illustration by Jameson Currier
ink, gouache and pastel on paper
20241028001

Pizza or Donut?

art and story by Jameson Currier

Saturday evenings in the city when I was alone, when Mitch hadn’t called and Wade had other plans and I had no out-of-town visitors, I would walk through the Village streets visiting bookstore after bookstore. I found comfort and hope in books. There was a gay bookstore on Hudson Street where I would look through the new books that had been published or read a passage from a book I couldn’t afford to purchase. Someone once told me that you should be like the man you want to meet, so I would stand in the fiction aisles, reading, hoping someone would notice me before I became self-conscious.

There was an “adult bookstore” on Christopher Street, that, if I recall correctly, you had to enter by passing through a turnstile. I’d flip hurriedly through the gay magazines, studying the images of nude men, and glance up at the guys who passed by headed toward a backroom that I was too timid to visit myself.

I’d walk along Christopher Street, trying to determine if anyone was cruising me. I wasn’t a type, unless a confused-bookish-boyish-nerd-in-the-wrong-place requires a distinction. I was suspicious of random hookups; sex in public spaces wasn’t who I was. There were a couple of restaurants on Bleecker Street that I had been to with friends, sometimes with Mitch, and I’d stand across the street and watch customers arrive and depart. There was another gay bookstore on Christopher Street, and a small bookstore on Tenth Street, opposite the entrance to a gay bar.

For a while I would walk around Sheridan Square—there was a time when there was a men’s gym on the second floor of a building, where you could watch guys walking back and forth and barbells rising and lowering. Some nights I would lean against a building and smoke a cigarette. I’d started smoking at gay bars because I didn’t know what to do with my hands, but I reached a point where I was self-conscious of looking like someone who didn’t look cool while smoking. I never met the man I hoped to meet, usually only someone who wanted to trick. After a while of walking and standing, I would backtrack my steps and go to one of the gay bars and have a drink or two. Later, on my way back to my apartment, I would stop for a slice of pizza—or a donut.

There was an evening I was drinking too hard and fell into a conversation with a guy who bought me another drink. I liked him a lot. But this was during the days after Mitch had died and I had no capacity for anything other than grief. The man walked me back to my apartment and we kissed on the stoop of my apartment building. I don’t remember his name. There are times now when I think I never knew his name, only the possibility he represented and the opportunity I let slip away.

_________

“Pizza or Donut?” is an excerpt from We Are Made of Stars, a novel by Jameson Currier, published by Chelsea Station Editions (2024).