Renata

Renata Forcelli was 43, big busted and broke. These were the only attributes she could think of as she wrote her third online profile of the month. She knew the big boobs would reel many guys in, but she wasn't exactly going to use that as her headline, at least not yet. Plus she knew the broke part, and especially the age part, balanced out her breasts so that her chances were always going to be 50/50, on a good day. Guys didn't want hot and older, the wanted hot and younger. And dumb. Or at least dumber than her. Surely, I've got to be at least partially dumb to invest so much time and money in these online personals, she occasionally thought to herself. Her last date ended in a failed attempt at sex which she stopped when Nate, a Brooklyn based freelance writer, answered a text while he was going down on her. "Unless you put that on vibrate and then in your mouth, this date is over," she said as she pushed Nate from between her thighs and off her bed. That night she immediately de-activated her account. But now she was back on after a self-imposed hiatus and cautiously hopeful that she might meet someone who could actually pay attention to her instead of an iPhone.

I'm sure as hell not gonna waste these babies, she thought as she cropped another photo just below the bust line. She hated when she thought like a straight guy. She knew she was more than just big boobs, but did they?

The website she just became a member of  was Nerve.com. She heard from a couple of single girlfriends that most guys here were looking for sex, but to be honest, she was too. She'd just like it to last several months or even years instead of one or two awkward nights. And throw in actual conversation, a few romantic candle lit wine infused dinners and semblance of commitment and she'd have it all.  Plus she heard the guys on Nerve were cute. The men winking at her on Match mostly recently resembled: Gene Simmons with a hair lip, Paulie Walnuts  from the Sopranos and lastly, Golda Meir.

Renata loved her Friday nights with Billy and Cedric and his boyfriend Michael, but it was tough. After dinner and a movie, she knew Cedric and Michael were going home to each other and Billy would slink off to the East Village do god knows what with whom in clubs called The Cock or The Fist Palace. She thought he might have made that second one up, but she never knew with Billy. All she had was a cat, Clancy, who she recently adopted from the Humane Society. This was her third cat in as many years. They kept dying, due to no fault of her own. The first one, Dewey, had an aneurysm underneath her dining room table, the second, Sasha, a beautiful Maine Coon, was in the last stages of FIV, the feline version of AIDS, when she adopted her and wasn’t long for the world. She hoped her luck would be different with Clancy. He was bright eyed and young-ish and she hoped he would last.

“My first cat committed suicide.” She told Billy one night after she lost Sasha to FIV. 

“How is that even possible?” Billy asked, between a heaping mound of chocolate peanut butter ice cream they’d gotten from the Cold Stone on 9th Avenue.

“It was when my mother and father were splitting up and fighting all the time. The cat would scamper away whenever my father would come home drunk. The cat remembered the time my father came down hard on his tail as he was sleeping on the top step of the porch. 

Billy had never heard this story before, despite their nearly 20 year friendship. He knew her parents split when she was 8, that her dad had a brief but spectacular period as a fall down drunk, and that Renata accompanied her mother through several marriages, rebirths and communes.They became friends when they met working at The Bronxville Field Club, a rich and snooty private club were they worked as a receptionist and groundsmen, respectively. Billy quit his job much sooner than Renata, as his 7 til 3 shift made it difficult to get home in time without missing the first 10 minutes of Oprah. There was a time, years before she splashed her face across every month of her feel good magazine, when he couldn't miss an Oprah.

“So how, exactly, uh, did the cat die?”

“He just walked out to the middle of the street, sat on the yellow dividing line and waited until a truck came and smashed him to death.”

“That’s freaking horrible. And you saw this?”

“No, my neighbor did. She swore that the cat watched all morning for the right time, calmly sauntered to the road and just waited.”

“That’s not true.” Billy rarely questioned Renata, but this story was too unbelievable.

