Of Your Life

It was the hottest summer on record, which surprised no one. Clogged AC units leaked so badly that the buildings in Steven’s Brooklyn neighborhood were tear-stained and rimmed with wet trash. People died of heat stroke while others found ways to stay cool collectively, sharing water and shade. Steven lived alone in a basement apartment that still managed to bake in the sun, but he was only a forty-five-minute bike ride to the beach, where he regularly escaped to find a man and float around in the waves for hours on end, until the water got too rough or his head too dizzy from diving in and rising out. He’d stay in there forever if he could.

He hated this time of year in New York, no one wanted to be anywhere––inside was over-cooled and outside was stifling and hazardous to vulnerable groups. Though Steven was not among them, he cursed the inhospitable climate on their behalf, imagining the elderly with nowhere to go, their morning walks too risky, the stale, recycled air hastening their slow demise in cramped quarters. His building smelled of it, he wanted to throw open all the windows and doors, rent a bus and bring all the ancients to the beach for a day with him, let them air out their house dresses and return in the early evening with sand in their sandals and wind still in their hair. There were plenty of old men in the building, too, but he felt less inclined to lead them like a captain to the sea, more afraid of their male sort of mutiny.

Steven was restless, like everyone else, his body itching for some release or relief––the whole city felt pent up. Just yesterday he’d seen a stooped woman carrying two grocery bags berating what looked like a ten-year-old biking on the sidewalk: “You bike on the ROAD, anybody teach you that?” He’d seen a man throwing bread loaves out the window, screaming at the top of his lungs, vocal cords hemorrhaging before Steven’s ears: “I’ll sell it! I’ll sell it! I’ll get rid of all of it!” He’d remember that for ages––the man had a bushy moustache and wasn’t wearing a shirt. Steven imagined the woman inside, caught up in the melodrama of her life.

Steven wanted some of his own. He sought it out online, at bars, in line at the grocery store. Choosing between salad dressings, checking for eye contact. Missed opportunities were tragedies to be avoided at all costs.

He was dating a disciplined man named Bryan who lived on the Upper West Side, the sort of guy who always reached out at the same time every day after his various healthy routines: Pilates or Peloton or yoga. Who verified his ETA three times before arrival––some prior abandonment at play that Steven was bound to replicate.

They’d been at it for five months now and Steven could tell Bryan considered it serious by the way he’d started making plans for them. He was good with a calendar, good with syncing schedules and daily reminders and good night messages. If they didn’t live on separate ends of the city, Steven would have felt suffocated. As it stood he was just a little wheezy, catching his breath, trying to catch up to this man's self-confidence. Steven had no such assured streak. He was barely sure of his interest in this guy, but once he started something it was hard to find the right reasons to stop.

“Hey there, handsome. How’s your weekend looking?”

Steven worked at a large, disorganized catering company as a client satisfaction manager. He provided quotes, planned menus, determined the necessary manpower. He worked mostly with harried, underpaid event planners answering to their own clients. A chain of megalomaniacs all the way down, from the chefs to the CMOs.

This weekend was fully booked, their staff at capacity: an awards event at one of the Chelsea Piers for The Council of Fashion Designers of America and a lavish dinner for clients of the New York Times Advertising. Steven was on call for both, ready to talk senior marketing managers off cliffs. It was a busy time for his business, everyone clamoring for in-person experiences. The pendulum had swung toward communal drinking again, clinking glasses, endless cheersing, and unspeakable amounts of waste. Thankfully that wasn’t Steven’s job anymore, there were shift leaders and load-out managers and cater-waiters with eight packs from their dance training ready to dump platters full of crab cakes and short ribs into slop buckets and dumpsters; down drains and into the city’s bloated bowels. From there Steven chose not to imagine.

“Serving the ravenous liberal elites this weekend, as usual,” he wrote back.

His small efforts to chip away at this man’s sincerity were futile but effortless, so he flicked them at him like rubber bands. Bryan seemed to enjoy it, oblivious to the reasonable obligation to lob a joke back once in a while.

“Haha, okay handsome. Well are you free for a sleepover?”

The thought of solving some minor crisis with tablescapes before a sweaty trek up to Inwood was one too many obligations for Steven. When sex with someone was no longer a reward, he knew he was in trouble. He tossed his phone across the room and it landed perfectly upright on his pillow like a cat, prepared for more abuse. He left it there to languish; he could ignore the invitation for a few hours before the sin of poor communication would gnaw at his guilty conscience.

