-interval class in a room full of young women with bouncing ponytails, and then a swim with people my age while the truly decrepit participated in aqua-aerobics on the edge of the pool, peeing, a friend assured me, in the water. After that I planned to have lunch with two old friends, which made me think a stop in Orange Heights might provide me with some amusing small talk. But that wasn’t the main reason I turned into the video store on my way west. One of the strange qualities of visiting a place like that is that it has aftereffects. In the same way you can go to bed after watching a porn film without having an orgasm and realize, when you get up the next morning, that you have to find that film before you do anything else, what happened at the video store on one day could very well amount to unfinished business with which you had to deal the next. That’s because everyone has a different melting point in these places. Some people are slow, cautious, and risk-averse; they take their time, not only to make sure the situation and object of desire are right but also to overcome their own inhibitions or fear of rejection. The talented, confident few jump right in. So now, twenty-four hours after having realized the farmer would do just fine, a fact I’d been too critical to admit at the time, I was driving back to Orange Heights in the hope that he might be there again. No such luck. When I stopped by to find the handsome Baptist, I found instead the same quintet of egg-shaped men in baggy T-shirts who’d been there the day before. After they left, the only person remaining besides myself was a middle-aged man with dyed blond hair occupying the cubicle where the farmer had stood with his back to me the day before—and when he left there was nothing to do but enter the booth he’d vacated and watch the porn film that was still running, which led me to the lowest form of experience there is in a dirty bookstore: watching porn by yourself.

  Of course, watching porn in a place where one is supposed to have actual sex is already depressing; it’s then that the pathetic nature of one’s fantasies, the depth of one’s loneliness, become clear. Had I been home, I’d have watched the movie the previous tenant had selected with no self-consciousness; I’d have been able to enter into the spirit of the thing with no problem. Now it was a mockery of the need that had brought me here, a film that only accentuated my isolation. Of course all my emotions were on edge to begin with because it was two weeks before Christmas, and in one of those strange moments when whatever we are using to distract ourselves from our real worries (e.g., porn) suddenly evaporates—the way we sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and immediately begin thinking about what it is that’s really bothering us, even when we didn’t know this when we went to bed—so it was that, watching the film on the monitor the previous tenant of this cubicle had abandoned, I ceased to see the figures at all, and in their place was what was actually getting me down: the coming holiday. In seven days I’d have to fly to my sister’s up north to spend the week with her family because she didn’t want me to be alone. I was doomed. There was nothing standing between me and Christmas 2020 at my sister’s but a potluck dinner given by the Gainesville Friendship Alliance, a group of gay men who met at one another’s homes every few months for social purposes that had become over the years so elderly that it was in danger of dissolution, my friend Patrick said when I joined him and our friend Luke for lunch in Gainesville at a restaurant on Thirty-Ninth Street after working out at the gym.

  “And why can’t they get new members?” I said as we sat down on a small patio outside the Gator Growl.

  “Because if you were young,” said Patrick, “and walked into a GFA dinner and saw people who looked like us, you’d run the other way too.”

  “Why? How do we look?”

  “Like people who have—how shall I put it?” he laughed. “Faded.”

  The only reason I was shocked that afternoon at being reminded of my age—ten years older than Patrick, two years older than Luke—was that I’d just come from a swim at the gym and was feeling fit and vigorous. But now there it was on the table between us. The reason I had to watch so much porn, the reason I had to go to the video store, the reason I’d not found anyone else in it attractive, and the reason we were having lunch with one another were all the same: we were old.

  It was odd, however, how each time we got together a different one of us seemed older than the other two, like a circulating trophy nobody wanted. The last time we’d lunched, at a Cuban restaurant on Thirty-Fourth Street, Luke had looked old to me, walking with a noticeable stoop because of his arthritis. The time before that it had been Patrick, the flesh on his face furrowed, his red hair too long, his eyes those of a thousand-year-old mummy. But today Luke was looking better than Patrick or myself—his short silver hair neatly trimmed, his tanned face set off by a powder-blue shirt and a pair of rimless eyeglasses. He was, I had to admit as we perused our menus, the one who looked most sexually viable. In fact, he was still going to the video store on Highway 301 once a week, he told me, and always had sex there, even if the last man he’d blown, he said, had been wearing a brassiere. He knew, in fact, who the Baptist farmer was; the farmer, he said, had a mole on his left testicle, and the longest prepuce Luke had ever seen. Luke, it occurred to me, was still in the sexual swim of things; Patrick had been in a relationship with a man I knew for so many years I’d lost count.