“Believe me,  It is. I wasn’t even sad at the time. I didn’t even ball my eyes out. I was relieved for him. He lived in fear of being crushed by my father. With the truck, he was at least in control of it. Sometimes, I wished it was me, she said, finishing off the last of the ice cream. “Come on, let’s get on the 7 at 42^nd Street, we can make it home and I can see if I still have a living cat or not.
All Billy could do was grab her arm and lead her to the train and hope that Clancy was there to head-butt her and weave between her legs when she got home, and not in a small cold heap under her dining room table.

Cedric

Cedric had been up all night. Again. I've got to stop doing this, he thought to himself as he turned on the shower and stood there statue-like as the cold water cascaded down his body. It was the eight all-nighter he'd pulled in two weeks and he was exhausted. Playing could do that to him. And when he played, he played hard. The first day of the rest of your life, he told himself. God, he hated the 12 step cliches, but had to admit they worked. I'll stop tonight. Or cut down. Yes cutting down was the trick. That would have to wait.  Right now he wanted to get back to the game.

Saturday meant he could play all day long and do nothing else. No calls from neurotic sisters, no slurring stepmothers and most of all, no pain-in-the-ass boyfriend checking in. Pepe was on a business trip for the last two weeks, which allowed Cedric even longer play times. He hurried out of the shower, half-dried and powered up the computer. He'd log on and find some "friends" and then time would evaporate and he'd get lost in it all. And nobody, not Billy, not Renata, his subway-stop coffee clatch and best friends, would have anything to say about it. He was annoyed, to say the least, by their concern, about how tired they said he looked, or asking why he was running so late. He knew the concern masked something deeper; a fear that he'd relapsed and was back to his old ways. It wasn't any of their business why he looked any way. Today he could look as strung out as he wanted to and they couldn't say a thing.

The computer whirred and beeped alive and Cedric dropped his towel and sat naked at his desk. He didn't need clothes for this. There was no modesty in this game, he could be whoever he wanted. He loved the escape, chasing the high, the anonymity of it all. Online, nobody really knew who he was. And nobody had to. The didn't know the past or the present and that was just fine with him. If he wanted to be a human he could. But he preferred to be a Dwarf for the Alliance and this morning he seriously had to kick some Orc ass. Theses fuckers were impossible to kill and his online teammates were off their game lately. World of Warcraft was not for the faint of heart, although he was getting concerned that it was becoming his only social outlet -- many of the guys in the fellowship, including his sponsor, were calling and he hadn't returned a single call. Cedric hadn't been to a meeting in a few days which was unusual for him. But WoW was getting so good, which he knew was an excuse.

What really was bothering him was that Darnell showed up at a meeting the other night. They partied together in the early 2000's, even had a fling when they thought they could save each other from meth. They hadn't parted on good terms -- Darnell stole the last of Cedric's meth and a credit card that thankfully he was able to cancel before Darnell ordered the entire collection of Racquel Welch wigs from a late night TV infomercial for one of his disastrous meth induced drag performances.

Cedric was sober for the last four years. If you didn't count World of Warcraft. Was this a problem he had to address as well? He decided he was being hard on himself. WoW was not crystal. At least he wasn't on red-eye flights from Chicago to NY for the the Black Party or to Los Angeles for whichever color party was happening that weekend. That was pretty much his life in the meth years -- back to back circuit parties and sex with as many hot, cracked-out boys he could get his hands on. In comparison, WoW was like doing the stations of the cross with cloistered nuns.

I fucking miss crystal, even though it totally fucked my shit up, he thought as he swigged from a glass of Mountain Dew. At least he could admit it. He knew so many guys in denial about missing the drug. And he new just as many who relapsed because the were Pollyanna's about their abstinence. "Every thing is great, don't miss it at all," friends would tell him and a week later they'd be in a psych ward hallucinating that the KGB had video taped him and his boyfriend having sex at the Olive Garden in Times Square. Cedric could admit two things: 1) that the drug made him feel amazing, better than ever and 2) it almost cost him him his freedom and his life. Spending a night in the downtown Tombs, the the massive jail on Centre Street and then another week on Rikers Island had that affect.

The stay at Riker's was fortuitous -- it's where he met Victoria St.Claire, a Brooklyn luscious former addict turned jail psychologist, who kicked his ass right off the drug and inspired him to refocus his psychology career to addictions. First his own, then to others.

