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  • A Place in the World
  • Bill Gaythwaite (bio)

I was getting some sun during my lunch hour the day I met Fisher. We were in the middle of Central Park, on that big, green lawn called the Sheep Meadow. It was a warm afternoon in late April, and the sky had the pale blue look of faded denim. The park was crowded. The previous winter had been stubborn and miserable, like a houseguest who won't leave, so now everyone had been cheered by the nice spring weather. Wherever I glanced, New Yorkers were wearing expressions of gratitude and contentment. They didn't look like themselves at all. I was lying on the grass with my shirt off and my khakis rolled up above my calves.

"Won't you get itchy like that?" said a voice to my right. I propped myself up on my elbow and shielded my eyes from the sun. The man who was talking to me was seated on a blanket a few feet away, with a book in his hands. He had the round, plain face of a middle-aged infant and a look of weary politeness. All told, he was quite ordinary, like an extra in a crowd scene.

"You think I'll get itchy?" I said, in the bored, mirroring tone I often used at bars when talking to men like this.

"I mean to say, I have a towel that you can use."

And with that he produced and handed me one, which I took without even thanking him. I stood up, put the towel down on the ground and sprawled out on it. Then I waited for him to ask me some more questions, which I planned to disregard. It was a way to spend my lunch hour. But he didn't say another word. This annoyed me. I turned on my side to show him my ass and then stretched a bit and flexed my biceps. I was twenty-four at the time, at the peak of my stretching and flexing powers. I wasn't used to being ignored. When eventually I caught him looking over, he gave me a prim, embarrassed smile. You didn't see much prim in this city, not in my experience anyway. I was intrigued. I thought about my friend Buzz.

He would have called this "an opportunity."

I knew Buzz from one of my first temp jobs after I arrived in New York. We were in a word-processing pool at a law firm where all the senior partners had the dead-eyed stares of serial killers and the associates scampered around nervously like so many potential victims. Buzz was also my tour guide through the gay bars and clubs of the city. He was fun and campy and fond of using phrases like "A boy's [End Page 94] got to take care of himself" and "Long live the checkbook romance!" He was the living example of such sayings, and now he no longer needed to temp, because he'd met a married doctor from Scarsdale who paid the rent on his little apartment near Sutton Place and gave him an allowance to buy ties and things at Bloomingdale's.

Before Buzz met his doctor, we would go out to certain bars in the city that he would laughingly refer to as elephant graveyards, because of the older, less desirable clientele. We'd let these old guys buy us some drinks and then we'd sit back, aloof and sneering, like royalty from a small country, while the rest of the evening passed in a blur of unspoken negotiation and protracted tease. Buzz had actually found his doctor in one of these places, and I went home with a few guys I met in this fashion, too, men who regarded me with the determination of hungry lizards, until they'd get me to their apartments, where they'd finally pounce, smothering me with their damp coughs and too much aftershave. As their hands traveled over me, I'd often will my mind to wander, like a runaway pet, and sometimes I'd disconnect entirely from myself and have something that resembled an out...

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