  So there we sat on a dappled patio in Gainesville, Florida, talking, as we increasingly did, about the aches and pains of growing old, which included, that afternoon, their glancing at the floppy hat I always wore on the advice of my dermatologist to prevent skin cancer, a khaki hat I had just put down on the table, revealing inadvertently a stain that ran around the interior of the brim that prompted Luke to observe that my hat looked “dirty.”

  “It’s sweat,” I said. “It’s the stain that sweat leaves. Remember that detergent ad—‘ring around the collar’? It’s the hat version of ring around the collar. Only in this case it’s ring around the hat.”

  They started to laugh but the more I thought about it the more ashamed I felt—like so many things in old age, a hat with a sweat stain implied something. I’d been accused of being an old man who didn’t take care of himself. There was no point, however, in making excuses. So I changed the subject to the recent death by heart attack of a man who’d chosen Luke as the executor of his estate, a man Luke had known for forty years, a man with whom he’d spoken on the phone every day, a man with whom he’d come to bicker with when they got older so sharply that it was uncomfortable to have lunch with both of them, a man who’d had more sex probably than the three of us put together, a handsome, muscular retired journalist who’d worked for the university and supported a younger hustler the past decade of his life, a hustler who, Luke told us now, had been knocking on the deceased’s neighbors’ doors to ask for money.

  “For what?” said Patrick.

  “His drug habit,” said Luke. “He’s been asking Skip’s neighbors for money for drugs. The woman who lives two doors down from Skip asked me this morning why Skip didn’t leave Lionel anything in his will—because, she said, he’d ‘mentored’ him for so long.”

  “Mentored him!” laughed Patrick.

  “That’s the word they’re comfortable with,” Luke said. “I told her that I’d asked Skip the same thing. I said to Skip, ‘Leave Lionel a hundred thousand in a trust, so that he can’t blow it on drugs.’ And Skip said, ‘I’ve already helped him enough!’ So Lionel’s not in the will.”

  “Have you ever met Lionel?” I said.

  “No,” said Luke.

  “Not in all the years Skip was seeing him?”

  “Not once,” said Luke, “though I saw him the day before Skip did. I was leaving the mall on Thirteenth Street when I spotted this handsome muscle number standing on the curb with his shirt open, and when I looked back he grabbed his crotch. But I kept driving. Skip didn’t. He saw Lionel the next day in the same place, pulled over, and said, ‘Get in.’”

  “And thus began a great romance,” said Patrick.

  “I don’t know if you’d call it a romance,” said Luke.

  “Well,” Patrick said, “they were together for ten years.”

  “But Skip never let him move in,” Luke said. “Of course, Lionel came by so often, the neighbors all thought he lived there. And get this. The woman who asked me why Lionel isn’t in the will told me that now Lionel comes up onto their lawn at dinnertime and stands outside the window of the dining room and watches them eat.”

  “That can’t be good for the digestion,” Patrick said.

  “But you go by Skip’s house too,” I said.

  “I do,” said Luke. “I’ve been looking for Skip’s Rolex—which has disappeared.”

  “Do you think someone stole it?” I said.

  “There’s no way to know,” Luke said. “It could have been anyone—Lionel, the paramedics, the police, anybody who went in there. Who knows? They found Skip on the toilet—the brand-new toilet he’d just paid eight hundred dollars for. I think the day he died he must have thought he needed to take a shit, when in fact it was heart congestion. The two things can feel the same way. He had his heart attack while sitting on his brand-new john.”

  There was a silence, since neither Patrick nor I knew what to do with that detail.

  “Did I tell you,” Luke said, “that not only can I not find the Rolex, but Skip left over a million points in his Marriott account that are not transferable?”

  “What points?” I said. “What Marriott account?”

  “Skip always stayed at a Marriott when he traveled,” Luke said, “and they have a sort of frequent-flier program for guests—the more you stay, the more points you get. And the more points, the bigger the discount on your next room. And as you know Skip traveled a lot. He went to San Francisco for the Folsom Street Fair; he went to Miami for the White Party, to New York for the Black Party; he went to Chicago and Washington and Miami for Gay Pride. He was a circuit queen!”

  “For which I give him a great deal of credit,” I said. “Skip was always able to enjoy life. I think he was in some way the happiest homosexual I knew.”

  “What does that mean?” said Patrick.

  “I mean he had it all. He was handsome, well-built, outgoing, he had a beautiful house, a good job, and he had no guilt whatsoever about being gay. He always had lovers, and lots of friends, gay and straight. He loved his life in Gainesville and he loved to travel. I thought he had a very happy and successful life. I think he actually enjoyed being gay. I mean, he really liked going to the White Party.”

