First Responders

    Renowned historian and man-of-words, Sir Horace Walpole, once said, “The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think”. I can’t help but feel those words resonate with me as I drive home from The Gallerie. Tonight began like any other night, with the obvious exception that I was especially bored. I had heard about The Gallerie on several gay forums, but had never had the desire to actually go. Well, that is, until tonight.
   I shower, make myself look presentable, and strike a few sexy faces in the mirror. I look good...I think. Do I? Well fuck, now i don’t know. I suppose the best I can do is brush my teeth...again. And apply some deodorant...again. I take a deep breath. I can do this. I’m an adult, dammit. It’s a rite of passage. Every gay guy has to do this at least once.
   I grab my keys, don my leather jacket, and walk outside. The January air is crisp and surprisingly warm. I walk to the end of my driveway, spinning my key-karabiner on my fingers as I walk towards Rocinante, my ghetto-steed. She’s a 1998 saturn something-or-other, named for Don Quixote’s horse, serving as a constant reminder to dream impossible dreams. She has a quarter-panel missing, chipping black paint, a sub-woofer in her trunk that shakes the street as we drive, and her name written proudly in duct tape on her spoiler. Together, we sally forth, bound for gay adventures. Adventures which, according to google maps, should occur in about twenty minutes in current traffic.
   We arrive. I smell The Gallerie before I see it. It smells like a hospital, overly-sanitized and steamy. I turn the corner and open the door. Electronic Dance Music and an overweight twenty-something greet me upon my entrance. Waiting at the counter is an older man with a paperboy hat and a curly mustache. He wears a leather vest and has a lollipop in his mouth. I give the man at the counter my ID to prove my age, and hand him seven dollars for a locker. He lets me in and the smell intensifies, the acrid aroma slightly stinging my nostrils. “It’s my first time here,” I say with a sniffle, “what’s the deal?”
   The man who rang me up looks me right in the eye and regales me. “Alright, so here’s the deal. The lockers are to your left. Go in, get naked, put this towel on and put your clothes in your locker. Keep your key close.” He hands me a key strung on an elastic band. “Just put it around your arm and keep it there.” I nod, already feeling overwhelmed. “Now, if you happen to lose your key and need to get into your locker, it’s a fifteen dollar charge. If you can’t pay the fee, we’ll cut your penis off.” I laugh, not sure if he’s serious or not, and definitely not ready to find out. “As long as you put it in a nice mason jar, I won’t mind,” I say.
   He laughs, and then his smile immediately fades and his face goes right back to business. “Now, as for the facility itself, you’ll find a steam room down the hall, a hot tub past the steam room, and showers and a sauna past that. Outside, we’ve got a patio with another hot tub, and a nice place to have a smoke if you’re into that sort of thing. Now downstairs is where the real fun happens.” He raises his eyebrows, smiles, and forms his hands into the universal sign for sex. “We’ve got thirty six screens playing everything your heart desires, a dungeon room, a sling room, and even a suspended bed for some group play. Now get naked, get in there, and have some fun.”
   I take my towel, strap my key to my shoulder, and walk into the locker room. Thus far, this adventure has been pretty successful. I walk down the hall and notice something strange...both walls have holes on various levels. The logical part of my mind assumes that the holes are an aesthetic choice, but the dirty part quietly smiles in the back of my head. I wait. I absorb. I watch.
   A man walks up to one of the holes, makes a kissing noise with his lips, and a penis comes through it and directly into his mouth. My thoughts confirmed, I continue down the hall. Next stop: the steam room.
   I enter the steam room, and my glasses immediately fog up. I take them off and squint through the haze. I take a seat and feel myself being watched. Looking around, I see an older man with his gaze fixed upon me. He looks to be in his mid-fifties, thinning salt-and-pepper hair, and a scar that snakes its way up the left part of his chest. “Hey boy,” he says, opening his towel “you like what you see?” I shake my head vigorously and exit the steam room. Sufficiently warmed up and aware of what I’ve gotten myself into, I steel myself to go down those stairs.
   I crack each of my knuckles as I walk over to the staircase, a tick I’ve developed in moments of apprehension. I round the corner and the smell hits me like a brick wall. For as sanitary and clean as the upstairs smelled, the basement’s pungent aroma is the complete antithesis. It smells like sweat, rubber, cheap lubricant, and there’s just a hint of burnt hair permeating the air. With each descending step I take into the darkness, my eyes adjust more and more. Once on the floor, I feel something brush through my hair. I look up and see that it’s a chain dangling from the ceiling. I follow it to its source, a suspended mattress with a red leather covering. At least, I think it’s red. There are red lights all around the ceiling of the basement, obviously in place to preserve the night vision of the gentlemen who decide to venture into these catacombs of sexual deviancy. The basement is laid out like a maze, with narrow hallways and sharp turns at the ends of short corridors. Every path leads to every other path, it seems. There are no dead ends, no places to be cornered, yet I feel claustrophobic.
   I sit down in what I later learned is called the group room. It’s the room that all of the hallways branch out from, or perhaps the room they all lead to, like the central courtyard of an overly-simplified maze, with the suspended bed in the center representing the tiny red star on a map. I suppose that sooner or later, all encounters in here lead to the suspended rectangle before me. I sit and wait. I watch the men in the room move around and exchange glances with one another. They range from their mid-thirties all the way up. It’s abundantly clear that I’m the youngest one here, which several men take note of. I feel self-conscious, and I stir in my own skin.
   “I see you starin’ at that bed, dude. You wanna put it to good use?” He’s the youngest-looking guy I’ve seen in here so far. My estimation in the shitty red-lighting puts him at about twenty-two. Frankly, I feel relief at interacting with someone who looks like he was born in the nineties. We maintain eye contact. He smiles. I wink. He opens his towel. He is an absolute work of art. Deep ridges of muscle connected to perfectly formed collar bones all topped with a mischievous smile and lusting eyes. The best part of him is: he wants me. Those eyes are filled with lust for me. For the first time all night, I feel neither violated nor self-conscious. My logical mind and my dirty mind agree on one thing: I came here to indulge.

