Shy (7 page)

A few minutes later, Frank and I were downing fresh beers, him on one side of the bathroom door, me on the other. I could hear him in there humming a Beatles tune off-key and periodically grumbling about something or other. I was running a clothes brush over my new slacks trying to remove all traces of Pedro and belting out the tit willow song from
The Mikado
.

I checked myself in the bedroom mirror. Brand-new button-down Arrow shirt, lightly starched, but not stiff, long sleeves rakishly turned back twice to expose my forearms. New front-pleated black trousers with a slim mahogany belt, and an almost-new pair of oxblood penny loafers with actual pennies in the slots just for the hell of it that perfectly matched the belt. I thought I looked pretty good. As soon as Frank vacated the bathroom, I’d add a little gel to my hair to get that casual spiky look going on, gargle a quick slug of high-octane mouthwash to make my breath pretty, and I’d be ready to party.

And the very moment I thought that thought, I knew I wasn’t ready at all. I broke into a cold sweat, swallowed back a swarm of butterflies that were trying to fly up my throat, and my fingertips went numb. Wondering just how many strangers Stanley had purposely invited to this goddamn party just to freak me out, I felt my legs turn to Jell-O and my left ear started twitching again. Suddenly my clothes were all wrong and my haircut looked stupid. I discovered a zit on the end of my nose, saw thirty pounds of fat hanging off my ass that hadn’t been there two seconds before, and I was pretty sure my breath smelled like a sick possum had crawled down my throat and died. Then I felt the flu coming on.

Before I could decide to dive under the bed, Frank came strolling out of the bathroom with his hair still wet and a half-empty beer bottle stuck in his pants pocket like a Luger. He was humming “Norwegian Wood” and looked remarkably calm and confident for a person with SAD who was about to attend a party with God knows how many strangers present. That look didn’t last long, however. The minute he saw the terror on my face, his confidence shattered like one of those crystal snow globes dropped out of a thirty-story window onto a concrete sidewalk.

“Oh crap,” he said, and his face went gray.

I almost forgot my terror when I checked out Frank’s attire. The jeans he had on were new and stiff and the deepest, darkest blue I had ever seen on an article of clothing. Even running them through a washer and dryer hadn’t toned down their color or softened them up. They must have been made of aluminum. He looked like he had stuffed his legs down a couple of stovepipes and he walked like a cowboy who had just climbed down off his horse after three weeks in the saddle. Bowlegged? You could have driven a MINI Cooper between his knees. His shirt was a tee with a tiny hole just over the left tit and a picture of a petticoated Donna Reed on the front. In a dialogue bubble above her head, Miss Reed announced, “Dinner’s ready!” I wondered if Frank even knew who Donna Reed was. I was afraid to see what was on the back. Frank’s shoes were the same battered tennis shoes he had worn earlier, clean now, after being hosed down by Pedro and run through the washer, but still looking pretty beat-up for a social engagement. The only concession he had made to formal attire was the black socks he wore under his tennies. It was a good thing Frank was beautiful. It made his total lack of style almost charming.

Almost.

I brushed aside my own terror long enough to supplement Frank’s. “Um, how would you feel about me doing a little damage control on your outfit? Not that you don’t look great, but—”

He looked down at himself as if he just now for the very first time noticed there was a body standing there underneath his head. “Too dressy?” he asked, crestfallen. I hoped he was kidding.

“Not for a hoedown,” I said.

I dragged him into my bedroom and told him to kick off his shoes. He was like a child, doing everything I told him to do. Fear is a great tranquilizer, apparently. I tossed him a pair of black dress shoes. His basket was so tempting in those tight-ass blue jeans that no one would look at his shoes anyway.

“They’re too big,” he whined after trying one on, so I threw him an extra pair of socks.

When the shoes were in place and Frank seemed reasonably comfortable with them poking out the bottom of his cast-iron pant legs, I ventured another suggestion. “Let’s try for a slightly dressier top, okay?”