"You need to find yourself a higher power, you little fool," He remembered her telling him with a drag queen worthy head snap. Of course, she was right and as soon as he could, he found a good Baptist church in Harlem and he got right with God. And then he got right with himself.

Billy

Billy moved to Astoria, Queens  in 1998, a week after George Michael was arrested for soliciting a police officer in a public bathroom in Los Angeles. The event pretty much ended  the singer's career as a pop star but did signal his new role as world-wide professional homosexual and major league fuck-up. Like George, Billy began his life as a professional homosexual at the same time, with less disastrous results. He attributed this to one simple fact: his coming out began in a modest one-bedroom apartment across the street from the Top Tomato grocery store on Ditmars Boulevard and not at a pubic urinal while he showed an undercover cop his schlong.

The apartment was in a 5 floor walk-up, above a Japanese restaurant and a video store. It was his first apartment without roommates and the first time he truly lived on his own. He painted each room a different color of the primary color wheel. His living room was a pale yellow, because he'd seen it on HGTV, the kitchen a fiery red, and the bedroom was painted periwinkle. Everything in the room was painted periwinkle, too -- the window sills, ceilings, the radiators. He played cool blues and Sigur Ros, the eclectic Icelandic band that moaned a lot but rarely sang a lyric, although one time he swore they sang "Yves St. Laurent" over and over until the song faded into oblivion (they didn't). The small lamps on his Ikea bed tables each had blue party lights, which cast deep blue hues in every direction. Lying in the bed, and depending on his mood, he either felt like he was submerged in water or rocketing skyward into the twilight of the day.

"It's my sexy bang room," He told anyone who would listen, although it was almost a year before he had sex with a person other than himself in this underwater fantasy.

When the news broke about George Michael's public shaming Billy immediately got a call from Joseph an old friend from high school who lived in a new high rise in Long Island City and with whom he'd  been in-and-out of touch with for several years. Joseph, a soft-spoken adorable cub of a boy, had come out bravely and publicly the year they turned 20.  He adored George Michael since he was a chubby 7th grader at Emerson Middle School in Yonkers, NY and could often be heard defending George on the merits of his voice and his songwriting, when really what attracted him was his bubble-ass and strong chin.  Joseph and Billy both knew that the other was gay as far back as they could remember. Joseph waited patiently for years for Billy's self-realization. Waiting turned into patient exhaustion for him and he used the George Michael incident as a springboard to finally find out about his former best friend.

"George Michael is gay," He blurted out moments after the news had been delivered on CNN.
"I know, who doesn't know that?" Billy offered in return. "He wore Richard Simmons short-shorts and neon gloves in that video."
"It's confirmed, he was waving his dick at a cop in a bathroom."
"Eww. Why?"
"I don't know, a bathroom is the last place I'm horny.
There was a pause.
"So are you?"
"Horny?"
"No, are you gay?"
"Yes."

And that was the answer that reunited them. Billy was finally ready.

That was a long time ago. Joseph, who now goes by Jose, although he's not Hispanic, and Billy are, at best, estranged. Daily phone calls dwindled to weekly chats, and finally to once a month email check -ins. Now, they were lucky to exchange quick "how are you?" texts. The last three Billy had sent had gone unanswered and he was beginning to worry. Although they never lived more than a few train stops away from one another, lately, it seemed liked they were a world apart.

Billy lived longest at the place he was at now -- 36-08 and 40th Street, in Sunnyside, a surprisingly gorgeous community right off the 7 train that was relatively undiscovered territory until New York Magazine listed it as an up-and-coming neighborhood several years ago. Since that time rents have increased, as had the preponderance of hipsters and young professionals all priced out of their respective Manhattan and Brooklyn neighborhoods. Thank god I'm in a rent stabilized pre-war building, Billy often thought. His large studio was twice the size of a Manhattan one-bedroom. Because Billy didn't have kids or a significant other right now this was what he bragged about the most.

It's wasn't a lot, but sometimes, in this city, it was enough.