I got over my previous hang-up about being seen in gay bars in one evening when I went to a bar called C-Street, a riff on New York’s Christopher Street (Chicago will deny it, but too many things in that city aspire to be New Yorkish for it not to be an indication of a broader identity complex). C-Street was a friendly, dirty-minded little dive where gays could go to drink beer in the front or dance wildly in the darkened back, as long as you avoided bumping into the few remaining ‘70s guys with handlebar mustaches who would dance in the olden-days style: slowly, one hand in the air, eyes closed. I loved going to C-Street because it was easy to talk to or not talk to people, notwithstanding the time I saw a muscular Italian dude and felt compelled to write my number on a slip of paper then walk up to him and insist it was something he’d just dropped before running out of the building.
Omar and I would go mainly to dance. I almost never went home with anyone but Omar. I was so shy, and the idea of admitting to him I was going to some guy’s place to screw mortified me. Not to mention the fact that I was so broke I was relying on him to ride shotgun with me on the el back to Hyde Park, whose train stop was a frequent site of ghetto vs. ivory tower violence. I remember seeing a trans woman on one of those late night trips home. We always kept our heads down, but she couldn’t, and she wound up having to bluster her way through a menacing confrontation with some locals who were not feeling L, G, or B, let alone T. I was impressed with her bravery and wondered where she got it from. Necessity, I guess.
I also furthered my celeb education at C-Street, dancing with Omar or my fabulous siren friend Jung-Soo, whom I’d dress up as Marilyn Monroe even though she was Korean, by learning about all the great disco music I’d missed out on, memorizing every chord, and eventually dancing along with all the older men as if these were the songs of
my
youth as well. In reality, the songs of my youth were the then-current Hi-NRG hits that were super popular in Chicago before anywhere else—one way in which Chicago was
not
simply a junior NYC or anywhere else was musically. I was already sick of house music barnburners like “Big Fun” by Inner City, not to mention imported classics like “Safe in the Arms of Love” by Shooting Party,
months
before my Michigan friends wrote me (on paper…in the “mail”) that they were making me mix tapes featuring them. I wasn’t afraid to learn about pop music and was in the best city in the world to do so.
Entranced by an alien growl undulating over a dance groove, I asked “Who
is
this???” of a jaded queen with no sleeves and no patience who was manning the coats at C-Street. He looked like a gay Muppet version of Oates from Hall & Oates.
“You don’t recognize
that
voice?” he asked in shock. “That’s
Earrrtha
Kitt’s new song with Bronski Beat, ‘Cha Cha Heels.’” Got it. No need to tell
me
twice.
In spite of my continued immersion into pop and house music while living in Chicago, other aspects of my starfucking were changing. I had no time to transcribe the Top 40 from the radio now that I was so busy studying. Fuck, I was so busy studying I had no time to attend two entire quarters of my required science courses. (I somehow earned Ds just for showing up the first and last days and taking the mid-terms and finals.)
The truth was that some of the pent-up sexual energy I’d been funneling into things like making lists of stars was instead beginning to come in handy for other things, like actually
having sex
. Of course, once I began my sexual career (we all have one, and just like our work careers, we have ups and downs, get fired, excel, and eventually retire, sometimes receiving a gold watch for good service), wouldn’t you know that one of my most prominent encounters would be with somebody on the outskirts of local celebrity—an honest-to-God male stripper?
I met Jack at a music store. He was the clerk at a trendy little shop outside the Loop where you could find amazing 12” dance records from the UK and even newfangled 3” CD singles from Japan. I was buying a stack of British imports (Kim Wilde, Kylie Minogue, Hazell Dean) after having made a stop at the more traditional music outlet Rose Records (a cut-out of “Sex Over the Phone” by the New Wave incarnation of The Village People, an impossibly campy Princess Stephanie of Monaco remix) when I spied a jaw-dropping Madonna promotional display announcing her status as artist of the decade.
