that's beantown, baybey!!!!!!!

ten years in one city, a dozen ugly maps

Aug 08, 2024

My feet are planted firmly, knees bent slightly, I do not touch the tarnished steel poles a lesser man might latch onto to keep his balance–I move with the sway. The train brakes with the suddenness of your youth being given away freely but I merely lean the other way, hands in my pockets, shoulders giving up the eternal shrug; unbothered king! The green line howls its unearthly screech, makes that lurching turn between Boylston and Arlington but I know the centrifugal force of it like the shape of my mother’s hugs. I cannot be moved. An athletic-looking man in his most mass-produced Red Sox gear stumbles into me like it’s his first day with legs but I do not budge. I offer him a winning thin-lipped white guy grin and he is chastened. I am a seasoned subway surfer, and yes I do it to impress. I’ve learned nothing else from this city but how to balance on my own two feet so you bet your yankee ass I’m gonna show it off.

September marks the ten year anniversary of my move to Boston at seventeen years old to work toward a degree I would not end up using. It’s a common saying that the hallmark of every seventeen year old is good decision-making and I may have just been the best. When my primary education was coming to a close and all my closest friends were looking toward what seemed like their predestined paths, I was throttled with the full force of realizing I had not imagined living past eighteen. I’d never gone so far as to plan my death but I definitely hadn’t tried something so brave as attempting to plan my life. Where does a depressed gay loser with squandered ambitions and dreams he cannot admit turn his sights? Some might say New York City but those people have never been as hopeless as I have.

Boston felt like an inevitability. A city I’d been to on a few occasions but still teeming with enough unknowns to be a little romantic. Not too far from home, but far enough that I could isolate if I wanted to (I would). I longed to be near and to see people but know none of them, let none know me. A place where I would never have to smile if I didn’t want to. And if all else failed, it at least seemed like the sort of place people went to die. That’s beantown, baybey!!!!

And wouldn’t you know, I hated it enough that I decided to stick around. I can’t imagine my life if I’d gone anywhere else–and I know I know, everyone imagines the infinite unfolding potential paths of their lives, the things they may have missed out on, if they’d be happier or sadder if they’d done xyz, fucked abc, married lmnop. We’ve all seen Everything Everywhere All At Once. But truly, when I try to imagine any other life but this one that I have given to myself over and over, it all comes up blank. There is no path but the one I’ve taken.

I used to feel free / was it just a dream?

I’m in a basement, shoes sticking to the floor, each step releasing a resounding shlock as I remove myself from this entrapment over and over doing something like dancing. There are sloppy black X’s on the backs of my hands but I’m inhaling a friend’s vodka soda in a dark corner anyway and I was downing nips in the line outside. I can’t grow a beard yet but I’m trying my hardest and none of my clothes fit. I could take my shirt off like so many of the men rolling their imperfect bodies on the dancefloor but this would be an admission. I am my body. I am afraid. I know too well what I want and what if no one gives it to me.

This is Machine, Boston’s one and only 18+ gay bar, may she rest in whatever peace is available to her. The venue closed a few years back but as someone who never took the fake ID route (too scared) it was one of the few places I could go to learn the ways of reckless hedonism, though I would spend more time studying the art than actually practicing it. To become the person I am now, I had to do a lot wrong and the worst of it was cooked up in spaces like this, these arenas of confident release where pleasure becomes simple and the only worry is where to get your next drink and is he looking at me and I hope they play that song we like to scream in our kitchen.

I trawled these places pretending to be the kind of person to whom these things came easily. They were bars and clubs and house parties and nights kissing boys with their feelings locked up in a distant dark attic and so very many basements because this is New England and we need dark places to hide our dark things. These hot, beer-soaked, concrete-walled spaces dot the city with bright red push pins like a map of ways to lose yourself entirely. The more I eked into those unknowns that had once excited me so, the more I struggled to understand what I wanted in the first place. Or was this actually all I wanted? To dissolve myself across so many nights until there was nothing left to salvage.

Inside the Battle Raging over Boston's Iconic Citgo Sign | Architectural Digest

I gave and received my first blowjobs in a Boston University dorm room nestled neatly beneath the iconic Citgo sign. I would treasure and boast this memory if it didn't also annoy me. I could construct an entirely different map of the places across this city where I lied to men and they lied to me and we disliked each other fundamentally but could not seem to cede one another’s company. A mutually assured torture. Such is gay living in a city.

