Boston Boys Club

by Johnny Diaz

Genres: LGBT Gay

Synopsis

Flanked by gorgeous brick row houses in the heart of Boston's South End, the Club Café is a bar where everybody knows your name--and who you slept with last. Every night men like Tommy Perez, Rico DiMio, and Kyle Andrews take their place among the glistening crowd sporting chest-defining shirts and lots of smooth, tanned skin, sizing up the regulars and the new blood while TV monitors blare Beyoncé and Missy Elliott. For Tommy, Thursdays at the Club Café in the company of his wingman Rico and a Skinny Black Bitch (vodka and Diet Coke) are unmissable. Recently relocated from Miami to Boston to take a reporting job at The Boston Daily, Tommy is finding it hard to break away from his tight-knit Cuban family, but his homesickness goes into rapid remission when he meets Mikey, a blue-eyed, boyish guidance counselor from Cape Cod. Smart, funny, and wicked cute, Mikey is perfect boyfriend material. . .until his drinking leads Tommy to suspect that he's got some issues of his own. Rico--a tough-talking, Italian-American accountant with a gamma ray smile and mournful green eyes that hint at a past he'll admit to no one--is sure Mikey is bad news, but to Rico any relationship that lasts longer than three hours sounds like bad news. Then there's Kyle, the lean, preening model and former reality show star who makes a red-carpet entrance into the CC every Thursday as if a swarm of cameras still follows his every move, but whose real life is about to take a dramatic turn he never anticipated. Over the course of one unforgettable year, Tommy is forced to rethink everything he's ever believed about life, lust, and love. And in the Club Café, a place filled with endless possibilities--of stumbling upon the perfect partner, the perfect story idea, or just a play buddy for the night--Tommy might finally discover the person he was meant to be. "Make way for the boys of summer! Johnny Diaz has written a sexy beach-read romp you won't be able to put down." --William J. Mann, author of Where the Boys Are and All American Boy

Release date: May 1, 2007

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 308

Sample

Another chilly night falls on Boston and the mercury is down to 30 degrees. Damn the thermometer! It’s not too frigid to go to Club Café in the heart of the city’s gay ghetto.

When I say ghetto, I mean that only in the most positive sense. The South End neighborhood is full of character and charm. Streets are lined with shoulder-to-shoulder three-story brick row houses, rounded with English-style bow fronts. First-floor windows sit a few feet from street level and the decorative cobblestone boulevards. Rose and orange flowers burst from the windowsills during warmer months. And there are Volkswagen Jettas, Beetles, and Mini Coopers parked on streets that have equally gay-sounding names such as Berkeley, Clarendon, and Upton. It’s basically a gay utopia.

As twilight beckons on this city on a hill, I brave the cold in hot pursuit of the man-traffic on Columbus Avenue. Guys sport sleeveless shirts and chest-defining T-shirts underneath American Eagle wool coats and Gap corduroy jean jackets. The top layers come off as soon as they hit the lonely coat check dude and drop a buck or spare change in his tip box. Then they walk around the club showing off smooth, tanned skin as if it’s summer, even though it’s a bone-chilling November night outside.

Not me, the more conservative (and cheap) one. I take off my coat and leave on the Nautica red hoodie I bought on sale at Costco. (What isn’t on sale there?) It’s not that I’m ashamed of my body. I have it; I just don’t necessarily think I need to flaunt it like Lil’ Kim.

Thursday night is the busiest gay night here. An armada of men stand around creating a logjam of testosterone, in this bar/lounge that also serves a gay gym downstairs. You come here depending on what kind of workout you are looking for.

It’s easy to think that this place has some kind of addictive magic. Each week guys come to drink, mingle, drink, cruise, drink some more, and perhaps, find manpanionship, a queer peer, a date, a potential partner/lover/spouse or whatever boyfriends are called these days, or just a play buddy for the night. No matter how often these guys see each other in the same spot, leaning at the edge of the bar, lingering around the coat check or S&Ming (standing and modeling, folks) under the TV monitors that blare Britney, Madonna, or the Wonder Woman theme song megamix, they never seem to tire of it. They never get sick of seeing the same perfectly shaved faces with mostly blue or green eyes and Salon Selectives hair, sipping their light Sam Adams or Corona beers or nursing glowing green Apple Martinis.

My reason for coming back is simple. After three Thursdays of coming here, chances are everyone will know your name as if you were in Cheers. But call this one Queers, where everyone knows with whom you last slept. So I try not to overdo it, at least the going-out part. Well, I try. Oh, and let’s not forget our lady friends. They’re here, too, in leather and denim jackets, jeans and winter boots. A small number wears skirts and high heels. But we men outnumber them by at least four to one. To the men, I say, You go girls!