Back then, I collected
everything
with Madonna’s face or name on it, as opposed to now, when I collect
almost
everything with Madonna’s face or name on it, but nothing more passionately than magazines and promotional items. When I was young and cute, all I had to do was let one lock of my hair flop over my eye (hard to do since it was varnished with gel) and beg a store to let me have a promo item and they usually would. Worst-case scenario, they’d have me put my name on the back of it and I could pick it up a few weeks later when they’d otherwise throw it in the garbage. This is how my grandmother intends to pass her possessions down to her children. She’s told them for years, “Anything you want, just put your name on the back of it.” I can’t see how that could lead to any problems.
This particular Madonna display was a must-have, so I laser-pointed my charm on the tall, muscular guy with dark hair working behind the counter. He had a nice smile but it was really his aggressiveness that was his key point of attraction. A Missouri import, he told me I was, “Key-yoot” (he had the Jim Nabors accent in the Rock Hudson body) and gave me his number along with the Madonna promo display (which already had somebody else’s name on a Post-It on the back—but all’s fair in lust and Madonna) and told me to call him up.
I did call Jack. During our first call, he mentioned that he’d be working at C-Street that week.
My
C-Street? I had no idea what he meant.
“Oh, I’m a go-go boy there,” he informed me like it should have been obvious.
“You mean you take off your clothes?
All
of them?”
“Naw,” Floyd laughed. “Just down to my underwear. But I’ll take all of ‘em off for
you
when we get together.” It was like I was meeting a soon-to-be shirtless Li’l Abner. Li’l Abs-ner.
This was shaping up to be as hot as a hokey porno. Not as hot as, say, William Higgins’s
Big Guns
, in which straight-acting bottomless pit Chris Gray urges his spank-happy invader, Johnny Davenport, “Don’t make my ass too red—my girlfriend will wonder what I been doin’!” and is wittily told by his sodomizer, “Fuck your girlfriend!” But still plenty hot.
Knowing that a stripper wanted to have sex was when it really sank in that I must not be fat anymore. In fact, I realized I must be highly desirable. After all, men
paid
these guys just to let them have a
peek
at what Jack told me he would be happy to give me fuller access to “many, many times,” as “Blanche Devereaux” of
The Golden Girls
might say.
The first night we went all the way, I met Jack at C-Street, aka his office, where he stripped on an impossibly small podium. He was literally on a pedestal, though it’s important to note that he’d put himself there and I was just along for the ride. I was hard as a rock over his cheap availability, watching a geriatric man stuffing dollars into his G-string all the while knowing I was the lucky fella who’d be escorting (you should pardon the expression) him home gratis, which I did.
In the elevator of his building, Jack, poured into second-skin, acid-washed jeans and in a slutty tank top, mauled me while the doors were closed, then led me into his luxurious studio apartment, which was (you should pardon this one, too) tricked out with plastic milk crates filled with hundreds of rare 12” dance records and which featured a large, signed Deidre Hall poster framed on the wall at the entrance.
I almost couldn’t decide whether to fuck him or scream like a girl over his possessions. His well-oiled bedtime routine decided for me.
We got right down to business on his waterbed (something Larry from
Three’s Company
would find sexy), which I later realized literally had notches in one of its bedposts. Jack maneuvered me into position and was just about to let me do to him what he would then turn around and do to me when I had to meekly ask for a condom. This was around 1990, and yet my stripper boyfriend (I thought of him as that already, on our
first date
) hadn’t been about to use one.