I indulge.

   We pick our towels up off of the floor. A group of men has gathered to watch. As I re-tie my towel around my waist, an older man says “well half of that was fun to watch,” looking at me, disgusted. This jealous old man can’t touch my glory. I smile, fix my hair, and enter the maze.
   Ascending into the light, the reality of what I’ve just done hits me along with the overly-sanitized scent. I realize the difference between having sex and making love. What I’ve just done was sex. There was no love, no intimacy, no emotion. Pure lust. As amazing, exhilarating, and intense as it was...it was just sex. Meaningless sex. I didn’t even know his name.
   Suddenly, I feel dirty. I feel wrong. I feel hyper-aware of myself and my present situation. I feel gross. This isn’t who I am. This isn’t what I do. As glorious as I felt leaving that red-lit maze, I now feel some strange mix of shame, regret, and self-loathing.
   I return to locker forty-seven and get dressed. I walk to the counter to turn my towel in. The man at the counter looks me up and down, “So, did you have a good time? You look tuckered out.”
   I nod absentmindedly, occupied by the existential crisis happening in my head. He smiles, and this time his eyes smile with him. He’s happy with another satisfied customer. I return my towel and key.
   I walk to Rocinante. She’s waited this whole time. My silent sidekick. My steed. Her carpet interior greets me like the friend she is. No judgement from her. She rumbles happily, ready to sally forth once more. What she doesn’t know is that we’ve had enough adventure for one night. I begin the drive home. I should be there in about twenty minutes. Approaching the intersection of Federal and Florida, there’s a huge line of cars. I see camera flashes out of passenger-side windows. What’s going on?
   As I move farther forward, the scene comes into view. There are no police or firefighters yet. The overturned car is in full view, illuminated by lampposts in the parking lot, as is the body of the woman involved in the crash. The passenger side of her car is on the ground and the driver’s side is in the air. Her torso dangles out of the car, and blood has already formed a black puddle beneath her lifeless body. Suddenly, it all hits me at once.
   The last person I talked to in-person was a guy in a leather vest who worked at a bathhouse towel-counter. The last person I ever had any kind of sexual interaction with was some nameless Adonis. There is a dead body less than twenty meters away from me, and all I can think about is what I’ve just done in the basement of a nameless building in downtown Denver. I realize that if Rocinante had been the overturned one in that parking lot, I wouldn’t be able to remark on my final hours as proud ones. What did she do in her last hours? Was she drunk? Was she texting? What was her car’s name?
   The world is a tragedy for those who feel and a comedy for those who think. So what should I think? What should I feel? Tragic or comic?
   Rocinante and I pull forward, leaving behind the questions, the self-loathing, and the regret. Silencing the internal monologue and clearing the battlefield in my mind, I force myself to leave it all behind. They fade into my rear-view mirror. Like the lights and sirens of the first responders for yet another unexceptional accident on an otherwise unremarkable street corner.