The Ginger Buccaneer
Connection and disconnection in late-night San Francisco
He was a good kisser. It’s the kind of thing you can figure out in about five seconds, and with him it took only two. It’s priceless, really. A good kisser can surpass our security systems and fling open all the doors within us. So many doubts grow stronger over time: Will I ever have a decent 401K? Am I an honorable person? Will I die of old age in Palm Springs? But the value of a good kisser is an increasingly sure bet.
We’d found each other in a tiny converted theater space on the edge of the Tenderloin near the stroke of midnight on a Saturday night. He’d hit me up the week before on one of the hook-up apps, igniting that little online dance, circling and sizing up each other’s digital selves for a few days. I’d quickly put him in the category of yeah, we’d probably someday fuck.
Tonight he’d told me about this party, some underground and defiantly unadvertised deal with a couple of local kid DJs spinning the kind of thudding beats that pull you helplessly onto the floor to rock with the others in communal late-night worship.
I plunged in from the edge of the dance floor, eager to shake off my self-consciousness. Proud that I’d even made it down here. I’m not wired to go out on my own, my dispensable income was shaky at best, and I suck at small talk. I am self-conscious to the point of absurdity, suspecting that everyone in my vicinity is measuring me, when zero people are actually glancing my way.
Except the Ginger Buccaneer. That was the name of his profile on the San Francisco escort page I’d stumbled across before he’d even reached out to me on Scruff. I’m a reluctant convert to the term ginger. Red-head seemed perfectly fine, and ginger reminds me of Gilligan’s Island. But language is a virus, and I accept when a word has reached critical mass. At any rate, getting free kisses from a hooker boosted for me the thrill of our mash-up. Quite a few years younger and a couple of inches taller than me, he was a bearded western European native who carried his beefy weight with confidence. But when he introduced me to his boyfriend on the dance floor, he let out a nervous and geeky laugh from the corner of his mouth that made him less imposing and more endearing.
The boyfriend and I shouted hello and all that over the music. I leaned into the Buccaneer to ask it were really okay to be making out in front of him. The Buccaneer had already told me about his other dude, a husband in his 60s who’d stayed home for the night, and as a long-time San Franciscan, polyamory wasn’t new to me. (Polyagony, I liked to call it.) But I wanted to be considerate, even if I didn’t want to stop. We don’t need to stop, he shouted into my ear.
We kissed and groped each other on the fringe of the floor. I hungrily leaned into him, my hands roaming his solid mass of muscles, his right hand grabbing my butt and pulling me up against his crotch. We teetered at the edge of inappropriate but I starved for him, and dove into him to take refuge in the primal.
In his groping I could forget my failures and unmet goals. I could forget the creeping fear of my fifties and finances, my lay-off last spring, and the man my last lover chose over me. I could forget the shadowed gauntlet these dancers slipped through to reach this place, trying to duck the hardscrabble, uneven luck of the people stumbling through these Tenderloin streets. I could forget the absurdity of Ubering past their gauntlet and the forty dollars I spent for entry. I could forget my second return to this city I can’t quit, after eight years away, and the few friends who remain here. I could kiss this man who was committed to two other men, knowing we could only be so much for each other, or to each other.
In two days he and his husband will depart Fort Lauderdale for a gay cruise through the Caribbean, but for now he pushed his hand down the back of my jeans and told me he wanted to taste me. We’d tumbled over the edge into vulgar behavior meant for other spaces, though we ducked behind a curtain at the edge of the stage to dim our spectacle.
Someday he’d taste me but it wouldn’t be that night. Whatever we made would stay within those walls, and that brutal boundary—between what I wanted and what I could have—sweetened the taste of his tongue in my mouth and stoked our smashup into hotter flame.
We ducked outside to join his friends smoking cigarettes in the alley behind the theater, and everyone had the euphoric glow and incessant chatter of recreational highs. At almost five years sober, I could recall that rush and imagine their flushed faces through that familiar prism, a small part of me wistful for its loss. Apart from them, I scanned the fire escape above and pictured pulling the Buccaneer up there for further deviance, until I spotted a straight couple who’d beaten me there. The boy held the back of the girl’s neck as they kissed, and the soft wind stirred her dyed pink hair.
Without their amphetamine fuel, I hit my wall before the others. l left the theater alone, the same man I was when I’d arrived, more or less. I slouched in the back of the Uber and checked for texts and other evidence that I mattered in the lives of others. I was headed back to my bed and would sleep with nothing but a chihuahua curled under the covers beside me, but I still hoped the driver wouldn’t want to talk. And was relieved when he stayed mute.
For the next two months the Buccaneer and I flirted and circled each other on the apps or at the gym. He made and broke plans with me. I hardly minded. He had two dudes, and after eight years away, I had a life to rebuild among the fogged hills of this familiar city, which half my friends had fled for more hospitable rents.
Last week he invited me to join him at a different club downtown, where dudes could do more than just dance with each other. I pictured our sweaty grasping in a dark back room, and said yes. But when I met up with him at a club on Sixth Street, he seemed distracted and disappointed by the crowd, his face constantly bathed by the cellular glow of his phone. Every ten minutes he’d leave my side and slip off to the bathroom stall.
What are you holding? I teased him once upon his return.
Just G, he said. And molly. And cocaine.
I nodded, thinking, what am I doing here?
I remembered all the nights I spent in bathroom stalls, chasing something that could never be caught. Maybe he was doing the same. Maybe not. But something had slid down between us, and I wondered if I’d romanticized our first meeting, that night in the Tenderloin theater. It’s the kind of thing I tend to do.
I stayed an hour, as a half-hearted gesture of thanks for the cover he’d paid for me. I left him as he joined the line again for the bathroom, and sat in the back of another, even quieter Uber, scrolling through my phone again. The night before I’d had a date with a different man, Diego, and in his company I’d felt seen. It had been a while since I’d felt such a thing. Thought about you tonight, I texted him.
It was after midnight, but the three dots came to life on the screen as he worked on his reply. I waited for his words.