  “He did,” said Luke. “And he was racking up points with Marriott when he took all those trips. It got so that the last time Skip stayed in New York it cost him, like, thirty-five dollars a night.”

  “You must be kidding,” said Patrick.

  “I’m not! And he died with over a million points that he could not leave to anyone else. Imagine what those are worth!”

  Neither Patrick nor I knew what to do with this news either, so we fell silent until it occurred to me to ask if Skip had ever gone to the video store on 301.

  “Are you kidding?” said Luke. “We both went, at least twice a week. Skip used to drive by my house to see if my car was in the carport before he went—because he didn’t want to go if I was there. I’d be sitting on the porch talking on the phone, and I’d look up and see Skip drive by—always in the baseball cap, the baseball cap he never took off—to see if my car was in the carport. We had a rule. If Skip’s car was in the video store parking lot when I got there, I had to wait twenty minutes before going in, and vice versa. As you know, it was hard to compete with Skip. Everybody wanted him, and he wasn’t shy. So he got everyone he went after.”

  “Skip was everyone’s idea of Daddy,” said Patrick.

  “That’s right,” said Luke. “And when he was younger, he was everyone’s idea of Son. I mean, did you see the photos of him when he was in his twenties that they used at his memorial? He could have been on TV! He was that good-looking. But back to the video store,” he said as he lifted a roll to his lips. “I’ve cut back on my visits—mainly because it has the problem that all those places do.”

  “And what’s that?” said Patrick.

  “Too many cock-suckers,” he said, biting a piece off his roll, “and not enough cock.”

  We fell silent at that too, as Luke began eating his soup and a handsome young man on a bicycle came onto the patio and stopped a few feet away from our table. He was so good-looking I nodded subtly in his direction so that Luke would turn around and look at him, but before Luke could the young man said something I didn’t hear, for not only do I wear a floppy hat to prevent skin cancers and disguise my hair loss, but I am also now nearly deaf—particularly when listening to Patrick, who speaks in so low a voice I can only compare it to Jackie Kennedy’s when she gave a tour of the White House to Edward R. Murrow on CBS. That’s why I missed most of the exchange that was going on between Patrick and the handsome young man until the latter raised his voice and said, “And when would that be?” to which Patrick replied, “Never,” whereupon the young man yelled in an even louder voice, “You asshole!” at which point I realized the whole exchange had been a request for money.

  After a few more insults, the angry young man rode off across the parking lot and stopped at a white car parked by a fence, a white car out of which three big, burly men in civilian clothes got and flashed their badges, at which point I realized the young man had just had the bad luck to go up to an unmarked car in which police officers were sitting.

  “I suspect he’s homeless,” said Luke, turning back from the scene.

  “And he just tried to panhandle the cops,” Patrick said.

  Whereupon I was moved to ask, “How many homeless men do you think there are in Gainesville?”

  “About eight hundred,” said Patrick. “And now that it’s getting cold they’re moving into town from their camp on the south side. Have you ever been? There’s litter everywhere. They shit on the ground, and then they put some small article of clothing over it to hide the turd. There are so many places for them to get off the street. Instead they crap on the sidewalk and leave a paper napkin or handkerchief on top of their bowel movement.”

  “That’s mental illness,” I said.

  “I agree,” said Patrick.

  I was thinking that this angry young man was good-looking enough to earn money hustling—but thought I’d better not voice that idea, since Patrick had set up a shelter for the homeless near the bus station. The trouble with Patrick, I thought as we sat sipping our drinks, was that he was so good he made you feel bad, and so intelligent he gave you the impression he knew what you were going to say before you said it. But I couldn’t blame him for being competent, charitable, and smart—a combination that is seldom endearing, when you spend your hours watching porn. Indeed, when he excused himself and went into the restaurant to get another lemon slice for his glass of water, I took the opportunity to say to Luke, “Did you know that Patrick helped get that social service facility for the homeless out by the bus station started? And that he mentors people? And that he’s doing an oral history of Gainesville, interviewing gay people before they croak? And he’s on the board of the Gay Pride Center, and the Natural History Museum, and he went to the hospital every day his sister was there with that strange skin disease to make sure she was getting good care—and picked me up after I had a biopsy on my right eyelid, which I couldn’t have had if Patrick hadn’t agreed to do that, since they won’t release you after anesthesia if you have no one to drive you home, which is the central problem of my life at this point—I have no one to drive me home—which I think is unfair to people who live alone, but that’s the rule. He does things for people we don’t even know about. He does what the Church calls corporeal acts of mercy—which makes sense, because he went to St. Patrick’s, right down the street, when he was growing up, though I think he’s an atheist at this point. But he really does try to help people in practical ways. He’s like a priest—a good priest.”