given movie money and sent out to enjoy himself with friends, while Donny checked out the scene.
“My advice? You need a big one to shake you up.”
“You mean a big relationship?”
Donny took another cool drag and crushed the butt in a studied fashion.
“No, I mean a big one. I was referring to a more visceral experience.” He jumped up. “Grab your jacket. We’re going to Slam. You need therapy.”
Three
Slam Bam, Thank You, Sam
The sign read Gentlemen’s Club. None of the men making their way up the stairs looked particularly well groomed or well mannered. There wasn’t a double-breasted three-piece or tux and cummerbund in sight. Gentle wasn’t even in the picture. Most of them were heaving with age or with desire or just heaving to get to the top landing, all under the judicious eye of a brooding, muscular miscreant guarding the Gates to Paradise, or at least the down-low demi-paradise version to be found in Toronto’s gay ghetto.
Donny discarded his cigarette at the foot of the stairs with a look of disdain for the injudicious by-laws afflicting the serious smoker. But then art had its price. Overhead, a marquee promised breathtaking performances from Messrs Orlando, Skye, Tyler, Little John, and Big Bad Captain Hook. One made sacrifices from time to time.
The conversation that had begun in Donny’s condo continued. Donny was at his dismissive best as he wound himself up.
“What’s the point?”
“Of love?”
“Of looking for it! Do you know? I gave up years ago.” A fey hand on the heart promised all the world’s truth and sincerity. “I never formally retired from love, of course. People can think what they like.”
“I doubt they would believe you, even if you came out and declared it.”
“Naturally, but I repeat: relationships are dangerous. Approach at your peril. Who wants to experience a train wreck or expire of utter boredom?”
Dan looked up at the marquee. “So this is your solution?”
“This is easier. It’s soothing. It gets you through the night. It doesn’t linger around and ask you to do the laundry or expect breakfast the next morning after disappointing you the night before.”
“They can’t all have been boring. Your boyfriends, I mean.”
Donny stopped to consider.
“Maybe not. But I am now of an age — a certain age, as they say — where all the good ones are either taken or dead or desperate. Of the former category, one need not apply. Of the latter two categories there is nothing to be said.”
They proceeded up the stairs and joined the line waiting to be frisked by a security guard who was, sensibly so for the management, a devastating looker. He embodied danger: pale skin, glossy hair and dressed entirely in black leather, right down to his fingerless gloves. Christian Bale crossed with the Hell’s Angels. A gay man’s death wish made flesh. Most of the clients seemed to anticipate his touch rather than fear it. Apparently they regarded it worth the heave-ho to climb the stairs just to be within his grasp.
Dan moved forward, arms raised for the patdown. “What about Philip?”
“Who?”
“Weren’t you dating someone named Philip last year?”
Donny cast his mind back. “Describe.”
The bouncer let Dan pass after what Dan regarded as a highly unprofessional frisk. The man seemed to have been checking out his personal apparatus rather than searching for weapons of the lethal sort. He turned to Donny, who was now undergoing a similar treatment.
“Delectable, lovely, charming. A beautiful, brown prince. Indian, maybe? You brought him around once or twice. He seemed very sensible. I thought you two got on well.”
“Ah! You mean Not Philip.”
“Not Philip?”
Donny smiled, looking his sphinx-like best.
“Yes, Not Philip. He was Sri Lankan.”
The bouncer waved him through. Dan looked back over his shoulder.
“What was he checking for — cock rings and scrotum piercings? Since when did getting into a strip club become a porn audition?”
“It’s all part of the fun.”
“The joys of ghetto life?”
“Right. Anyway, he — meaning Not Philip — kept saying he had a secret. Not Philip made it sound like something terrible. An affliction of some sort. I kept expecting HIV or worse. I even checked out his medicine cabinet the first few times I stayed over. Nothing. Not even an eczema cream.”
“So what was it?”
They were lining up again, this time to pay the inflated cover charge. Donny waved at a couple of faces in the line-up ahead and blew a kiss, all without breaking stride in the conversation.
“Two things, actually. First, his real name was Prabin, not Philip. He doesn’t like to go by his birth name.”
“It’s a nice name.”
“Exactly. He didn’t live up to it.”
“Not the most terrible thing, but it says a lot about him. And the second?”
Donny held up a warning finger: Hearken — a note to the wise.
“And second, he was forty-two years old and had never had a relationship last longer than two weeks.”
“Ouch!”
“I think ours was the record at eighteen days.”
“Congratulations?”
“No. Sympathy would be more in order. He was beautiful. Flawless, in fact. And he was heavenly in bed. All testosterone and sphincter muscles. His hair was superb, his skin irreproachable. Even his breath smelled fresh in the morning, no matter where his tongue had been the night before. But Not Philip was also not relationship material. At the first hint of my growing amorousness, he bolted.”
“A fight?”
“No, more like a fright. And then no answer for days on end. From fast forward, let’s-get-together-every-day to suddenly I’m-busy-all-the-time. I stopped calling after the first week. I became pathetic by the second. By the third, I wanted to go over and scratch at his door and beg him to let me in. I was totally gaga, head over heels. He wanted none of it.”
Bills placed on the counter vanished in exchange for a stamp on the inner wrist. Dan looked down at a glowing smiley face. He assumed it was either a suggestion of the demeanour expected of each guest while on the premises or a highly optimistic prediction of how he would be feeling by evening’s end.
He
