2

The streets of Chelsea were no less busy than the streets in my neighborhood. The lack of airflow indoors had coaxed residents and tourists alike into the streets to find some sense of relief. There were, however, a few bars that remained open to serve the population drinks at prices residents of other American cities would never consider paying in their hometowns. But in New York, that was part of the deal to be so close to the center of the universe, so they said.

The bars that were open on Ninth Avenue seemed to spill over with tourists and drunk straights, and I wasn’t sure I could be bothered with the hassle, so I contemplated a walk over to Eighth or pushing on down to the Village. My T-shirt was already damp with sweat. What would another ten or fifteen blocks in hundred-degree temperatures matter?

I finished my water and pushed onward, tossing the empty bottle into the grated garbage can on the corner. A few minutes later, I stepped into a bar on the corner of Grove and was met with the sweetest greeting I could imagine: a blast of cool air on my sweat-slicked skin. Never again would I underestimate the importance of a generator.

The bar was literally packed with people who stood shoulder-to-shoulder and wore tired, worn-out expressions from incessant exposure to the heat. Many of them held empty glasses in their hands, not necessarily keen on getting another but not quite ready to be forced back out into the fire. They lingered and loitered, weary but attentive, one eye on the door, scanning for new blood.

Pushing past the crowds that gathered more densely under air ducts, I found an opening at the bar and ordered a beer from the mildly irritated bartender. I then wandered through the maze of patrons until I found a lone high-top table by the window. It was in the process of being abandoned by a group of preppy-looking guys whose product had long ago sweated out, wayward strands of hair plastered against their foreheads. As they vacated, I populated, capturing one of two barstools that lingered on either side of the table before some other fatigued patron could swoop in to rest their weary bones.

The table was a mess with empty glasses and water spots and crumpled-up napkins that had probably been used to dab at beads of sweat resting mercilessly on foreheads and necks. I did my best to stack them and push them to the edge of the table, out of my way. I didn’t figure anyone would be by to bus the table anytime soon, but then, I didn’t require much space. It was surprisingly fortuitous that I’d been able to find a seat at all.

Pop music drummed from the speakers surrounding the main level of the bar at what I would describe as a reasonable volume—a much more reasonable volume than it would have been played on a Friday night, anyway. The grand piano that the more theatrical queens normally flocked to during typical happy hours sat desolate in the corner, no Broadway throwaways or optimistic drama majors to tickle its keys. The black iron railing around Christopher Park, visible from where I sat, fenced in groves of shade trees and benches packed with people, begging for relief.

I took occasional sips from my beer and lost myself in thought as I peered through the window. Seventh Avenue looked almost lonely. People seemed to move more slowly than usual, without any sense of purpose or inflated ego. Funny how one can become accustomed to the self-importance that wafts through the streets and wades down the avenues of New York City. The immodesty sometimes spills from the windows of taxicabs and bleeds from the cracks in the sidewalk. Overbooked calendars and vibrating phones and back-to-back calls and the incessant pinging of social media feed notifications fill the air around us with a thick pompousness that can only be cut with overpriced juices and the newest Asian food trend.

But when the city has no choice but to stop and bask in itself, to look at its haggard face in the mirror, to focus on nothing but the beauty around it, its citizens become human again. They become real people that ache and sweat just like the rest of the world. Their feet swell and their heads hurt and they realize just how much they need a break.

I relented into my love-hate relationship with the city I called home as I gazed out that window. I lost myself in the cool air and the quench of my thirst.

I grabbed my beer and brought it to my lips, and as I swallowed hard, there he was: the guy I’d passed on Forty- Fifth Street. The guy in the jeans and the white tank and the Timberlands. The guy with honeyed flesh and rugged definition and perfectly high-faded, jet-black hair. The eyes that met mine and the lip that curled when he realized he’d been caught. He strolled right by the window at which I was perched without looking in, without noticing me.

Had it been a coincidence that I’d seen him again? A twist of fate? Or simply the fact that a sizable portion of the city’s residents were in search of a light at the end of a deeply suffocating tunnel?

I smiled to myself and went back to my drink, back to idling and daydreaming. The air vent positioned in the ceiling not far from where I sat streamed cool relief into the bar and onto my skin, drying the sweat on my brow. I used the back of my arm to finish the job. An uncomfortable clamminess clung to my skin. I was oddly excited about taking a shower even though I’d had one that morning, simply to rinse the heat of the day off my frame.

“You mind?”

The voice, even and deep, shook me from my thoughts. My attention was torn from the world outside and attempted to focus itself on the man standing next to my table. It was him, casually gripping the slender neck of a beer bottle in one fist while the fingers of the other rested easily on the tabletop.

It was him. The man I’d shared a look-back with on Forty-Fifth Street.

He stood there in all his ’round-the-way glory, the slightest smirk pulling at the corner of his mouth. His eyes stared through me, almost squinting as though the sun outside was still blinding him in this new, noticeably darker environment. Short, silken strands of black hair softly coated his forearms, tapering off as they reached his biceps. Had he been wearing a Yankees cap while sitting on the stoop of a brownstone and rolling a joint, I’d have written him off as a curious piece of rough trade, a guy on the down-low in a neighborhood his boys wouldn’t have been caught dead in. Someone I had no interest in fucking with, even as a one-night stand.