The sudden abundance of queerness is a shocking saturation, from the quiet tidiness of a suburb to the raucous filth of a city. You might think this would be calming, that it might allow for some room to be choosy but after being starved of desire for seventeen years, I would give my life to any man who tossed a careless glance over his shoulder. I’d call it devotion. Fear by any other name…

This one man who lived under the Citgo sign was very good at twisting this devotion into free use of my desire. He is the owner of many of my first sexual experiences. From him, I learned the transactional nature of relationships, how one uses sly humor to lure in an onlooker, reveal nothing, and then convince them that their general want was always for him alone. I remember texting my best friend immediately following our first sexual encounter because there really was no moment to remain in, I desperately wanted to be miles away talking about it with someone else and forgetting the inadequacy he was carefully sowing through my body. But he told me I could stay if I wanted to so I would.

His bed folded out in the living room. He was obsessed with the 1975 and made me listen to Matty Healy in our underwear. He had a roommate who had a boyfriend who was best friends with a guy who would end up being my roommate for a single summer a couple years down the line. Cities will always confound you with their inescapable webs bringing you back to mistakes you forgot to bury.

I feel as though I was deceived / I never found love in the city

Despite a childhood spent telling anyone who asked that I was going to be an author, I came to the city entering into an environmental science program. I don’t regret this path. I hated academia and I hated clinical lab sciences but man, I freaking love the movements of nature. Studying in the environmental department guided me to some of my favorite places in the city: the Arnold Arboretum with its cacophony of tree diversity where I’ve taken everyone I’ve ever dated; the Alewife Nature Preserve, all tiny winding paths where I learned to identify trees by their funny-shaped leaves; all the way out on Deer Island where all the literal shit produced in the city is funneled and refined but you can turn your back on all that and just watch the salty ocean kiss the sky into forever.

My first day living in Boston, I set out on my own downtown in an early September heat, intent on getting lost. Which was easy because I knew nothing. I ended up in Post Office Square park, a gorgeous and really well-maintained space in the financial district. I spent hours there thinking I’d found this hidden gem no one else knew about. This is now the park directly outside of the office building I currently work in where every person and their nepotism-hire cousin eats their salad in the sun. I eat my salads there too, of course. I am not immune to knowing a place and making peace with it. But I do mourn that first day, bright-eyed me, little guy who thought the whole world might be laid out just for him. His heart was bigger than he knew.

On my lunch breaks at work, I like to take long walks downtown, set off in a random direction with the hope that I might end up somewhere new. Mostly, I find myself on streets I’d forgotten were laced with ghost memories, gut punches of simple nostalgia or complex grief and it seems I’ll always know everything forever. Every once in a while though, I might stumble down some strange stinking alley or a side street on the outskirts of Chinatown and find it completely foreign, entirely new. I assign it this new memory, the feeling of discovery at this timestamp on this sunny/cloudy/nondescript day so I might return sometime and touch its ghost again, on and on until all the city is my ghost.

Ten years in this one city is a monumental anniversary in itself but most importantly, it’s ten years of knowing the people who have loved me the best, shaped me most sweetly, steadied me so endlessly. The friendships I formed my freshman year of college are the ones that saved me. I chose life because these people (you know who you are) in this oftentimes desolate and hopeless place continued to show me what life can look like. Free and horrible and expensive and loving and heavy and grievous and beautiful, but most importantly worth it.

Up until my most recent living arrangement, I consistently shared a space with my best friend, my can’t ride (no license, never learned how to ride a bike gang gang) or die, my anti-kindred spirit, the platonic love of my life, some woman named Kelly. I would not have met her if I had not made the hapless decision to come to this godless sports city and I don’t envision a reality where I’d be alive without her. We share a language that simply cannot be transcribed. We speak exclusively through reflexive memory. The two of us have grown in tandem in ways that neither of us could have fathomed when seeking oblivion in those dark basements or sleeping with men who would have shrugged at our deaths.