Bryan was very sex-specific, too, would probably be confused and awkward if Steven showed up unprepared to put out. It was so old-fashioned, he thought, this expectation of butt sex.

He wanted to meet someone new, someone who could ask him the same, clichéd first date questions so he could invent different ways to answer. His favorite band growing up would be Fleetwood Mac this time, and he’d live in Cusco, Peru if he could choose anywhere in the world. Altitude and water, he fluctuated unpredictably between the two.

It was Thursday morning, a full day of off-the-clock freedom ahead of him before a weekend of compulsive phone-checking and middle-manning. He began by lathering himself in sunscreen that smelled like lemon verbena, adding a few complementary dabs of cologne to enhance the effect. After downing two cups of black coffee he felt alert and kinetic––he slapped his thighs and did thirty burpees in front of his full-length mirror. Two hard-boiled eggs and bites of leftover spinach salad fueled his hunger for the day. He sheepishly reconciled with his phone in order to check Grindr, finding––surprise––the same three guys active on his block, all big, beefy men who offered to plow and/or cuddle him, one or the other or in quick succession. One of them sent him a squirt emoji, which propelled Steven to get out of his apartment and into the thick swelter of the paved outdoors.

Someone had stolen his bike. They had cut through the fence where he locked it up, taken it titanium lock and all. He stood there dumbstruck, feeling paralyzed by the loss of his primary mode of transportation.

He was already drenched in sweat, and now he simmered with rage, the city suddenly his enemy again, shimmering with menace. He found an electric bike for rent nearby and flew through the neighborhoods on the way to the beach, hoping he could blur them into oblivion with his speed and fury, hoping he wouldn’t have to make out any individual’s face or building’s facade. He feared how he might despise them, transferring his anger at the anonymous bike thief to the nearest recipient––the stupidity of some careless child catapulting himself toward the street; the negligent disrepair of a healthcare clinic, with the letters NYC long lost to the elements, a sad, smeared shadow all that remained. Pathetic.

By the time he reached the beach, though, he was more numb than mad. Finally, the semblance of a breeze. He thought of leaving New York, a habitual rumination with a familiar sequence: spend all of his savings on a car, decide on a lake or a river or a mountain range, breathe free, run wild, get bored, get lonely, and dry up––like a standing dead tree in a forest of green. After all, he wanted to keep up the hunt. Keep finding new men who mirrored his yearning need, expanding his pack of strong yet vulnerable allies who would offer a lifelong supply of validation as protection against the oncoming heat and panic. And all of it cloaked in the language of skin and touch and beauty. Aesthetics of one kind or another were inescapable, he told himself.

People responded to simplicity––streamlined and frictionless. To reassurance that the endless complexity of the world could be broken down into pieces: bite-sized, digestible frames like these torsos and abs on his phone. In his palm, a thousand easy, soothing blueprints to reference. One in particular stood out first, some interplay of color and symmetry, a seductive filter. He clicked into “high-fi” to find he already had a message from the guy––

Hey, you at Riis?

Yeah, just pulled up. Where are you? I’m Steven.

Hi Steven. At the gay part. Like a twenty minute walk from the main lot.

Is it crowded?

Not really, it’s too hot.

Steven looked up and around. His helmet was tucked under his arm and his tanktop had a deep v of sweat on the front and back. His stomach rumbled. He was irritable and on an impulsive streak, surprised to find himself here, like his body had gotten ahead of him. His hands and feet had a tingly numbness to them again, some new symptom of being alive. He needed to jump in the ocean, trusting its palliative effects without requiring much explanation––for digestion, hangover; anxiety and depression; ambivalence toward humorless men: submerge yourself in cold, tidal waves and wipe the slate clean. He made his way to the shoreline, weaving between families and friend groups and couples and solitary men in wide hats with distended bellies, and other men with sculpted bodies like demigods of the Atlantic.

Come, high-fi added, still choosing not to share his name.

