Tales of the City 02 - More Tales of the City

If you do, you’re screwed but good. Not right away, maybe, but sooner or later. You have to—I don’t know—you have to learn to live with yourself. You have to learn to turn back your own sheets and set a table for one without feeling pathetic. You have to be strong and confident and pleased with yourself and never give the slightest impression that you can’t hack it without that certain goddamn someone. You have to fake the hell out of it.”
    “You aren’t faking it, Mouse. You are strong.”
    “I’m tired of it. I’m sick of picking up the pieces and marching bravely onward. I want things to work out just once. ” He rubbed the corner of his eye, smiled suddenly, and shrugged. “I wanna do a Salem commercial with a Marlboro Man.”
    Mary Ann squeezed his hand. “We’re all that way, Mouse.”
    “I know, but it works out for some people.”
    “It’ll work out for you.”
    “No it won’t.”
    “Mouse …”
    “I want it too badly, Mary Ann. Any idiot can see that. When you want it too badly, no one wants you. No one is attracted to that … desperation.”
    He turned away from her, wiping his eyes.
    “Christ!” he said softly, reaching for her hand again. “Look at that sky, will you?”
    After Mary Ann and Burke had left, Michael spent half an hour in his stateroom reading another chapter of the Isherwood book, then wandered out onto the deck again.
    The lights of the city blinked at him beguilingly.
    But why should I? he wondered. Why should I put my heart through the wringer again? Who could I find that would possibly matter on a two-day stay in an unfamiliar foreign city?
    And should I wear the pink or the green Lacoste?
    The taxi driver had a huge white mustache and a jovial, grandfatherly face. Michael hated to ask him.
    “Uh … do you know any gay places?”
    The driver blinked, puzzled. “Red light?”
    “No, not red light. Men.”
    “Men?”
    “Sí.”
    “Ah, homosex!”
    “Sí.”
    The driver peered over the seat and studied his passenger for several seconds. “Homosex,” he repeated, then turned his eyes back to the road.

The Man in White
    T HE ROAD UP THE MOUNTAIN WAS POORLY LIT. MICHAEL caught only rough impressions of dusty foliage and black palms, shabby stucco houses that cowered under the headlights like illicit lovers trapped in the flash of a detective’s camera.
    The cab stopped at a blocky white building with a central archway. Iron grillwork over the entrance spelled out SANS SOUCI.
    Without care, Michael translated. Without care in Acapulco in a gay bar with a French name on a night when nothing in the world made any goddamn sense at all. He realized now, with some embarrassment, that he had laid the heaviest of trips on Mary Ann. She had glimpsed his soul at its blackest, devoid of humor, poisonous with self-pity. She had seen beyond the brave Disney elf, and the sight couldn’t have been pretty.
    He paid the driver and walked through the archway, nodding to an old woman sweeping the floor. She returned the greeting without expression. Michael wondered if she had a word for gringo fag.
    The archway led to a rear terrace overlooking another hillside and a chunk of the bay. There was a thatched bar at one end of the terrace where an old man seemed to serve as both sentinel and bartender. The whole scene was so shadowy that Michael tripped on a chair while making his entrance.
    Recovering his cool, he looked around the terrace for witnesses to his clumsiness. There were none. The place was empty. The only sounds were the skeletal rattle of palms along the hillside and the sepulchral wail of Donna Summer singing “Winter Melody.”
    Something was gravely wrong.
    Or maybe not. Maybe this was exactly the way a gay bar in Mexico was supposed to look. Or there might have been a language problem with the cabby? No. What else could “homosex” mean? A joke, then? A macho prank on a simple American pervert?
    It was half-past nine when Michael ordered a Dos Equis from the old man and sat down at a table on the edge of the terrace. He lost himself for several minutes in the onyx shine of the bay, the huge illuminated cross at the Capilla de la Paz. A neon Pepsi sign glowed obscenely on a distant hillside.
    Several people straggled onto the terrace. Women. Lesbians? A man appeared. He was decked out in spray-on white pants, several dozen gold chains and a patent-leather Latin Lover hairdo right out of GQ. In L.A., he would have been straight. But here …?
    The