Club Café is a perpetual rerun episode of Same Sex in the City. Each season or college semester brings a crop of new faces. So you never know whom you will meet. That unknown, an optimistic sense of possibility of meeting “someone,” is what keeps guys revolving through these doors week after week, winter, spring, summer, fall, rain or snow. But even the ones who do meet that someone still can’t seem to pull themselves away from Club Café.

“Howdy, Tommy Boy! What’s up with you? I haven’t seen you since what, last Thursday,” says Rico as he walks in through the front glass, snow-stained doors that face Columbus Avenue. Rico fits the stereotype of the sexy, macho Italian to a well-groomed T. He’s got thinning wisps of jet-black hair combed down Caesar cut style and eyes that easily match the green of the Italian flag.

Tommy is my nickname, short for Tomas, as in the Spanish pronunciation. It sounds like the Spanish word toma as in “drink,” so I think I was appropriately named. Yeah, I’m the Cuban transplant to Boston from Cuba North, also known as Miami. Although if you think about it, Miami really is a piece of Cuba injected into the United States—but more on that later.

Just as I am proud of my Cuban heritage (my Jeep Wrangler’s license plate reads QBAN) so is Rico of his family’s lineage. The tattoo on his bulging right shoulder bears the design of a sailing Italian flag. It looks good with his blue T-shirt that reads ITALIAN STALLION. Rico is that kind of patriotic. This is Boston, after all, where everyone’s proud of where they came from, especially the native Bostonians. But us newcomers have plenty of pride in our roots, too. Some people hate it, but I like that people here cling to their identities. Like the Puritans who first arrived here centuries ago, Boston today remains a city of immigrants. It’s a revolving door of newcomers, including me. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

“Doing really well, Rico. Just hella good,” I say as he stands by the coat check, peels off his coat, and unveils his guns—those killer biceps that frame his sleeveless blue T-shirt. Rico’s body is hard, sanded, and sculpted like the sand dunes in Provincetown. The great body is the result of his boxing hobby, which he says is stress-release from his accounting job in the financial district. Boxing is great for cardio, he always says, but I’ll have to take his word for it. I’m a writer, not a fighter. Picture a more rugged and built Freddie Prinze Jr. before he went crazy-blond for the two Scooby Doo movies and that’s Rico.

“Good to see you, dude,” Rico says, handing his coat to the coat check dude and then giving me one of his rib-choking bear hugs that literally lift me off my feet.

“Want a drink, dudette? Let me guess, the usual, right?” Rico offers.

Vodka with Diet Coke, aka Skinny Black Bitch, is my tonic. I didn’t name it; that’s what the bartenders here tell me it’s called. A black bitch is vodka with regular Coke and the former is all I order. Blame my predictability on my mild OCD—the one in the medical books. I always order the same thing at restaurants and bars and I get stuck in ruts like coming to Club Café on Thursdays after 10 P.M. (Just don’t call me on Friday nights when Dateline and 20/20 are on the tube.) But some say I have another kind of OCD: Obsessive Cuban Disorder, since I manage to lace my everyday conversations with Cuban references or inject them into my feature stories. Plus, I love our Miami hometown girl Gloria Estefan.

But Beantown keeps growing on me. Although there aren’t many Cuban-Americans here, I always wanted to experience the seasons besides summer, write for The Boston Daily, and get in touch with my inner New Englander. I traded sopa de pollo (chicken soup) for clam chowdah. And all the buildings here have stories to tell. Being in Boston is like living in an urban museum. With a walk or a jog, you pass buildings from different centuries, each with a unique history and sometimes connected to a famous or infamous figure. Miami, my hot endless summer for twenty-nine years, looks like it was just unpacked out of a box on CBS’s CSI: Miami.

Rico and I are about the same height, five-feet-ten, and I have to say that the physical similarities end about there. I’ve got the tumble of dark brown curls and thick black eyebrows like two sculpted awnings that umbrella my Cuban coffee-bean eyes. People say I look a lot like a skinnier Ethan, the guy on Survivor who won the $1 million a few years ago and who plays soccer. I can see why people have told me that. Hey, I’m just glad that people don’t get me confused with the other Survivor winner, you know, the fat gay naked guy who has been fighting the IRS for not paying taxes on his winnings.

“Any cute guys tonight?” Rico asks as I recover from his bear hug with a d-e-e-p breath.

We make our way deeper into Club Café, also fondly known as Café SoGay, which is a restaurant in the front, with a lounge and bar in back. We pass a row of guys, spectators in a parade, as they stand along the walls of each room.

