What a bizarre day. In an moment of unguarded generosity, he had volunteered to be in a gay fundraiser; a musical revue. He wasn't just nervous about being in the show, his ex was back in town with her new boyfriend. They would be at the show. After all they were "still friends".
No pressure; just him wearing a pink teddy borrowed from a local theatre group and performing a song from "Guys and Dolls". ("Take Back Your Mink, Take Back Your Pearls. What makes you think I'm that kind of girl?") It couldn't have been more fey. Not emasculating at all.
And then there was the trifecta. He was nervous about seeing her again. "Why not drop acid?" In what parallel universe did that make sense? The night was a Cinemascope blur. "Just hang on," he kept reminding himself, the usual tether to sanity, telling himself that it was "just a drug", that "this will pass", was useless against this emotional and situational vortex.
The noise and the ambiance was paralyzing, weird even by holiday standards. The usual bar cacophony of crowd noises, music, servers, bartenders, sound checks, and skits was just the backdrop. This is Mardi Gras - in a gay bar. The evening featured a full fight card: date spats, female-on-female fisticuffs, bar dramas, and the oblivious drunk who had wandered in off the street and was wondering why he is now in a fight with a woman who is somehow offended by the attention he is paying her friend. It was a bacchanal. Everyone - his friends and strangers - camped it up, putting money in his underwear or his "bra" and making lewd comments and suggestions. Promiscuity was off the charts. He was trying to stay the good sport but the night wore on as an interminable adrenalin circus.
Then, it was over. Somehow that made it worse. The distractions had been a sort of salve.
Home in the wee hours he is alone and still tripping. Home to a house in what once had been a robust central business district but had been abandoned for the lure of modern shopping centers. Now there were only sketchy businesses, strip joints, gay bars, shot houses, and houses, some dilapidated and others, like his, in the process of rehabilitation.
He's not feeling any heroic urban pioneer vibes. He is foundering in the exagerated reality of his situation. The walls of his bedroom are a mottled collage of different layers of peeling wallpaper and paint. The floors are somewhat midway through the process of being shaved of its varnish and its years of dirt and grit. Construction debris is everywhere.
Everything - his life, his city, his house, and certainly that day - takes on the weight of metaphor. Like the protagonist in Darkness at Noon, he relives his regrets, the loss of love, the road not taken and the paths misconstrued. He counts the nanoseconds and clings to the promise that daylight will surely come and this will pass.
