Fantasy #1
Maskless. Finally. Now I look like everyone else on the street, because only old people wear masks around here. Lunch with friends I haven’t seen since the day the earth stood still. They’ve aged—but not me. The cautions and coverings haven’t changed my face at all. Like Broadway, I’m back.
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This is how it goes with plagues. We forget them. Wars have parades; plagues get gardens. Wars have statues of heroes and honor rolls of the dead; plagues get candles or a quilt. Stop by the Greenwich Village AIDS Memorial in a park that replaced a dump for medical waste. Water trickles over the still surface of a pool. A sculptural frame is vaguely triangular—queer, but calming. Over the years, the trees have grown and spread. It’s a lovely place to sit and forget the day I saw a young man in gay-clone attire dragging an IV unit with one hand and pushing a walker with the other.
Covid is harder and easier to bear than AIDS was. Harder because it’s in the air; you can get it from a breath. Easier because there’s no stigma, so it doesn’t arouse my guilt. Maybe that’s why I never had a nightmare about this plague. My fears were real. The refrigerated truck waiting for bodies—just up the block. The ventilators—visible every day on TV. I couldn’t shake the image of myself with a snaky tube down my throat, like an evil parody of a blow job. It felt like a dream, but all of it was in waking time.
AIDS never really ended; it just stopped killing my friends. But the pandemic is over; so says Joe Biden. I wish I could agree, but I’ve been burned by rounds of optimism followed by new surges, and each wave of infections has made me more skeptical of reassuring news. The truth is, no one knows what this virus will do next, and I’m too old to take its course for granted.
Still, I’m willing to believe that the risk/reward ratio has changed. Several fully boosted friends have come down with Covid recently, and they’ve gotten through it pretty well. I’ll test the water, toe by toe. I’m still going to wear a mask in tight indoor spaces, even if I’m the only one; after all, I haven’t been exposed to a measly cold virus for more than two years. Going out will feel deliberate, like eating healthy—nothing casual about it. But I can’t spend the rest of my life clinging to the ideal of perfect safety. There are some things streaming can’t provide.
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Fantasy #2
I’m in a restaurant, no longer looking around to be sure the place isn’t full. No more mental measuring of the space between tables, no more eating at unsavory hours to avoid the crowd. Just me and a guy who looks a lot like Darren Criss. We order food that will be freshly prepared, not plopped in a take-out box for reheating in the micro. Right out of the kitchen. And it’s…delicious.
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The pharmacist seems indifferent to the momentousness of the occasion. She’s got a line of hopeful customers to jab. I’m resigned to a Tylenol evening followed by a morning of fatigue, but my mind is set on the joy of not standing out. l’ll never again run into a teenager who glares at my mask and mutters, “You’ll die soon anyway.” I’ll never have to move away from people without masks in the subway. I’ll only worry about being pushed onto the tracks.
Fresh from Rite-Aid, I brave the tumult of Union Square, humming a disco song half a century old. I first heard it in a rush of poppers, and it still propels me when I need the courage to pretend that I have courage.
I’ve got all my life to live
I’ve got all my love to give and I’ll survive
I will survive
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Fantasy #3:
I’m not thinking about the pandemic. The day goes by as usual, with bursts of anxiety that have nothing to do with the virus. Only insults and rejections to obsess about. Such a luxury.
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Lockdown was a crucible, but I didn’t have to endure it alone. My husband and I were together 24/7. We had to navigate the terror of Covid, not to mention struggles over the TV remote (I hate nature shows) and quarrels about the overuse of toilet paper. We might have torn each other to shreds, but instead we grew closer, haunted by the specter of one of us summoning EMS to take the other one away. We bonded over the irrepressible knowledge that our lives are fragile.
But every bout of symptoms turned out to be ordinary malaise. And there were pleasures amid the panic, long walks through silent streets and evenings of intense comfort. It won’t be easy to resist the charms of Netflix a deux. Still, if we keep that up, we’ll be living in a nursing home of our own devise. We have to pry ourselves apart.
He’s going to Europe to reconnect with friends. It’s the first vacation we haven’t taken together, and it has to be that way. I don’t know how I’ll spend the time alone, but my schedule includes several vanity destinations. I’ll pay what Medicare won’t to have the barnacles that accumulated on my body burned off; I’ll get an overdue dental cleaning and a real haircut. I’m no longer content with a DIY barbering kit that makes me look like a balding Harpo Marx. Groomed, scraped, and jabbed, I’ll be ready to roll.
Which may mean a reunion with Geezer Quest, my generic term for daddy-loving dating sites. I let my membership lapse because I didn’t want to be tempted by the lure of f2f. But nothing has changed in this virtual dog run; thousands of guys are sniffing around. True, many of them live in China, Russia, or Colombia, and most of the locals are interested in roses, which is a genteel way of saying, “It’ll probably take you an hour to come, so you better be willing to pay.” I don’t have a problem with that arrangement, but it’s not my thing. For me, sex is an adventure, and adventurers have to be sincere. Fortunately, there are gay men who truly crave grandpas. I’ve been lauded as a Santa, which, for a Jew, is quite an accomplishment.
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Fantasy #4
I see him in the intercom. He actually looks like his selfies on Kinkstagram. Bright-eyed and pony-tailed, with the string bean body I find inexplicably cute. I open my door. His glance shifts from anxious to relieved. I flash him a susceptible smile. He wraps me in a hug. I feast on the smell of him.
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Life for an old homo doesn’t have to be an Andrew Holleran novel, a grim remembrance of lost passion. My hormones still flow, even if my body looks best in low light. As for the common belief that seniors are lonely and grateful for crumbs—not me. My marriage is solid and satisfying, a deep harbor with room to cruise. So I can mess around without remorse.
Am I fleeing from the perils of intimacy by seeking sex on the side? Probably. But there’s a simpler explanation for my wanderlust. I need to fill the void that the pandemic has left. For more than two years, it absorbed all my morbid thoughts; now I‘m back to worrying about irregular lab results and lumps that don’t go away. They could be (probably are) the first sign of…who knows what? I’m ready for something as preoccupying as Covid was—like, say, HOOKING UP!
If I were a straight married man, it might feel treacherous to seek that thrill. But for a gay man of the liberation generation, it’s an existential choice rather than a betrayal. The right question isn’t why I might want to explore this option, but why I shouldn’t. The answer has less to do with devotion to my spouse than with the fear that I’ll discover what old age really means. It’s not just about enfeeblement or loss of energy. It’s the triumph of realism over desire, the final victory of ego over id.
But there’s another possibility. A frustrated libido may rebel against its limits. This is what makes old people especially vulnerable to love scams, not a rare occurrence on these dating sites. I have to beware of soldiers seeking gifts, and eager twinks whose fetishes involve a diaper. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but….) And then there’s the latest infectious microbe.
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Fantasy #5:
I’m begging my doctor for a painkiller strong enough enough to soothe the agony of monkeypox. There’s a trace of impatience in his neutral affect. “Really!” his eyes say. “At your age.”
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Time for a nap.