Kiss Me, Straight

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

A week after EP Training, we were delayed coming home from Paris because of a ground staff strike, a not-uncommon occurrence in France. I didn’t get home until almost midnight, so I was a little slower than usual getting started the next morning. It was actually probably closer to most people’s lunchtime when I dragged myself downstairs to The Button Hole, Katie’s vacuum cleaner and sewing machine repair shop, for my coffee.

Never heard of a vacuum cleaner repair shop with a café in it? Yeah, neither have I.

Katie Alvarez is one of my very best friends, and her shop is on the ground floor of my apartment building on Divisadero. On the days when I’m home, we pass many happy hours sitting around the dining room table she uses for a desk, sipping strong coffee into the afternoon hours (when coffee cups are often cleared to make room for the wine glasses), talking, arguing, philosophizing, and, very occasionally, gossiping.

This particular Monday morning (well, afternoon, for you sticklers about detail) found Katie with her hair pulled back and sleeves rolled up, swearing over a Singer Touch-and-Sew. I knew the tinkling bell on the front door would annoy her, because she only tied her hair back with a vacuum fan belt when she was particularly frustrated with a repair, so I loudly announced myself straight off, shouting, “It’s Todd!” as I ducked under the counter.

She didn’t look up or give me more than a “hey,” just slid her head far enough in my direction for me to give her our traditional peck on the cheek. I set down the white paper bag I had brought from Paris, grabbed my mug off the wall rack, and helped myself to a cup of her famous smoky, black French roast. I sat without speaking for the first several sips. The soft clanking and cussing indicated clearly that Katie was engrossed in her work, and I knew she understood how tired I was, although she had quit flying nearly five years ago.

Shortly, she let out a frustrated “Ack!” and her screwdriver clattered across the table. “This thing is messing with me, Todd!” she cried. “It should be running better than new, and it gives me nothing. Nothing!”

She backed away from the sewing machine. “I’ve been dying to take a break! I thought you’d never get out of bed,” she scolded, pulling the fan belt from her hair and smoothing the honey-colored curls. With her naturally ebullient hair and sassy Irish freckles, Katie would probably be a smash in one of those Real Women in Their Underwear ads. Two pregnancies had thickened her in the hips, and two hungry newborns had helped her chest stay plenty curvy. “How was Paris?”

“Great, of course.” A pretty standard answer concerning the Paris layover. “You never got to stay at this hotel, but oh, Katie, the coffee! We get this great breakfast in the morning; you can have it brought up to your room or go down to the café. It just feels, so, you know…”

“Like home?” she said, indicating her office.

“I was gonna say ‘French’, but I see your point,” I admitted, as her office was basically the downstairs café to my apartment. “Anyway, it was fine. I worked with a good crew. I worked with Bobby Dutta, and we went out the first night and had fun. That boy is crazy!”

“No wonder you look so tired!” she pointed out. “I’m scared of you two loose on a town full of French boys.”

“I was very well-behaved, thank you very much.” She c****d an eyebrow, but I forged ahead. “I did meet one nice guy who bought me a few drinks. We ended the night at a bear bar in the Marais. We probably would have hooked up, but when a 300-pound French biker takes the stage at karaoke and stumbles drunkenly through Johnny Cash’s ‘Ring of Fire,’ you know it’s time to go home.”

She laughed, acknowledging the universal truth of this statement, and rinsed the old, cold coffee out of her cup, the better to enjoy a fresh round.

“I brought treats,” I told her, nodding towards the white paper bag next to the coffee maker.

Her face lit up. “Croissants?” she asked hopefully.

“Oui. Regular, and chocolate ones, too.”

“Hooray!” she exulted, rubbing her hands together before plunging one into the bag and withdrawing a pain au chocolat. The proprietress of the establishment, Katie had a selection of personal mugs, all of which had been painted by one or the other of her children at one of those paint-your-own pottery places. She lived right around the corner from one in Noe Valley, and had been putting her kids’ handiwork on gifty items pretty much since the day she brought my goddaughter Liliana home from the hospital. Today she was drinking from my favorite, on which her son Anthony, all of three years old, had drawn his impression of himself and his older sister in Katie’s convertible. Their dog Mavis, inexplicably, is driving.

Ever the hostess, Katie topped my coffee off before filling her own cup, then took her usual spot, half-sitting on the counter, one clogged foot firmly planted on the floor, the other swinging free.

“You look beat,” she informed me. “How many days off do you have?”

I held up five fingers, reveling in the one element of this job that will never grow old: time off.