Another crush of younger guys, sporting American Eagle T-shirts, Old Navy hoods, blue jeans, and baseball caps tilted to the side, plop themselves in the middle of the room, like an island of youth. Like piranhas, the older guys—awkward in youthful garb that doesn’t quite disguise the fact that the salt in their hair pours out more than the pepper—circle around and watch their potential gay prey. Destiny’s Child pops up on the monitor and Beyoncé, Kelly, and Michelle’s voices ricochet off the mirrored walls behind each bartender’s station.

“Can you keep up baby boy? Make me lose my breath…” the trio harmonizes.

“Yeah, there are some Twinks here and some new faces. Like Mary J. Blige says, let’s go percolate around the club,” I tell Rico. (For the uninitiated, Twinks are late-teen or early-twentysomething gay guys who are uniformly thin, wear tight A&F shirts, and who are new to the whole gay bar scene. They look like any one of the boyish, teenage hunks you’d find on The CW network, formerly The WB and UPN.)

Rico flashes his smile as he passes each guy, almost like a Miss Little Italy would when greeting her public. His smile can be compared to a gamma ray. When he smiles, which he does often, you need sunglasses to protect your eyes. It’s that bright. He knows his smile is his trademark and he flashes it often, almost like a reflex, in a Tom Cruise sort of way. It’s how he meets guys. He smiles and they come, in more ways than one. Problem is you never know what Rico’s thinking when he smiles. Whether he thinks you’re an asshole, hates what you’re wearing, or doesn’t exactly get what you’re trying to say, the smile appears. It’s mischievous like a Cheshire cat. Even at funerals, the smile makes a cameo appearance. And he gets away with it.

When Rico doesn’t smile, he has mournful eyes that seem to harbor something deep and dark. His smile seems to mask some sort of pain, some longing. I can only guess because he’d never talk to me about such things. He can be inaccessible emotionally. We basically talk about guys and how to cut corners financially. Whatever he hides, he keeps it close to his vest as he does his boxing gloves. He’s never told me and I suspect that lots of spontaneous sex is his panacea.

As Destiny’s Child winds down from their booty-shaking video, Laura Branigan suddenly appears on the monitor, belting her 1982 hit “Gloria.”

“Gloria…I think they’ve got your number…GLORIA.”

The music mixes with and seems to add new life to the chatter from the scores of simultaneous conversations in the jumping Club Café. By the entrance near the lonely $1.50-service-charge ATM, a couple of guys seem to be whispering to one another as they look up.

It’s a bird. It’s a plane. No, it’s The Kyle, whose arrival is marked with his usual flair for dramatic entrances. By this, I mean he stands under one of the brighter lights in the bar and starts waving to people across the room like he is a victim drowning in a Baywatch rerun, just so people will know he’s in the house.

This six-foot-three, lean, dirty-blond curly-haired former model from the Midwest walks into the place like a movie star of Brad Pitt caliber, waving to people and nodding his chin up to greet folks he doesn’t necessarily recognize but who definitely recognize him. He stops to sign a few autographs. Really.

He’s no movie star although he is a dapper dresser with khaki pants and long-sleeved Polo shirts. He’s a reality show has-been whose once shining star has begun to fade and fall. Kyle still acts like a coterie of cameras shadow his every move, record his every word, and capture his every drama-dripping moment.

Kyle was the gay dude on the reality show The Real Life, which chronicles seven twentysomethings as they live together under one roof in Somewhere USA to see what happens when you put seven unstable opposites together with cameras all around them.

Kyle was on the Boston season, which airs in rerun hell on the weekends. Modeling scouts discovered him on the show, and he graced runways in New York, Miami, Los Angeles, as well as Milan and Paris. But as soon as the show wrapped up its fresh crop of new episodes two years ago, Kyle found himself without a televised runway to showcase himself.

Editorial modeling jobs and runway work dwindled, and his fizzling star dimmed and now barely flickers. His latest venture is to try to enlist in the Battle of the Genders challenge, which pits former Real Life contestants against one another in extreme sporting competitions. That season airs now and sometimes you can see it on the monitors here at Club Café. Kyle firmly believes the show will resurrect his career, whatever that may be.

Kyle (we call him KY for a sloppy KY Jelly incident inside a hot tub during a threesome on one of the most-talked-about Real Life episodes of all time) soaks up every stare and bit of attention he attracts wherever he goes. Tonight included.