At the shoreline there was a ledge carved out by the tide, a steep slope down from the berm to the water, which roiled and rolled today. Two ladies shrieked as it battered their backsides. A real shlocker, he thought. But they were fine, no shrieking necessary. A lifeguard’s whistle competed for attention, but everyone seemed governed by their own solitary rules of risk and reward. Steven, too––he was disinterested in the guise of straight male protection, convinced that it always masked an ulterior motive of control.

He made his way up the beach toward “high-fi,” the crowd growing thinner as he went: fewer toddlers in awe of the ocean’s power to sweep them up, fewer young men calling each other pussies, more open, sparkling sand banks with solitary roamers like him. He stayed on the sea side of the ledge, feeling cut off from the mainland, as if all that was left was this strip of sand and the beckoning blues and greens.

Steven loved it here. The beach glowed with potential; the sun burned away his doubts about Bryan and dread about the upcoming weekend of work. There was an air of redemption. Everything felt fresh, open, and free. The water flowed over his feet, his ankles, his knees, occasionally surprising him with its sudden force, cooling his sundried skin. He squinted through sunbeams, happy to dull his awareness to a misty impression, the line between land and sea shifting like a mirage.

“Steven,” he heard––from somewhere unseen––authoritative and deep.

Coming out of his reverie, he searched around for the source and found a tan, rangy man lying on a large, red towel edged with tassels. He had an impressive beard that was cute on him, well-manicured, and a head full of salt and pepper hair. Steven looked down at his phone compulsively, thought for a second he’d try to match the torso from the profile to the person, but then thought better of it.

“Hey,” he said simply. He shrugged off his shoes and took off his shirt. It was pretty empty here. A few sleeping beauties with their butts to the sun. An older man in a thong swimsuit flirting playfully with the water. Further down he saw some silhouettes walking toward him or away, impossible to tell. No one was in the waves.

“You’re handsome,” said high-fi.

“Thanks. What’s your name?” Steven asked.

“Let’s get to know each other first.” His voice was smooth and resonant, cutting right through the ambient sound of the breaking surf.

“Before you tell me your name?”

“I’m DL,” he said.

“Wow, I can’t remember the last time someone said that to me. In what way?”

“I just like to keep it separate.” He said all of this with a smirk, a sort of mocking come-hither look, like he was just playing a game. Fair enough.

Steven gave up for now, choosing to take a seat on the towel next to him. The guy smelled great, like some sort of baked, salty herb. As he shifted to make room, the muscles in his torso contracted and relaxed. Steven salivated a little.

“Well I’m not calling you high-fi,” Steven said.

“You can call me whatever you want, baby.”

Baby, already. Steven didn’t hate it. He wanted to be baby. Cradled and cooed to sleep.

“I’m going to call you Fred,” Steven said, leaning back and closing his eyes, letting the sunlight flatten him out. He felt the gentle trace of two fingers up and down his arm, it was sweet and made his head tingle. His reverie was returning.

“What brings you here today, Steven,” said Fred.

“You, it feels like.”

“I was hoping you would say that.”

“And the waves.”

“Oh yeah? It’s rough out there. And I hear there are sharks.”

“There are always sharks,” Steven said. “It’s just a matter of how close they get to you.” He felt a bite on his chest and opened his eyes. The man had bitten his pec. He was now officially turned on.

“Thanks for sitting with me,” Fred said, smiling––clearly pleased that this hadn’t freaked Steven out––his eyes and his forehead crinkled and charming, seemingly untouched by Botox. “Our chances weren’t great today.” He looked toward the prancing, thonged man, maybe thirty years their senior.

“How old are you?” Steven asked, watching him carefully now. Fred chuckled.

“Oh, are we A/S/L-ing?”

“I think two out of three are out of the way.”

“I’m forty-two.”

“And what’s that like?”

Fred turned toward him. “It’s like this,” he said, and he gave Steven a deep kiss, finding his tongue at just the right time, gripping his face with one hand, four fingers on Steven’s cheek and pinkie tucked behind his ear. Smell was everything, that’s why Bryan was giving him the ick. His skin smelled wrong. This man’s smelled like saltwater, like a memory Steven wanted to bury himself in, like catnip. Some unconscious chemistry evolved to help him have the healthiest offspring. Good luck with that, he thought, which made him smile mid-kiss.

“What is it?” Fred asked, staying close to his face.

“Pheromones,” said Steven.

“Oh, I don’t really believe in all that.” Fred leaned back again, crossing his legs, showing off. He ran his hand through his hair, the same hand that had just gripped Steven’s face. Lucky hair.