It’s funny the way I sometimes judge people. I mean, I grew up just off the M-line in Ridgewood. The son of a second-generation Italian-American plumber. My ma worked at a hardware store. Queens was in my blood. Stoop-sitting and handball and public school had all defined my childhood just as much as they’d probably defined this guy’s.

But he wasn’t hiding behind a baseball cap. His features were sharp but soft, and he wasn’t looking over his shoulder. His eyes were steady as he addressed me. They weren’t shifty. And he didn’t seem the least bit nervous about being caught in a gay bar.

“Nah. Seat’s open.”

He effortlessly perched himself on the barstool across from me and examined the tower of glasses and bottles at the edge of the table, smiling. “Been goin’ hard?”

I laughed. “They were here when I sat down. But you knew that already.”

“How’s that?”

“Because you saw me on Forty-Fifth. I haven’t been here long enough to finish a beer.”

He smiled. “Is that so? Small world, I guess.”

“You know it is. You’re native. Where’d you grow up?”

“South Bronx. Soundview. But I’m in Mott Haven now. You?”

“Queens. But I live in Hell’s Kitchen. What were you doing in my neck of the woods?”

“Just pickin’ up my check. I work at the garage on Forty-Fifth.”

Bingo. I wasn’t too far off the mark with my assumption after all.

Our conversation rode a direct path, one dotted with simple questions and even simpler answers, a no-nonsense approach to flirting with a stranger. That is, after all, what was happening. Had we connected on a hookup app, these details would have hardly been necessary, but the tone of the conversation would have been similar. When meeting in person, however, over a drink in the middle of a city-wide disaster, exchanging these bits of personal information seemed appropriate.

His irises flickered with light browns and deep greens and his hands appeared large and rough as they caressed the bottle. It was clear to me that he worked with his hands, but underneath that rugged, blue-collar exterior and that distinctive the-fuck-you-lookin’-at? attitude, a gentleness wept from his eyes and traced his fingernails and colored the way he sat on his barstool. Something told me that once our initial display of brusqueness wore off, once the obligatory questions had been addressed and the beer began to take hold, our conversation would become easier, more casual.

“What brought you here?” I asked.

“Same thing as you, I guess,”

he joked. “It’s my day off. I wanted a drink. Everything in HK is closed, so I started downtown.”

I smiled at him and his shoulders relaxed slightly before he took a swig from his bottle and scrubbed the palm of his hand over the top of his head, almost as if he were trying to massage the cool air into his scalp. A black tuft of fur, mildly matted by sweat and circumstance appeared under his arm, the strands long and unmanicured. I appreciated his natural state. It wasn’t something normally found in the sea of plucked and pulled bodies that populated Manhattan’s west side.

I offered my name. “I’m Joey, by the way.”

“Luis.”

He pronounced it like Louis , but I got the feeling he’d only started pronouncing it that way after growing tired of correcting people when they said his name wrong.

Luis and I chatted as we drank our beers, drifting from one topic to the next. We talked about our jobs and the neighborhoods in which we grew up and the pains of the MTA, always under maintenance. We grabbed another beer—his treat—and continued to chat, our knees occasionally touching under the table, sometimes by accident and other times as a tease, as a temperature gauge, to measure the response of the opposite party. The response was favorable each time: reluctant smiles and hesitant glances at the table and nervous chuckles highlighting rosy sheens on the cheeks.

The short stubble that dotted his jawline, the goatee that grew shorter as it trailed up his cheeks into sideburns that almost disappeared, shifted with the shape of his face as he smiled and laughed. It splashed into his dimples like cliff divers into the Acapulco Bay as his flesh stretched and moved with the easy, sexy pull on his features. I found it hard to look away when he spoke. But our beers dried up and the bar grew more crowded, so we decided to relinquish the table.

The tension between us was almost negligible, but it was there. Would Luis head back to the Bronx or did he want to continue hanging out? Would I walk back to Hell’s Kitchen alone? Never to see him again?

I mean, it would make sense. We’d had a good time, but he hadn’t initiated a hookup and neither had I. There would be no reason to exchange numbers or try to hang out again.

We lived mere miles from one another, but by New York standards, we may as well have lived on different continents.

Traversing from Hell’s Kitchen to the South Bronx by public transit would take damn near an hour on a good day. What would we do? Hang out after he got off work at the garage?

It seemed a strange dynamic. What if he had responsibilities at home?

Maybe he took care of his folks or younger siblings, or worse yet, what if he had a boyfriend? Or a girlfriend? We hadn’t really discussed our private lives. Not in detail.

Why was I getting so wrapped up in this person who had been a complete stranger less than two hours ago? Someone I had never seen before today?

It was odd behavior on my part. Historically, I’d been a discerning thinker who’d always been able to separate romance and sex. But I didn’t want to leave him yet. Something about his presence was comforting, and I wasn’t ready to give it up.

“So,”

I started as we stood from the table. “You headed back to the Bronx?”

“Uh,”

he stuttered almost nervously, as though he’d had other plans. “I hadn’t really thought about it. Might as well. Probably nothin’ else to do here.”

Luis glanced around as though he were trying to find a reason to stay. At the bar, in Chelsea, in Manhattan. Or maybe with me.

I took a chance. “I’m just gonna start back to the neighborhood. Maybe see if the power’s back on yet. You’re welcome to join me… if you want.”

“Uh, yeah. Sure. Maybe I’ll stop by the garage and see if the boss man needs help.”