“But this is my best shirt,” Frank joked with a straight face. At least I think he was joking. God, I hoped so.

“Well, let’s just see how
this
looks. Take that thing off.”

I drained another four ounces from my beer bottle while Frank pulled his Donna Reed T-shirt over his head and threw it on the bed. His freshly showered body smelled like heaven. I stared at his perfect chest so long that he finally stuck a hand on one hip and cocked his head to the side as if to say “Ye-e-s?”

My hands were trembling as I handed him a cashmere V-neck sweater in pale yellow. I figured the yellow would look great against his skin, and my hands were trembling because I was getting a boner seeing Frank standing there in my bedroom half-dressed smelling like an angel. He was too busy worrying about how he looked to take any notice of my boner. That was either a good or a bad thing, depending on how you looked at it.

There wasn’t much I could do about the boner at the moment, since boners pretty much have a mind of their own, but I was pleased to note that the sweater really did look great on Frank. He pushed the sleeves up to his elbows, exposing his hairy forearms, then shook the damp hair away from his eyes. “Well?” he asked. “Am I fit for human consumption?”

“God, yes,” I said. “I mean, hell, yes. I mean yes.”

He surveyed himself in the mirror for all of two seconds, then turned to look me up and down. “So we’re really going then, are we?”

“Guess so,” I said. “You nervous?”

“Nope. You?”

“Not a bit.”

We were both lying through our teeth. We were scared to death.

“One more beer before we go?” I asked, hopefully.

“One or two beers sounds great,” Frank said, cleverly augmenting my suggestion with an extra serving of alcohol. I thought I detected a slight tremor in his voice. It seemed to counterpoint the tremor in mine. What a pair of cowards we were.

God, SAD sucks.

Frank, on the other hand, dress sense or no dress sense, was just one small notch below wonderful.

Thankfully, I was too drunk and too nervous to fully comprehend the ramifications of that thought.

Chapter 5

G
IGGLING
like a couple of third-graders, we toppled out of the cab in front of Jerry and Stanley’s rented condo. I couldn’t help but notice, for the umpteenth time, that Frank was a hell of a good-looking man. Even slobberingly drunk he was a looker. He didn’t seem to share any of the symptoms of his brother’s assholeiness, either, and God help me, I’ve always been attracted to nice men. “Nice” to me is just as much a turn-on as “handsome.” Maybe even
more
of a turn-on. I also couldn’t help noticing that Frank looked better in my yellow cashmere sweater than I
ever
had. That was a turn-on too. Yes siree.

We took one look at Jerry and Stanley’s front door and the smiles fled our faces like fleas jumping off a dying dog. There seemed to be an incredible number of voices laughing and babbling and chattering behind that door. Sounded like a big flapping flock of geese. Gazing around, we saw that there also seemed to be an inordinate number of automobiles parked on the street for a neighborhood where all the condos had underground parking. Just how many guests did Stanley really invite? I wondered. This didn’t look like the first thirty pages of the phone book. This looked like maybe all the way up to J or K. How many people could Stanley possibly know? And if they knew him, why the hell would they accept an invitation to a party thrown by such a dick? Maybe they came for Jerry’s sake. That at least made sense.

“You’re mumbling,” Frank said.

“No, I’m not.”

“Yes, you are. Munk and drumbling. I mean drunk and mumbling.”

“God, Frank, shut up.”

“Let’s go back to your place and have another beer, what d’ya say, Tom? I’ll buy.”

“You don’t have any money. How are you going to buy? And what about Stanley? You need your brother’s help. God help you, but you do. And let me just be the first to say, rotsaruck.”

“You speak Japanese. I’m impressed.”

“Frank,
please
shut up. You really want to go back to my place?”

“With all my heart and soul,” Frank said, gazing at his brother’s front door with absolute terror splattered all over his face.

“Me, too,” I said, and at that very moment our cab drove away. We were stuck.