“What do you mean you don’t believe in pheromones? They just are, you can’t believe in them or not.”

“Ok Mr. Scientist, go jump in the water and wash off your pheromones. We’ll see if you still taste as sweet on the other side.”

Steven rolled his eyes and got on his hands and knees, stretching out his lower back. “You’re too good at this to be ‘DL’,” he said. Walking on the sand left him with a dull ache near his pelvis. He took it as an opportunity to show Fred his back, which––for who knows how much longer––would look better than it felt. Fred gave him a couple pats on the butt and then lingered there with his wide hand, applying light pressure in between Steven’s cheeks, searching, which made Steven giggle and spring up and into action. He started to run toward the shore, his erection pressing pleasantly against the front of his suit. “Hurry back!” Fred shouted, but not in a strained way, it was like through a megaphone, like he could expand the inside of his chest to amplify his deep rumble.

Why was it like this, Steven wondered. Men either too available, like Bryan, or some kind of undercover agent. It’s a world of extremes, the ocean implied, crashing unpredictably and then rearing back, disinterested in his desire for some nonexistent happy medium.

He stepped further into the swell with thoughts of divine abandon. He was waiting for the right moment to dive in so he could avoid being battered at the break line. That moment arrived and he pounced, swimming past the initial shock and into the full-body relief he’d been looking for, like a cellular cleanse. Surrendering to it was a different, holier sort of acceptance than the usual kind he practiced––endurance of the heat, of work, of the distance between life’s promise and its daily realities. This was about being absorbed, not boundaried.

He touched the bottom, still right there. It was nice and sandy, not too rocky or spiky or slimy, worn smooth by the relentless waves. When he came up for air, he was facing the horizon and for a second he felt like he was much further from the shore than he was, barely past the breaker zone but it looked like he’d been dropped into the open ocean. His heart pumped a little faster, he could feel his blood in his ears. He turned around and saw Fred at his spot on the beach, lying flat; unconcerned, perhaps, with whether or not Steven returned to him.

The thonged man midway between them was still hopping around, splashing, flinging himself to and fro, absorbed in his witchy, low tide dance. Steven wished that his beach trips could be more like this old man’s, solitary, unconcerned with meeting up, hooking up, making nice with anyone except the ocean. He rode the tops of the waves, the shoreline dipping in and out of view as they crested and he bobbed. He dove a few more times into oncoming swells, then lay on his back and stared up at the sky. A small propeller plane was trailing an ad banner that Steven couldn’t fully make out, only the words “...of your life.” Looking for the man of your life? More extremes.

My life, he thought. An overrated concept. So finite, so useless by itself, like a single drop of the Atlantic that evaporates instantly once it's isolated.

He floated, warm and cold at once, and caught sight of a mist rising as he was carried along. Ride of your life.

And what about the life of the sea? Interconnected, omniscient. Soiled by the slop of human excess, the urban waste he helped produce. Better not to go there.

When he went upright again, he found that he could no longer touch the bottom. That had happened quickly––he hadn’t noticed where the sandbank dropped out from under him, couldn’t see that he was suddenly in twelve feet of water.

He started to swim inland, his blood still in his ears, but he wasn’t getting anywhere. He couldn’t see Fred anymore, or the prancing man, or anyone. He was in a valley, he only saw the blue-green-white of water. Then they appeared again, briefly, and he oriented himself, attempting to swim toward them. But he couldn’t. There was an insidious force at play, mocking his effort, pushing him further out. Everything looked the same. He knew he was supposed to swim sideways but it was hard to tell how to do that, or whether he was making any progress. He was a strong swimmer, but the water was stronger, the turbulence here quickly exhausting him. Waves broke randomly and into other waves. His arms started to burn, and that’s when the panic arrived––another burning, spreading through him in an instant, consuming him, making it hard to think straight. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. His feet kicked at nothing, frantic and pointless, like a fish’s fins flapping out of water.