Rico and I see him coming our way near the bar. Mr. KY spots us right away. Like a head-on collision, it’s too late to avoid him. Kyle has always seemed like a good guy but his constant need for attention has made me wonder: What wouldn’t he do to get it and what happens when no one cares anymore to ask him about the show? So I chitchat with him now and then to be socially diplomatic but I keep it simple and brief.

Rico, who doesn’t care for Kyle and even rudely ignores him sometimes, manages to turn around. He focuses on flagging down the bartender and scans the rows of beer and liquor bottles that bedeck the wall mirror and shelves at the bartender’s station.

I’m on my own here with The Kyle and there’s nowhere for me to run.

“Tommy, heeeeeeeeeeeey, what have you been up to?” His words ooze out in a feminine lisp as he lords over me like a giraffe, looking around the room to make sure guys are looking at him. “When are you going to write an article about me in the Daily? I’ve got some upcoming projects in the works. You could put me on the front page or in the Features section. You write about everyone in this city but moi!”

I crane my head up to speak to this giant queen of a man and I “uh-huh” my way throughout the one-sided conversation. It’s hard to get a simple word in when Kyle talks; he’s a conversation hijacker. Finally, he takes a breath and lets me speak. “Yeah, keep me posted, Kyle. I’m really tied up with some other assignments but let me know if you get a big part in a movie or something,” I say, noticing that Rico’s V-shaped back is turned to us, intentionally oblivious to what is going on. “I can’t guarantee a story. But I will let you know either way. Cool?”

Kyle, who is ever preening, can easily pass as a male version of supermodel Rebecca Romijn, you know, Mystique from the X-Men movies but without all that blue body makeup and morphing capabilities. He leans in for a double air kiss before he heads off to feed his ego answering all the inquiries and stares from The Real Life show’s fans that are here tonight. “Great, Tommy. I’ll have my agent send you an updated bio and press sheet. You’re a doll!” he says, strutting off like Tyra Banks or a contender on America’s Next Top Model, his favorite show.

I turn around and catch up with Rico at the bar as he waits among a throng of guys for the ponytailed bartender in the wife-beater shirt to come our way. “Hey, look at that guy, with the orange hoodie. He looks like your type. Pretty, skinny boy,” Rico says. As I scan the rainbow of hoods and baseball caps, Rico smiles at the bartender, who doesn’t even need to ask what he wants. “Sam Adams light, right?” Rico goes for the low-carb stuff. He nods back, smiling of course, as he fumbles for five dollars from his Urban Outfitters leather wallet and grabs his cool elixir for the night.

The guy Rico is talking about, the one I’m now scrutinizing like a Monet painting, resembles Ethan Hawke. He looks extremely boyish, sandy brown straight hair that really brings out his blue eyes, which sparkle like two small swimming pools. I watch him across the room bantering with his friends and taking a swig of Corona, and he laughs back. He’s having a good time; he seems like a happy good spirit. His orange hoodie has a simple 10 on it. It agrees with him. I’m definitely interested. He looks my way, our eyes lock for one…two…three…seconds and we look away. As Rico turns around to talk to me again, I leer out of the corner of my eye and notice No. 10 looking back at me. We look away again. Reality bites in a good way.

“Guao!” as we say back in Miami. “He’s sooo cute, Rico. He kinda looks like the prototypical American guy, the boy next door. Should I go up to him?” I look and look away from Mr. Ethan Hawke’s clone.

“Yo, Tommy, why not just say hi to him when we walk by. Not everyone’s gonna come up to you. For a reporter, you can really be shy sometimes. You just gotta put yourself out there. Let’s go make the rounds. Let’s walk, boyeee,” Rico says.

So we trudge through the thick crowd of men and try not to spill our drinks. This place is packed! It’s like a highway intersection of men, where Interstate 93 meets the Turnpike—during rush hour. In this traffic, you’ll inhale a heady mix of aftershaves, body lotions, and colognes that the guys doused themselves with before leaving their brownstones or triple-deckers. I bump into Kyle again, who happens to be in the middle of the bar, babbling to some wide-eyed, impressionable younger guys about what it’s like to be on The Real Life. I hear him saying “Yeah, we have microphones on alllll the time and there are cameras in the bedrooms. The only private place we have is…well, come to think about it, we don’t have any areas off-limits to the cameras. So as I was saying, I…”

After Rico and I tap a few fellas on the shoulder to get by or squeeze in between some others, we approach Mr. Number 10, dead ahead at twelve o’clock. He sees me coming. We lock eyes once again, and we both break out in a grin at the same time.

“Hey, you’re cute,” he tells me, slightly tipping the top of his chin. “What’s your name?” he asks in an undiluted Boston accent.

