Two Performances at Once

            This is my 61st date of the summer. We’re in a Mexican restaurant. A half-full—or half-empty—margarita pitcher sits between us, but I only sip on my empty water glass that’s just ice to try to erase that sugary dryness on my tongue.

I’m sweating—not out of nervousness, of course. “AC broken. Lo siento,” the sign on the front door read, its edges warped from water. We were too lazy to think of another restaurant, but now, as sweat pools under my arms, I regret it. All the windows are open. Every time a breeze blows through, we sigh. Sighs that border on moans, laced with pleasure.

            He stayed longer than I imagined. At 26, my hair is more gray than black. Wrinkles and scars are etched into my face. I never fully escaped my teenage acne, acne that I still pick at and pop, the temptation too hard to resist. My parents never paid for my orthodontic work, so my teeth go in every direction. Dandruff covers my scalp, though I’ve tried every possible combination of shampoo and conditioner available—even ordering products unavailable in the United States.

I’m fat, too. Sometimes, I squeeze the rolls of my skin into different faces, and I give them different voices. In the gay community’s beauty standards, I may as well be a walking corpse in terms of my fuckability.

            How do I get so many matches then? Well, I paid for my photos to be professionally edited. On her website, she said she Facetuned for celebrities. She didn’t list any celebrity names, though. Confidential, I figured, or she could have just been full of shit. Either way, they turned out good. Too good. Fifty bucks a photo. I ordered six, but only use five on my profile.

            “Danny?” my dates always ask when they arrive, unsure. Squinting their eyes, looking for traces of the man they matched with. Some don’t even sit down. They just leave. Some cuss me out, and it becomes this whole melodramatic soap opera, everyone in the restaurant stopping their conversations and turning their heads. Others laugh, as if I’m playing a prank on them. I am the punchline. About sixty percent stay; the ones who are too nice or desperate to leave.

            I love first dates. They are, in a way, a performance:

            Spotlight on center stage. A booth tucked in a corner of a Mexican restaurant. Two

men, Danny and his date—the date a lot more attractive—sit and laugh. And smile. They look happy. Two separate checks lay at the table’s edge, one stained with salsa. Danny keeps sipping his empty water glass, then waves it in the air, hoping his waiter will see it.

Date

Sorry, I feel like I’ve been rambling. It’s been a shitty week. Tell me more about you. (Smiles.)

            I have mastered my first-date stories. Every gesture, every inflection, every pause, is planned. I am a performer.

            I always bring up my father; it feels like a necessity. How he was on prednisone all throughout my childhood for his ulcerative colitis. How a scream was always suspended in the back of his throat. My hiding place: a gap between where our piano met the wall, making my tiny body even smaller. How he always kept the house lights off—even at night. To save electricity, he said, so my childhood home was full of lamp-lit shadows.

Danny

Sometimes, he let me turn the kitchen light on. My eyes were always adjusted to darkness.

My father was not a man prepared to see our home lit. (Pause.) For both of us, it made it easier to hide. (Looks down at the table.)

Date

(Looks down at his phone. There is no notification there.) I’m sorry. My friend just texted me. She’s going through a hard time right now.

Danny

It’s okay. (Smiles, but the smile is just lip.) Go ahead.

Date

Appreciate it. I’ll see you around! (Places his cash on his salsa-stained check. Wipes his sweaty forehead. Leaves without looking back.)

            A week later, I text him to see when’s another time we can meet. Another week passes without a response. When I open up the dating app again, I see that he’s unmatched me.

***

            In a crowded karaoke bar, a woman sings “Movies” by Weyes Blood. She is a textbook butch: crewcut, tattoo arm sleeves, septum piercing, and only one earring. I’ve never heard the song before, but I add it to my playlist as she sings with a longing only captured by failed artists. I, a failed artist who now works in a cubicle, can attest.

            My date hasn’t left yet, I think, because the lights are so dim. Bars are my favorite places to meet for this very reason. Neither of us plan on singing. We both cited tone-deafness, but I lied. My shower performances are Grammy-worthy. I’m just too shy. I already have my audience; dates are my one-man show:

            Lights up on a crowded karaoke bar. The karaoke performer sings “Movies” by Weyes

Blood. “Making love to a counterfeit / Why did so many / Get a rise out of me?” Date

sips a vodka cranberry. Danny sips what looks like a beer, but is actually a cider. They

have to shout to be heard. They stop talking frequently, listening to the karaoke singers.