I was about to say I didn’t really mind walking twenty miles if Frank didn’t, when that damned door popped open and I saw Jerry beckoning to us to come on in.

“Damn,” I said.

“Damn,” Frank echoed.

“Damn,” Jerry called out. “Where the hell you been? We were getting worried about you two.”

I’ll bet. “Car trouble,” I said. “Had to take a cab at the last minute.”

Jerry looked us over. “Good thing. You’re both so drunk you can barely stand up. Stanley’s going to love this.”

“Oh, is
he
here?” Frank asked.

And we looked at each other and started giggling again. Frank pulled two beer bottles out from under his sweater and handed me one. They were warm from being stuck down his pants for the past twenty minutes. Lucky beer bottles. I wondered if Frank’s pecker was suffering from hypothermia, and if it was, if there was anything I could do to warm it up again. We popped open the beers and plopped down on the curb with a couple of satisfied grunts.

“We’ll be in as soon as we’re finished,” I said over my shoulder.

“Yeah,” Frank echoed. “As foon as we’re sinished.”

“Fine,” Jerry growled, and slammed the door.

It was a lovely night to be sitting on a curb drinking warm beer with a handsome farmer from Indiana. If it hadn’t been for that blasted party hanging over our heads like a frigging vulture, I would have been enjoying myself immensely.

Frank and I gulped our beers faster than we should have and when we stood up we had to hold onto each other until we found our equilibrium. Obviously, Frank wasn’t any better at drinking than I was.

“Oh hell,” I said. “Let’s get this over with.”

Frank seemed to have been smacked on the head with a sober stick all of a sudden. “Stay with me, okay, Tom?”

I leaned in and kissed his cheek before I even realized what I was doing. Frank didn’t seem to mind. He was probably too scared to notice. I wasn’t. I remembered the feel of his cheek against mine and the way his neck smelled all warm and fragrant for the rest of the night. It’s what kept me going.

“I won’t leave your side,” I said. “I promise, Frank.”

And hand in hand, like a hammered Hansel and Gretel approaching the big bad witch’s cottage, we stumbled up to my ex’s front door and softly knocked.

The door swung open. What had sounded from the curb like a gabbling flock of geese now became the raucous roar of a hundred or more revelers, each and every one laughing and jabbering as they clutched a drink with one hand and someone else’s ass with the other, or so it seemed. The crowd was predominantly gay male, with just a smattering of lesbians strewn about for texture. Terrified, we were pulled into this tempest of sound and color and frantically cheerful humanity and immediately lost sight of each other. Like two doomed sinners sucked blindly through the gates of hell, Frank and I suddenly found ourselves facing our greatest fear
alone
. Christ. And after all our preparation too.

Isn’t that just the way it always ends up?

N
OW
, SAD, in an unfunny way, is a funny thing. You can sometimes kill it dead with alcohol, as Frank and I were trying to do on this particular night, but the general consensus is that one should not let that particular form of treatment become a habit. Otherwise one would be drunk
all
the time, and that would, of course, lead to a whole
new
set of problems. So on the whole, it is the considered opinion of most medical experts that it is better to suffer from SAD than be a raging, slobbering, pee-down-your-pant-leg alcoholic.

SAD is also funny, in the same unfunny way, because it doesn’t always affect everyone in an identical manner. Some who suffer from it may only be affected when trying to
eat
in front of other people. Or having to
speak
in front of other people. Or—and this is the most common manifestation of social anxiety disorder—when the sufferer is thrown into any social situation with any group of people, be it large, small, or in-between. Casual or formal. Once there, he is bombarded with the fear that he will be judged by those around him, or ridiculed, or totally ostracized and shipped off to Siberia for some unfathomable reason or other.

In my case, and probably Frank’s, it basically boiled down to the fear of being humiliated and made to feel unworthy in
any
sort of social situation, be it eating, speaking, mingling, or just standing around looking stupid with anywhere from one person to a thousand.