Contradictions

Yesterday afternoon, nearly halfway through the weekend, I was looking ahead to a lonely Saturday night with no plans. And I was also craving a change. I needed to get out of the city. I was missing Charlottesville, Virginia, where I went to school, and I craved an all-American Saturday night: dinner at a generic fern-bar-type chain restaurant, followed by a movie at a multiplex. Driving around in a car. It was consuming me, I was missing it so much. At around 3:30 I called up my former roommate, whom I’ll call Mack, in central New Jersey. “Do you have any plans tonight?” “I have no plans,” he said, and so I packed some things for an overnight stay and took the New Jersey Transit train down to New Brunswick.

I lived with Mack before I moved up here in the fall; I moved into his guest room last March after needing to get out of a bad roommate situation. Mack is a 35-year-old gay attorney with a great condo and great finances, and we have a deep friendship. We’re both gay, we’re both Jewish, we’re both lawyers, we’re both from New Jersey (albeit different parts). We click in that way. I’ve known him for about a year and a half.

Mack picked me up at the New Brunswick train station and we drove the 20 minutes back to his condo. His yellow labrador puppy greeted us; I was still living with Mack when he bought her, so she has a deep affection for me and goes nuts whenever she sees me. Given that she’s a yellow lab puppy, she’s the cutest thing you’ve ever seen, although she’s a lot bigger than she was eight months ago.

After watching the most recent episode of “The West Wing” on tape, we went out to TGI Friday’s for dinner. It was exactly what I needed. And since I’m nearly broke, it was on him. While waiting for our names to be called, we walked across the parking lot to Wal-Mart, where Mack bought puppy supplies and I looked at all the white trash. How do they make it north of the Mason-Dixon Line? And why do they always go to Wal-Mart? (No offense to any intelligent self-proclaimed white-trash bloggers who live in the East Village.)

As we were walking over to Wal-Mart I decided I didn’t want to see a movie afterward. Instead, I suggested we go out to one of the gay clubs he likes, where I used to go with him when I still lived with him. So after a long, hearty, generic TGI Friday’s meal — mine was a house salad followed by Jack Daniel’s chicken with a pineapple slice and green beans and a baked potato slathered with bacon bits and sour cream — all very fulfilling — we went back to his place, changed, and then hit the road.

We drove all the way to bucolic New Hope, Pennsylania, to go to the Cartwheel. (The link has a photo.) The Cartwheel is about a 45-minute drive from Mack’s place. We drove along dark, quiet, rural roads, listening to a Saturday night dance mix on an FM radio station, Mack’s brights on so we could look out for deer.

I hadn’t been to the Cartwheel since September, and I was preparing myself for a nice change: none of that New York gay attitude, much less glamour, and more friendliness. But the place was packed with plenty of broad-chested, tight-tee-shirt-wearing guys, and there was a bright glitzy dance floor and earsplitting music. In my mind I’d exaggerated the differences. Gay life turns out to be the same everywhere.

We had a nice time, and we ran into several people that Mack knew. Running into someone you know rarely seems to happen in an New York gay bar, at least in my experience.

After a couple of hours, we drove back home, back along the winding country roads. It was 2 in the morning and I saw the brightest stars I’d seen in ages; I opened the window, stuck my head out and looked up at the twinkling night sky, the wind whipping my face, just like a dog. Then I looked across the fields at the mountains in the distance, silhouetted in black against the dark sky that looked only gray in comparison. I gulped down the scenery thirstily, thinking, This is what I’ve needed. How can human beings live without nature? I need and love nature just as I need and love men. Nature is erotic. Nature arouses you. Nature is as necessary as sex.

Eventually we got back to Mack’s place and I went to sleep on his couch, where I had vivid dreams.

Around noon today we went out for brunch, which Mack subsidized again (although I paid five bucks as a token gesture of chipping in). It was a beautiful spring afternoon, warm and brightly sunny, so afterward we decided to take the dog and drive out to the Delaware and Raritan Canal. Mack let her off the leash and the three of us walked through the woods, along a dirt path, stepping over fallen tree trunks, looking up at the bright green baby leaves and the light blue sky above them and then down at the grass and the wildflowers. Next to us was the rushing river. Nobody else was around. It was pure heaven. We got to a bank and Mack would throw a stick into the water and the dog would run in, fetch it, swim back, shake herself off dizzily, and make Mack do it again and again and again. She was adorable.

I took off my watch and put it in my pocket, and I thought, why do I want to live in Manhattan? I could move back to central New Jersey, and I could have a car again, and cheaper rent, and I could go to the Den every Friday night, a friendly gay club where Mack has gone almost every Friday night for almost ten years, except when he’s been on vacation in one foreign country or another, which he does several times a year. I could become a regular at the Den, and I could make friends like Mack has, and maybe even meet a special guy.

And then I think, but I’d be living in central New Jersey, and I’d have to drive to and from work again, and deal with rush hour traffic, and boring suburbanites, and have nothing to do on weekday evenings. And I’d have to live among the cookie-cutter condo developments and McMansions that have sprouted up across central New Jersey like kudzu over the last decade, in the wake of all the office parks that have sprung up along bland Route 1, clogging the meager roads and highways that were built during George Washington’s time and creating sprawl and ruining the wilderness and keeping everyone apart from each other in their safe, cozy homes.

Why does everything have to have a cost? A tradeoff? Why does everything have to have an up side and a down side? This is why I can never make decisions. I keep looking for the choice that doesn’t come with a downside. I am fickle, easily swayed, easily unsatisfied; I want it all. I want urban culture and crowds of sophisticated people, and I want quietness and nature. I want to have a car and listen to FM radio and NPR (which I haven’t done in ages), and I want to commute by train. I want excitement and I want the comfort of regularity. Can you have both excitement and comfort? Is that possible? Can you just possibly get by with only one of those? But is that any way to live?

I also know that one reason I’ve strived to make Manhattan the center of my life is because I think it’s the only place I’ll find a boyfriend — that the chances are greater sheerly because of quantity. There are so many more young gay men in the city, so isn’t the possibility stronger that I’ll find him there? Maybe, maybe not. But I know that somewhere inside myself, I want to wade into the city, find me a man, and drag him back out — grabbing his hair in one of my hands and a club in the other.

I don’t know what the hell I want out of life. I wish my goals wouldn’t keep changing. I wish I could have everything I want, right now, even if everything contradicts everything else. I’m impatient. I want it all now.