In my worst moments, drunk on the deck of our first apartment where we’d throw these iconic but miserable house parties, I’d lean on the railing with her, look out at East Boston pulsing slowly beneath us and say I want to get out of this fucking city. For the longest time it was all I wanted. The vision of somewhere new, a fresh place to throw all of my old fear at. It was my way of isolating myself without ever having to move at all. Tell the people you love that you’d kill to be anywhere but where you are and keep your gaze on the skyline to avoid the sadness this bloats them with.

I still feel it sometimes. The impulsive, electric desire to flip the tables and make for somewhere far off where all my problems can get dressed up in fresh kicks so I can’t even tell they’re the same old problems. And I will leave this city someday. It groans and churns and continues to become something that wishes less and less to house me, and that is okay. I love-loathe Boston and the feeling is mutual. I think I will like it better once it’s in my rearview, lovely and distorted. But what I can no longer shirk and refuse to take for granted is the vessel that this city has been for a transformation so subtle it is only obvious in retrospect. I have taken new shape here, a shape that looks more like me than any other and it was formed in this stupid pressure cooker.

I should call my parents when I think of them / should tell my friends when I love them

So it was risen from the sea, so it shall return to the sea. The neat rows of gorgeous, impossibly expensive brick townhouses that make up Back Bay, the glittering glass monotony of Seaport, these neighborhoods dredged up from the ocean to make room for more land to sell will be the first casualties of the rising sea levels. Already, the king tides that swallow the old-stone harborwalk come more and more frequently and are treated like a funny oddity rather than inevitable catastrophe. This old city that holds so much pride in itself will seemingly give away its sprawling body indifferently.

Boston has grown on all these tiny contradictions. The oldest buildings in the country with their delicate and intricate, intentional architecture looming decrepit and historical next to the cheap, new age, universally despised apartment complexes devoid of all character and care. The very first subway system in the country with over 120 years of operation still can’t seem to make itself work. Our touted parks with their dried and brittle lawns begging for something more than observation. The big blue beating liberal heart shielding decades of grievous racism from the past into the future.

It’s been a revelatory home to me, contradictory boy. Lust-filled creature too fearful to act on his desire. Kindness-indebted loverboy hardened into a knee jerk mean spirit. Happy clown grinning from ear to ear at the joke of his own incurable self-inflicted melancholy. We were made for each other, you see? To highlight one another’s woes and an unwillingness to purge ourselves of them. Stubborn entities who will drown in the thing they were born from.

A cute metaphor that 17, 18, 19 year old me would have loved, but it turns out I’m not a city. I’m a man and I can only stare in the mirror for so long before deciding not to punch the glass. I fuck the contradictions. I speak my fear and the shape of me changes.

NOAA to release annual and monthly high tide flooding outlooks | National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — i sit here at least once a week on my lunch break. usually with less water

How to boil ten years down into so many words? I once got bedbugs so bad my skin was made into a map of a tiny nation’s hunger. A pretty frat boy put me on a washing machine, spread my legs apart and kissed me like something capable of being desired. In front of the Old Navy, a lost man threatened to gut me for being in the same place as him. We got high on the floor and thought ourselves the first to do it. He was embarrassed to be caught wanting me. You had a panic attack in our kitchen. She moved away forever. I made a mess of my mind and then tidied it up smoking cigarettes on a roof watching planes land after midnight like every other twenty-something.

I’ve moved unsteadily toward my thirties under the impression that I have wasted my youth, handed it over to the reaper that is depression and shame and hatred of the one life I’ve been given. But god damn, didn’t I actually do it? Didn’t I play around in the mess? Didn’t I get hurt and hurt others the way you’re supposed to? Didn’t I get fucked like a good boy? Didn’t I invent all of these terrible realities I must now make peace with? That’s the American Dream of youth, ain’t it?

I am different. Ten years will make you different. Did you know this? I am a kinder person than I once was. I sank into alcoholism and then got sober and, uncomfortably, I am stronger for it. I built and dismantled arrays of love in a jagged roughhewn map of my heart. I wore myself to the bone at a job I hated. I gave myself to unworthy men and took from men who were willing to give. I called myself a writer again. I learned to ride the broken subway with my head, heart, knees and feet. I am imperfect and this ugly city is a mirror. Call it Boston call it beantown call it the real windy city call it home—it is where I am.