Steven tried giving up, letting himself get slapped around, sucked under. He tried yelling “help” but barely anything came out, he swallowed it with a gulp. Mouth and nose full of salt, his stomach dropping over and over again. End of my life. At the sight of a massive surge coming at him, he came to attention and plunged his head downward, letting the weight of it drag his body along, and then breaststroking as hard as he could away from the seething surface. Somehow he’d remembered to take a breath long enough to last, so he kept swimming down, opening his eyes to find nothing but a murky brown at first, until a ray of sunlight cut through it and a reflective glimmer caught his eye. He aimed for that. A school of silversides flickered past him, oblivious, with dead-eyed bluefish close behind, darting from above. But Steven just saw dark and light, until the seafloor rose up to scrape both his knees, mercifully. A wave crashed into the sandbank and the surf shoved him into the shallows. He breached the surface and gasped for air, sucking at the sky, knowing that he needed to act quickly or he risked being dragged back and overwhelmed by a breaker. His feet found sand and he ran until it was shallow enough to crawl on all fours, dragging himself up the beachfront in great, dramatic heaves and landing with a thud on the wet sand above the low-tide line, like something being born out of the ocean.

He breathed––a sharp, blooming pain in his chest keeping the air from hitting the spot, like it couldn’t make it past some invisible wall his lungs had erected. It felt like the bare minimum. So he just lay there, taking shallow breaths, taking what he could get, trying not to force it, to avoid hyperventilating.

“Are you okay?” He saw a veiny foot, close enough to make out the sand stuck between its toes, and a purple varicose standing out like a river branching from the coastline. All he could manage was a weak thumbs up, a tilt of his hand.

The man crouched down and brought his face close to Steven’s. He had chubby cheeks and a sunburned nose, eyebrows full of unruly strays. He seemed concerned but not alarmed, a small comfort. Steven must have felt worse than he looked. He sat up on his elbows, but his arms quickly gave out. Balls caught his eye on the way back down, two hangers barely contained by fabric. Another comfort, this man’s shamelessness. No reason to be embarrassed. All men were naked and powerless here.

“That your guy over there?” he asked, pointing.

“I just met him,” said Steven, rolling onto his side and then his hands and knees.

“Do you want me to––”

“No no, I’m fine. I’ll be good. Thank you.” The man stayed next to him a while longer, started kicking up a little water, his veiny feet unable to sit still. Steven’s breathing filled his lungs again.

“I saw you out there,” the man said, no longer looking at him, digging a figure eight pattern in the sand with his big toe, sprightly and vital as ever in his world of one. “I said to myself, he’ll make it.”

He didn’t know how to respond to that. Or…what? He would have just watched Steven get taken by the ocean? Lost a bet with himself?

He walked toward his Grindr date, dragging his feet, unsure how long it had been since he went in, ten minutes or forty. When he reached the long, lithe body lying there in the sun, eyes closed, oblivious as a silverside, he felt a guttural pang of sorrow, it moved from the back of his throat to his diaphragm, giving him the sudden urge to throw up, which before he could help himself he was doing, emptying his sea-sloshed insides onto a corner of this man’s towel.

“Woah, dude! Woah!”

Steven clutched his stomach with one hand, trying to brush the bile into the sand and out of view with the other. He stayed hunched over, avoiding eye contact.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

“What’s going on?” There was a sharp edge to his voice, no sympathy.

“I, um…sorry, I got caught out there. I got stuck,” he said, unsure how dramatic to be.

“What?” said the man, suddenly quite fastidious, grabbing the towel out from under Steven and carefully stretching it out, shaking it off––it was a precious heirloom, apparently.

“Nothing, I just got beaten up by the waves, it’s, uh, rougher than I thought.”

“Yeah, man, you gotta be careful. You really shouldn’t be swimming out there if you don’t have that kind of experience.” Steven peeked up at him, but he was a lost cause now, concerned mostly with preserving his clean facade, with keeping things separate. No room for Steven’s mess in a partitioned life, for bodily functions or the ugly stains they leave behind.

“I’m gonna go wash this off,” he said, talking to himself.

Thankfully Steven had barely anything with him. He gathered his helmet and his clothes as quickly as his tired arms would let him. There was no reason to wait or say goodbye. Overhead, the banner plane circled back around, advertising some tacky, online vacation planner: The escape of your life. He plodded back down the beach, fumbling with his phone, heels sticking out of his shoes. It was dizzying and required unusual focus––to navigate to his texts, to find Bryan’s name, his unanswered invitation, and respond, hours later and still hours apart: “Yes, I’ll sleep over.”