“Must be nice.”

“Oh please, like you’d ever give this up to go back to flying.”

See, that’s where I met Katie, in Stewardess School (as we called flight attendant training) at Globe Runner Airlines twelve years ago, as fresh-faced, hot-bodied new hires barely out of college. We attached ourselves to one another on the first day of training, bonding over our shared passions—for France in general, where we had both studied abroad, and in particular for a big-nosed, handsome French fellow trainee named Philippe. He had been “released” (i.e. fired) from training before we even went on our first training flight, but Katie and I had each had an opportunity to become intimately acquainted with his charms and compare notes, and by the time we had basically forgotten all about him, we were already best friends. Although we no longer fly together, we are still joined at the psychic hip; Katie and I tell each other everything, and I rarely make a decision more complicated than what to have for lunch without at least a quick consult with my former flying partner.

She sipped her coffee and pondered the sewing machine she was finishing up.

“Oh, don’t even try,” I scolded. “You could never leave those kids now. You wouldn’t be any fun on a layover, these days.”

“I couldn’t stand to be away from home for so long now, you’re right,” she conceded. “But I most certainly would be fun on a layover! I may be all married up now, but my husband is Argentinean! We eat dinner at nine P.M., may I remind you? That means we are still fun.”

Sharing a healthy sense of adventure and a very healthy interest in Latin men, Katie and I were thrilled to be based in Buenos Aires right out of training, and enjoyed a certain amount of success with the local menfolk. Katie—she was O’Brien in those days—enjoyed quite lasting success with a particular member of the local menfolk, and when her boyfriend Francisco was transferred to Northern California for his job with a local wine distributor, she transferred to our base in San Francisco and made him her husband.

“Yeah, I guess having a husband hasn’t slowed down Bobby Dutta.” I continued, deliberately goading her with the comparison to the most notorious slut in the base.

“I’m not sure I’m that kind of fun anymore,” she admonished.

“Oh, come on now, Bobby’s a very devoted husband and lover.”

“I’m sure he is,” she said. “Very devoted to his husband when he’s home around bill-paying season, and a very devoted lover to all and sundry when he’s on his layovers.” We had been in Stewardess School with Bobby. Then a barely-nineteen, lanky, Indian head-turner from Texas, he was now a thirty-one-year old man-eater known to most flight attendants in the base as the Air Mattress.

She raised that eyebrow again in my direction. “As I recall…”

“Oh please, Katie,” I cut her off. “My thing with Bobby was ages ago.” And will not be discussed in this narrative! “I’m sure he wouldn’t even look at me like that now. Not, I hasten to add, that I’d be interested if he did.”

“Too chunky for him now?”

“Hilarious, you are. Too old is what I meant. He’s been into twenty-two-year-olds since he was about thirteen.”

“Guess so. Not sure it was any more appropriate then!” she observed.

It’s been a number of years since I’ve been able to pass for twenty-two, and, more encouragingly, it’s been a few years since I’ve cared about trying. But I still take pretty good care of myself. I read Men’s Health, and not always just for the pictures. I play softball with a couple of my friends (including Bobby Dutta) on an all-airline gay softball team, and I ride my bike to the ocean a couple days a week, just because I grew up in Nebraska and I think it’s cool that I can ride my bike to the ocean. But I spend a lot of time away from home, and I have learned to embrace the people and things I love while I have the chance, and this includes embracing Cinnabon and Ben & Jerry when the mood strikes. I may have a tiny bump under my T-shirts, but I know if I die in a plane crash on my next trip, I won’t be thinking, “If only I’d eaten more spinach and done more crunches!” Besides, I think feeling comfortable in my body has made me more confident and more handsome, and I say “chicken or beef” just as convincingly now as I did when dates were grating cheese on my abs.

“Besides,” I continued with the days off theme, “you don’t need all those days off to be at home anymore. You’re home every day! When was the last time you and Francisco slept apart?”

Can you believe they’ve been together almost ten years, and she still gets a dreamy fantasy-prince look on her face when we talk about him. “You’re right.” she said. “I’m not gonna be giving that up any time soon.”

“Geeze, Katie, you’re a married woman. It isn’t fair that you get some every night!! Here I am, single in the gayest city in America, and I haven’t had any in weeks. And what I do get, I get in other countries.”

“What are you complaining about? I got Francisco in another country.”

“Yeah, but he’s only got the one gay brother, and he’s got a boyfriend,” I reminded her.

“He’s also seventeen, you sicko,” she teased. “Besides, then we’d be related. That would get complicated.”

