Tales of the City 07 - Michael Tolliver Lives

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    I headed for my truck (a light-blue Tacoma, if you must know), buzzing on a sort of homegrown euphoria that sweeps over me from time to time. After thirty years in the city, it’s nice to be reminded that I’m still glad to be here, still glad to belong to this sweet confederacy of survivors, where men meet in front of the hardware store and talk of love and death and circle jerks as if they’re discussing the weather.

    It helps that I have Ben; I know that. Some years back, when I was still single, the charm of the city was wearing thin for me. All those imperial dot-commers in their SUVs and Hummers barreling down the middle of Noe Street as if leading an assault on a Third World nation. And those freshly minted queens down at Badlands, wreathed in cigarette smoke and attitude, who seemed to believe that political activism meant a subscription to Out magazine and regular attendance at Queer as Folk night. Not to mention the traffic snarls and the fuck-you-all maître d’s and the small-town queers who brought their small-town fears to the Castro and tried to bar the door against The Outsiders. I remember one in particular, petitions in hand, who cornered me on the sidewalk to alert me that the F streetcar—the one bearing straight tourists from Fisherman’s Wharf—was scheduling a new stop at Castro and Market. “They just can’t do this,” he cried. “This is the center of our spirituality!” We were standing in front of a window displaying make-your-own dildos and dick-on-a-rope soap. I told him my spirituality would survive.
    The dot-commers have been humbled, of course, but house prices are still rising like gangbusters, with no end in sight. I’m glad I staked a claim here seventeen years ago, when it was still possible for a nurseryman and a nonprofit preservationist to buy a house in the heart of the city. The place hadn’t seemed special at the time, just another starter cottage that needed serious attention. But once my partner, Thack, and I had stripped away its ugly pink asbestos shingles, the historic bones of the house revealed themselves. Our little fixer-upper was actually a grouping of three “earthquake shacks,” refugee housing built in the parks after the 1906 disaster, then hauled away on drays for use as permanent dwellings. They were just crude boxes, featureless and cobbled together at odd angles, but we exposed some of the interior planking and loved telling visitors about our home’s colorful catastrophic origins. What could have been more appropriate? We were knee-deep in catastrophe ourselves—the last Big One of the century—and bracing for the worst.
    But then I didn’t die. The new drug cocktails came along, and I got better, and Thack worked up the nerve to tell me he wanted out. When he left for a job in Chicago in the mid-nineties, the house became mine alone. It was a tomb at first, filled with too many ghosts, but I exorcised them with paint and fabric and furniture. Over the next eight years, almost without noticing, I arrived at a quiet revelation: You could make a home by yourself. You could fill that home with friends and friendly strangers without someone sleeping next to you. You could tend your garden and cook your meals and find predictable pleasure in your own autonomy.
    In other words, I was ready for Ben.

    I met him on the Internet. Well, not exactly; I saw him on the Internet, and met him on the street in North Beach. But I would never have known who he was, or rather what he was looking for, had my friend Barney not modeled for a website catering to older gay men. Barney is forty-eight, a successful mortgage broker, and something of a muscle daddy. He’s a wee bit vain, too. He could barely contain himself when he stopped me on Market Street one day to tell me that his big white marble ass was now available to World Wide Wankers for only $21.95 a month, credit card or online check.
    Once upon a time, this would have struck me as sleazy, but the Internet has somehow persuaded half the world to get naked for the enjoyment of the other half. Barney is a fairly sexy guy, but I squirmed a little when I checked out his photos on the site. Maybe I’ve just known him too long, but there was something incestuous and unsettling about it, like watching your Aunt Gladys flashing titty for the troops.
    At any rate, there was a personals section on the website, so once I’d fled the sight of Barney’s winking sphincter, I checked out the guys who