Whether the silence is comfortable or awkward is anyone’s guess.

Date

What’s your craziest dating story?

Dating history! Yes! I’ve memorized that script. My first official boyfriend: a transfer student for the semester, so a deadline hung over our relationship. I told myself to not get too attached; I failed. But we didn’t last the whole semester. Outside one of the city’s gay bars, the air thick with cigarette smoke and smoke from the bar’s fog machine, we sat on a cement stump in the alley. Another man offered up his vape. The man inhaled, first, then leaned in towards my boyfriend, who then opened his mouth—just slightly—before fully opening himself to this stranger, their lips locking, the smoke blowing inside.

Danny

That’s what I remember most: how tight their lips were, that not a single strand of smoke escaped. Only when I burst into tears did he seem to realize he did anything wrong.

            Spotlight. The bar’s lights turn on. A bartender shouts that it’s closing time.

            The lights are too bright. I have to squint. My date, under this new harsh lighting, looks me up and down. He frowns.

Date

(Without sympathy) Damn, that sucks. Well, this was fun!

            He waves his arms in the air frantically, trying to get the bartender’s attention, trying to

get the hell out of here as soon as possible. The bartender returns with his check, and

Date scribbles his signature that is just sloppy lines.

Date

Have a good rest of your night. See ya! (Puts on his rain jacket. Exits.)

            I chug my cider. Close my tab. We could’ve walked out to the parking lot together, at least. The bar’s closed anyway. The second he saw me under the bright lighting, he couldn’t keep his act up any longer.

***

            We embody a first-date cliché: a picnic on a beach. Yet it’s nice to pretend I’m part of a cliché every once in a while; that my life could be so overdone and bland. The city’s skyscrapers rise behind us. Seagulls strut across the beach, and if this were a scene in a play, I imagine the seagulls as people dressed up as seagulls. Real seagulls, surely, would be out of budget—or too hard to handle. It’d be like some Little Mermaid shit. They keep trying to eat our charcuterie board, and we keep shooing them away.

We share a bottle of wine he brought that tastes like rotten fruit, but the buzz is nice. First dates are always better with alcohol, in case you live under a fucking rock and didn’t already know that. Us both being rule followers, we poured the bottle into tumblers so we didn’t get caught by the beach police.

Date

Okay. Now that I’ve just trauma dumped, it’s only fair that you go next.

Danny

What are your thoughts on haunted houses?

            My parents, as a child, always told me to ignore the abandoned house at the end of our street. Shattered windows. Loose, hanging, and collapsed gutters. A lawn overrun by untrimmed grass and weeds. Other teens in the neighborhood, I knew, snuck in there to drink, smoke, or have sex. When riding my bike around our block, I always went extra slow past the haunted house. Every so often—but only during the day—I peeked inside to see the peeling paint, the cockroaches and cobwebs, the empty beer cans, a stained mattress shoved in a corner, a couch coated in a thick layer of dust and grime. The house seemed to draw me to it, its front resembling a mouth, the cliché that it would swallow me whole. It will, yes. But even worse: it spit me back out.

Date

Let me guess, you went inside when you weren’t supposed to.

Danny

Yes, but not now. Later. Someone moved in, but that didn’t make it any less haunted.

Haunted houses were meant to stay abandoned. So it was a shock when, as I rode my bike around our street, I saw a U-Haul parked in the haunted house’s driveway. A man carried a box from the back of the U-Haul and set it down in the garage. I slowed my bike down until I stopped, transfixed. Everything about him was sharp: his jaw, his eyes, his haircut. Pristine, I think now, but obviously didn’t know the word then. Jewelry glinted around his body: a golden chain, silver rings, diamond stud earrings. As he moved boxes, I remember his muscles reacting: popping biceps, the veins of his forearms like the roots of a tree.

He spotted me, and I hurried to start pedaling again, but my feet missed the pedal and my bike, refusing to move, toppled sideways. The man set down his box, then ran over to me. “Are you okay?” he asked, his deep voice giving me goosebumps. There was pain, sure, some scrapes, but the rush of lust drowned all that out. He put his big hands around my body to help me up. Yes, touches can be electric, I learned.