“I’m gonna need a younger man here before too long,” I lamented, turning to a theme that was becoming increasingly familiar for me, now that thirty-five was beckoning to me from my next birthday. “Someone to look after me in my old age. What am I going to do when I’m all alone and too stiff and frail to bend over and tie my own shoes?”

“I’ll get you one of those long-handled shoe horns,” she deadpanned. “We’re not having this conversation today. Only single gay men think thirty-five is their old age. Some of us are just getting started, you know. Besides, I couldn’t tell you the last time I saw you in anything besides flip-flops. When do you plan to start wearing shoes that tie?”

“You know what I mean,” I whined.

“Here,” she said, tipping first some milk, then some more coffee into my mug. “Encore du cafe t’aidera de sentir mieux.”

I laughed. “Ooooh, French. I feel younger and more glamorous already.”

“Good. Have you eaten since you got home? Maybe that will help you feel better. You could call across the street; I’m sure Marzipan would send the new guy over with a Special Delivery for you.”

I hadn’t heard about this. “There’s a new guy?”

“Apparently, yeah. Some kid, new to the City. Who knows where she found him—he’s only been around a day or two.”

“Where does Marzipan find any of her men? Who knows what she gets up to?”

“This one’s gay, though.”

“Oh?” This was intriguing. In addition to the building in which both Katie’s business and I reside, our friend Marzipan owns Marzipan!, the bustling café across the street. She could pick a handsome man out of a stadium crowd blindfolded, bring him home, make him fall in love with her, and have him doing her bidding in the time it takes most people to finish their breakfast. She also had infallible gaydar, though, and was admired and feared by single women all over San Francisco for her ability to find the straightest needle in any haystack. While not unheard of, it was unusual for her to take a fruiter under her wing. To my knowledge, she hadn’t done so since she’d taken me under her wing all those years ago.

“He cute?” I asked. As in most things, Marzipan has unparalleled taste in men. “Maybe he could make a Special Delivery.”

“Quoth the queen of the double entendre.” Katie rolled her eyes. Katie says things like “quoth” so she can feel like she’s applying her literature degree to her everyday life. “I haven’t met him yet, but she sure has talked him up. I think she’s picked him out especially for you.”

“Oh?” I said again. The men in Marzipan’s orbit are most often straight, but they are never boring. Somehow she finds these guys whose spectacular looks are just icing on the cake. Smart, funny, and creative, they are also quite often handy with a wrench and a plunger, which makes those of us who live in Marzipan’s building love them even more. So to hear that there might be a new gay guy in the neighborhood, selected by Marzipan and therefore bound to be made up of a patchwork of these colorful qualities, was exciting news indeed. What’s more, apparently he was only a phone call away, and could be made to appear right at the table in a matter of minutes. And now that Katie mentioned it, I was feeling a little peckish. I had eaten a fried-egg sandwich and most of a pint of Ben & Jerry’s when I got home last night, but that had been eleven hours ago, and breakfast is the most important meal of the day, even if one doesn’t get around to eating it until almost one o’clock in the afternoon. No single GWM in the world could have responded differently.

“Maybe a bite of something would perk me up,” I allowed. “Let’s call across the street.”

“You’ll never change,” she smirked.

“Hey, cute guys and food, what’s to change? A man cannot live on bread alone.”

“There ya go,” she assented. “What do you want? Breakfast or lunch?”

“What are you getting?” I had only just had my first cup of coffee, and Marzipan! has many great breakfast options, but if anyone orders a burger from Marzipan!, I am forced to follow suit, as they are the most greasily delicious cheeseburgers in the world. I am prone to Order Envy, and have to know what everyone else is ordering before I am able to make my own decision. If something is going to be brought to the table that I will wish I had ordered, I can’t enjoy my own food, so often I am forced to copy to stave off disappointment.

“I think I’ll get that salad I like, the one with the candied walnuts and the bleu cheese.”

Okay, I’m never going to be jealous of anyone’s salad, for goodness’ sake. Breakfast it is. “I guess I’ll have a couple pancakes.”

Maybe I should have some fruit or something, too. “Banana pancakes,” I amended. Yup, pour enough caffeine and sugar in me and I’ll be able to get through most of the afternoon pretending I’ve never heard of jet lag.