“I don’t have anything and you don’t have anything,” he said cheerfully, clearly having no idea if either assertion were true. “But okay.” To this day, I’m glad I didn’t let my excitement over Jack’s assets (not to mention my excitement over his records) distract me from having safer sex with him, as it had distracted me when a year earlier I’d lost what most people would consider my virginity to a charming C-Street pick-up. The pick-up, a handsome Italian-American who had the same kind of body as the ones I’d been paying to ogle in magazines, had been a beast in bed, then tender toward me when dropping me home in Hyde Park after a later date to see
Weekend at Bernie
’s in Orland Park. When we turned off of Lake Shore Drive, he sweetly warned me that the area was full of “niggers.” I was stunned. Then, inside, he saw a photo of Omar in my place and asked, “Who’s the sand nigger?” This was a person I’d been more sexually intimate with than anyone before and anyone for years after. My vetting process had clearly failed. And thanks to being too turned on to think straight, I had not gotten away from our brief association scot-free, winding up with what was probably the only recorded case of crabs in U of C history, epididymitis, and rectal warts. (Don’t be shocked—you watch
Girls
, you know everyone has HPV.) The crabs were so shocking I mailed one home to my mom under Scotch tape. I realize this takes “cool mom” to a new plateau.
Luckily—very luckily—I did
not
get HIV from that first major Chicago lover and, just as luckily, I didn’t give Jack the Stripper the opportunity to give it to me either.
I don’t know for sure what happened to Jack in the long run, though a Googled obituary that sounds like him was dated just a couple of years later and probably wasn’t the result of a slip-and-fall accident, but I lost my starry-eyed outlook on his night job when I moved in with him over my summer break (we couldn’t live in the dorms outside of the school year) only to discover that he unapologetically had unsafe sex two or three times a day with men he reeled in from the record store, the bars, or even, at times, the alley outside. While living together, I succumbed a few more times to his charms, but only because he would provocatively walk around in a T-shirt and nothing else and constantly suggest we watch one of his many porn tapes and jerk off together. (One time, he so thoroughly murdered my nipple and with fingers that were built up from grabbing all those dollar bills at work that it was scabbed over for a week. But when it got better, it was 100% hard-wired, so I am forced to think of Jack to this day any time someone discovers this secret about me.)
But in spite of a couple of mis(ter)adventures with my pig of a roommate, I mostly was just grossed out by what today would be called his self-destructive sexual addiction. Don’t get all up in arms—you can’t slut-shame the shameless.
The straw that broke the camel’s bareback was when I woke up one night—did I forget to mention that we were sharing that waterbed because mentioning that makes me sound stupid and like I’m as much of a whore as the whore I’m currently bad-mouthing?—to find myself in the middle of a conversation with a handsome young guy who was seated next to me. It was pitch black and Jack was in the bathroom running the shower (a preferred place for his hook-ups, which I sanctimoniously referred to as “going to a watery grave”) and I was being chatted up by some random stranger who could have robbed me or killed me. Or raped me, which reminds me that one of Jack’s regular fuck buddies was allegedly raped behind a bar one night, called him in tears to have Jack pick him up, and then seduced Jack back at his place barely an hour after the purported assault.
So much for being highly desirable. I was just another doable guy on two legs to Jack.
Clearly, I was in with the wrong crowd. I did not believe that any other U of C students were being put into such awkward positions with their stripper roommates/boyfriends/sex partners. I missed innocently watching Jeff Stryker movies with Omar and not masturbating even though we wanted to. I missed being stuck in Hyde Park on weekends when my money ran out, having to do things like play the roommate version of
The Newlywed Game
in the common area for prizes that included passes to the café downstairs where I would buy Dr. Pepper and cheeseburgers. I missed not spending sleepless nights wondering if you could get AIDS from a shower streaked with the ejaculate of a thousand Chicago boys.
The spell Jack had over me was broken. I decided he’d banged his last anonymous pick-up with me in the room pretending not to hear or see or smell. (So much Drakkar Noir.) The next morning, when he was at work, I packed everything and moved temporarily around the corner into the apartment of my Madonna-collecting frenemy John, leaving a note telling Jack I was outta there. Having been detoured from the high road, I took with me enough of his import records (Paul Lekakis, Cover Girls, Nick John on blue vinyl) to earn $100 at the nearby second-hand music store, Reckless Records. It was a horrible thing to do, but he had so many records and I’d endured so much indignity; I felt it was an appropriate palimony.