“Thank you,” I said, then biked away. Turning around, I saw him smiling and waving.

            A seagull manages to grab a piece of cheese; it doesn’t run away with it, though. It stays,

wondering why the men aren’t chasing after it, like a dog waiting to get in trouble.

Date

Do you even want the rest?

Danny

No. Not really.

            They then hold the charcuterie board up: an offering. All the seagulls, a rush of chaos,

swarm to get a bite, their wings all flapping in unison, like some migration, like a movie.

In an instant, the board is picked clean, only crumbs left.

And as I watch the seagulls eagerly devour our offering, I think about how we’re not even supposed to give birds human food, that one claim that rocked the world: feeding ducks bread can kill them. And yet, people still feed them anyway. A necessary habit.

Date

Your haunted house story. Tell me more.

            And this is when I know I have him.

            Our new neighbor, Theo, delivered cookies to our door. My mother didn’t invite him inside, as she never did with surprise visitors, saying the house was a perpetual mess. Though she yelled for my father and I to come to the door to meet him. Hesitant, I lurked behind my mother, in her shadow, even though I was taller than her by then. My father shook Theo’s hand, and even smiled. Crazy how much attraction disarms people. “And this is my son, Daniel. He just started high school,” my mother said, pushing me into the spotlight in front of her. We shook hands, and he squeezed mine—hard: a gesture lost to everyone but us; our first of many secrets.

“Nice to meet you,” he said, his eyes glittering just as much as his jewelry.

            The sun sets, our date coming to a close, as the beach’s not open after dark, and we’re rule followers, remember? As we roll up our blanket, pack away our things, and walk back to our cars, he says that I hope to see you soon, and with the hundreds—if not thousands—of dates I’ve been on, I can tell that, this time, my date is actually telling the truth.

***

            The glorious second date. A hard achievement to reach. I hope I don’t go off-script.

            Lights up on a bowling alley. Spotlight on a single lane as the other lanes fade to

darkness. Date keeps getting strikes, Danny gutters.

Date

Do you want me to put the bumpers up?

Danny

No. I am not a child. I gotta get better the hard way.

Date
(Laughs.) Okay. Just let me know. (Gets another strike.)

Danny

How the hell are you so good?

Date

I love bowling. (Danny bursts out laughing.) What? What’s so funny? It’s true! My dad was a professional bowler back in the day. I take all my dates here.

Gradually, the spotlight grows bigger and bigger, revealing one lane at a time. In each of

the lanes, people are happy. A couple sits on each other’s laps, making out. Two kids see

how many times they can hit their bumpers and jump in circles. A group of friends tell a

joke, and they all can’t stop laughing.

Date

So tell me more. About Theo.

Danny

Right. Where did we leave off?

Date

The cookies.

I started riding my bike around our block three or four times a week that summer, hoping to see Theo. Eventually, I did. He walked outside wearing a tank top and shorts that left little of him to imagination. “Danny, hey! Can you help me move my couch real quick?” I nodded, unable to imagine him incapable of lifting something. Abandoning my bike like trash on the curb, I wondered how he knew I preferred to be called Danny when my mom introduced me as Daniel.

As he led me inside, I gawked at the haunted house’s transformation: clean hardwood floors, shining marble countertops, even a chandelier in the foyer, my reflection distorted within the glass. Theo explained how he wanted to put a TV instead where the couch was. “I could have dragged the couch myself, but I didn’t want to scrape the hardwood floors.” His mix of masculinity and femininity disoriented me. Throughout my entire life, I’d never heard a man talk about scraping hardwood floors.

“Three. Two. One. Lift!” He grunted as we moved the couch, but it must have been effortless for him, surely. “Wooo,” he exhaled when we set it down. Walking over to me, he put his hand on my shoulder. This close, I knew he must have just been doing yardwork, as he smelled like grass and mulch.

“Would you mind giving me your number? In case I need help moving furniture again.” As if possessed, my hand rushed to reach into my pocket and hand over my phone. When he put in his phone number, he even took a contact photo, right then and there, his skin glowing more than sweating, which is what everybody says, but for him it was actually true, I see the picture so clearly, I masturbated to it almost every night, his blond hair ruffled, his half-smile, a smirk with no teeth.