On the first day back from a Europe trip, I can usually keep upright until I pass out during the 7 P.M. episode of The Simpsons. The next day the jet lag is even worse, and by day three I’m returning to normal circadian rhythms. By day five I’ll be totally rested, just in time to fly out the next afternoon and start the whole cycle over again. I am commonly asked by people who don’t fly for a living how I deal with jet lag—especially by somewhat frequent travelers, who want to know The Secret so they won’t be wrecked after their next trip abroad. But there is no “secret.” Most flight attendants you’ll meet are too tired on any given day to remember their own home phone number. We don’t have a “secret” for dealing with jet lag; we simply grow accustomed to living in a constant state of it.

Like most people I know in our neighborhood, Katie has Marzipan! on speed dial, so it was a matter of ninety seconds between deciding on what to eat and getting it ordered. Mind you, we can see Marzipan! out Katie’s front window, and it would be a matter of another ninety seconds max to walk over there and place our order at the counter, but we’re pretty much friends with everyone who works there, and it seems like most of the guys kind of like the excuse to skip out of the café for a few minutes, so we have stuff delivered much more often than is strictly necessary.

“So,” I started, dragging myself up out of my chair to fix myself another cup of coffee, “cute new guy across the street. What else did I miss? I was only gone four days.”

“That’s the big news, I guess. I’ve been spending way too much time on Peter’s frickin’ sewing machine, but it’s not like I’ve had that much else going on. This woman who walks her dog up at the park where we take Mavis is coming in later on today or tomorrow to show me some samples of this embroidery stuff she does,” she announced. “Greeting cards, funky little pillows, and teddy bears. I guess she designs and sews these little tea cozies, like for teapots, and for just mugs, too. I told her she should at least put some cards or fliers or something up in here. You know that’s just the kind of stuff most of the people who come in here would go for.”

She was no doubt right about that. Katie is known, among the circles of people who know this type of thing, for having a magic touch with any ailing household machine; if it’s broken, Katie can fix it, and if she can’t fix it with factory-authorized parts, she can fix it with Popsicle sticks and peanut butter, or some other combination of the myriad random objects crammed into drawers and spilling out of baskets all over the counter, office, and back room of her shop. But her bread and butter is her staggering notions selection, and, in addition to her infallible eye for quality, she has a keen sense of what will appeal to her cross-section of customers. Katie has shopped merchandise marts and nighttime street markets in every corner of the world; people come from all over the Bay Area knowing she will have exactly the right pattern, decal, iron-on patch, ribbon, bangle, or bauble, whatever the project. She has been featured in more than one trade magazine specifically for her unrivaled collection of unique and exotic buttons. Teenyboppers, scrapbookers, dressmakers, grandmas, and every other crafty type in town flock to Katie’s to window-shop the buttons, some in shapes you’ve never even seen before, some covered in bold or delicate fabrics, some painstakingly painted by hand, ranging in size from a grain of rice to a compact disc. On the walls she has some of her favorites in frames, including a ceramic set she made herself depicting such San Francisco landmarks as a mini cable car, a tiny Trans America pyramid, and, of course, an itty bitty replica of the Button Hole. So if this woman’s got the goods, and her cozies and cards are eye-catching and fun, they will no doubt fly off the shelves when Katie’s customer base gets a look at them.

“That’s kind of a cool idea. Maybe I’ll get a coffee cozy for my cup here,” I mused. “Never knew I needed one, but now that I think of it…”

“Great, I’ll tell her I’ve already made my first sale. You laugh now, but I’ve seen a jacket that she jazzed up, and a pair of mittens she made. Her stuff’s cute. She’s good.”

“Cool. No, I think it’s a good idea. You know I admire people who listen to their muse and create.”

“Even when you’re being sincere you sound sarcastic,” lamented Katie.

“My cross to bear, as a natural wit.”

“Yeah, you and Oscar Wilde,” Katie said, giving me her famous side-scrunched lips that say “we’ll see about that.”

“Oh, look,” I exclaimed, abruptly changing the subject when a blinding flash of yellow in the window across the street caught my eye. “Marzipan’s even there this morning.” The café was easily the most successful and self-sufficient of Marzipan’s many businesses, and she was rarely there, trusting day-to-day operations to her dedicated staff. “She must be excited about this new guy.”

When she glanced out the window and saw me, she made a big “O” of surprise with her mouth and threw both arms in the air. She clapped her hands dramatically once, then dashed for the door, emerging onto the street in a rippling nebula of yellow. She floated across the street in our direction, dodging traffic the way a brilliant sunshiny butterfly in a bejeweled turban might hop from flower to flower in a meadow. She waved, I waved back, and she burst through the door like a monsoon wind that cried, “Darlings!” before tearing through a saffron-seller’s stand in an Indian market.