“Thanks, I’m Tommy,” I respond, smiling and looking down. I can’t help it. I get shy around cute guys. I get butterflies in my stomach, even if I interview police chiefs, mayors, the homeless, and strangers every day for work. “You’re cute, too,” I say, my inner butterflies flying away. “And you are…”

“I’m Michael but call me Mikey, everyone else does,” he says, although it sounds more like “Mike-eee” with his accent, which hints at a Cape Cod/Plymouth upbringing.

I almost forget about Rico. These things happen when someone captures my eyes and, perhaps, my heart. I do believe in love/lust at first sight. I’m a dreamer. I’m a Pisces.

“Nice to meet you, Mikey. This is my buddy Rico or as I like to say R-r-r-ico.”

Rico rolls his eyes at my cheesy joke (it’s not the first time I’ve said it), smiles, and then turns to us and says, “Hey, I’m gonna make a round here. I’ll catcha in a few.” I wink at Rico, mentally thanking him for giving me some space with Mikey. That’s the mark of a true friend, when he leaves you alone to chat up a cute guy. No sense in cock-blocking. Rico’s not like that—and a good thing, too. It’s hard to make good gay guy friends without breaking out into catfights over cute men. That’s why I feel blessed to have at least one good hangout buddy here in this sometimes-unfriendly metropolis. My closest friends are back in Miami. My best friend Brian lives in New York and Miami, jetting back and forth on his helicopter with his partner. While we see each other only a few times a year when I visit mi familia, we e-mail and talk on the phone several times a week, kind of like the two women in the movie Beaches.

Rico disappears into the sea of guys as Beyoncé bounces her bootyliciousness on the video monitors mounted on each corner of the room crooning and hiccupping, “So crrrazy in loooove. Uh oh, uh oh…” And I’m here with Mikey, smiling and chatting up a storm in a corner of the bar, where cushy stools and small bar tables line up against a wall of windows, protecting the club goers from the freezing weather just on the other side of the glass.

Mikey is an elementary school guidance counselor on the South Shore, where he also grew up, just outside of Plymouth, as in the Rock. He is slight like the lead singer of Maroon 5 and a little hunched when he talks. I find it hard to believe he’s thirty-three, only four years older than me. He looks twenty-five—probably because he has a head full of hair and exudes a boyish playfulness that seems endearingly innocent. Small freckles dust his nose and cheeks. When he says something he thinks is funny, he pops his tongue out and gently bites down. He’s a cutie pie. Que lindo.

“Tommy, what do you do? Are you Italian? You look it, cutie,” he tells me as I smile and glance away again. I need to stop doing that.

Folks here think I’m Italian or Greek, something that is bittersweet for me. In Miami, no question about it, everyone knew I was un cubanito. In Boston, my light olive skin allows me to blend in with the populace, allowing me to see how others are treated when they don’t blend in and hear what others have to say about them. That’s Boston for you. Almost thirty years after the divisive racial busing riots, the city still sometimes views itself through the old black-and-white prism. That surprises me because Boston itself is a minority-majority city. As for Latinos or Hispanics (depending on whom you ask), the townies don’t know what to make of us, because we represent various shades of the ethnic spectrum.

Back in Miami, the city is a sea of Cubans. But in Boston, it’s another story. Only a couple thousand Cubans, according to the Census (I know this because I am, after all, a reporter) and just a handful of gay ones. So when I tell someone I am Cuban, they look at me like I have a third eye. To others, Cuban sounds exotic.

Anyways, back to Mikey. I explain to him that I grew up in Miami Beach. I was born and bred there, by the sun, sand, and surf, and grew up watching Miami Beach undergo an extreme makeover. When I was a little kid, the city was more of a Jewish retirement community with the elderly lining the porches of Ocean Drive hotels with the best views of the beach. By the time I was eleven, the place had become gun-slinging, cocaine-cowboy country just like in Scarface and Miami Vice. In my teens, Miami Beach and tourists rediscovered and fell in love with the city’s Art Deco decadence. The models came and so did the greedy developers. In my early twenties, the place became a gay subtropical capital and the club land on the East Coast. These days, SoBe is an international hip-hop playground with Missy Elliott and Usher considered as local royalty, and of course, JLo and Ricky “La Loca” Martin as part-time residents.

I am Cuban-American and speak Spanish (or more like butcher the español). I tell him I am a reporter for The Boston Daily, moved here a year ago to Cambridge, next to TWGU, The World’s Greatest University (Harvard, folks), and I love the Boston way of life. It goes back to my college summer internship at the Daily in Living/Arts, my first time away from h. . .