“Here’s something for your help,” he said, pulling out a crumpled ten-dollar bill from his pocket. He didn’t wait for me to reach out my hand, but instead grabbed my fist and pulled back my fingers one at a time, like a flower blooming, and placed the money into my palm. “Our secret,” he said, smiling, closing my fingers again, one at a time.

Danny

After Theo gave me his number, I was invited to his house almost every night. We stayed up late playing video games. My parents didn’t care. My mom was preoccupied with her depression and my dad with his alcohol. In fact, Theo ate dinner with us sometimes. Helped us cook. Brought over groceries when all we had in our fridge was a carton of eggs, lunch meat, sliced cheese—but never any milk for my cereal, so I often used coffee creamer. It was everything I could have hoped for: spending this much time with him. As time passed, I stopped thinking there was a catch. (Pause.) Until there was.

***

            The final act. Two performances at once. 

            Lights up on a bedroom. Danny and Date enter, hand-in-hand. They remove each other’s

clothes.

The cliché is that we’re hungry for each other, our bodies compared to food.

Once they’re naked, the lights dim.

Danny

He texted me to come to his house. The front door was unlocked, as usual. When I stepped inside, all the lights were off, but because I was so used to darkness in my home, I didn’t think anything of it here. “Theo?” I asked. “Downstairs,” he said. Good. Another normal night playing video games in his basement. So why did everything feel so strange?

Classical musical plays. Tchaikovsky’s “Pas de Deux.” The men’s bodies are hidden

in shadow, but their shapes are visible as they thrust, spit, slap, moan. They yell out words people only say when they’re fucking; it is a language that, outside of that space,

feels ridiculous.

Theo’s basement. Danny tries to turn on the light switch, but it doesn’t work. The TV is

on, but it’s all static.

After they finished, they lay in bed. One does not lay on the other’s chest, but instead they

both face each other, lying on their sides. Moonlight finds the cracks in the blinds.

Danny

“Come sit,” Theo said, patting the couch cushion next to him. I sat. Closer, even in the darkness, I could tell something was off. His skin was peeling, almost. A rotting smell filled the space. He smiled, and his teeth were yellow, decayed. His hair was patchy and pubic-like. “I feel like you don’t know how attractive you are,” he said. He put his hand on my knee. His hand was covered in those dark spots old people have. (Starts crying.)

Date

(Wiping the tears from Danny’s cheek.) What’s wrong? What’s wrong? What’s wrong?

Danny

Theo transformed then. The bottom of his jaw popped off; it rolled across the carpet. It allowed for his mouth to open wide, and wider, and wider, until it became the chasm of a cave, and something slivered out, like a black leech, and then the black leech’s mouth opened, and a mosquito-like needle jutted out until it made contact with my neck, and it felt like getting a flu shot, the sensation of something going inside your blood, not blood getting taken away, that dull ache, and Theo moaned. I don’t remember if I screamed. I don’t think I did. Just sat there, lifeless, as Theo feasted.

Date

What the fuck? Is this real?

Danny

(With urgency.) Let me finish. I have to finish. When he pulled away, Theo looked like his usual self. Actually, he looked even more beautiful than the first time I met him. “That’s all I need from you,” he said as the leech retracted back into his mouth. He reached down to grab his jaw and popped it back into place. “Just about once or twice a month. Can you do that for me? It’s a very big help. I wouldn’t survive without it.” I wish I could say I hesitated. That I thought it over. Perhaps asked what it would cost me. But I didn’t have to think: yes, yes, yes, yes. He hugged me, tight, said thank you, thank you, thank you so much, and I forgot about the monster that just crawled out of him.

Theo, who has been waiting in Danny’s bedroom closet, steps out. Theo’s jaw pops off

and hits the bedroom floor with a smack, which causes Date to scream.

This is not the round two he was hoping for, I’m sure.

“Pas de Deux” still plays. Theo’s leech juts out and inserts into the date’s neck, who then

thrashes back and forth, white foam starts spewing out of his mouth, his eyes become

pools of white as the irises roll to the back of his head.

Danny

(While Date continues gasping and thrashing.) I’m sorry. I wish it could’ve kept being me.

I stand in the room’s corner, staring out at the shining city lights, unable to look at what’s happening, waiting for the final curtain.

Blackout.