Bear Hunting

Chapter 7: The Bear’s Den

Chapter 7: The Bear’s Den

March 30, 20—

7:00 P.M.

Twenty-four hours later the two men meet at The Bear’s Den, a queer bar on Weston Street in downtown Templeton. The place isn’t busy tonight because there’s a drag queen competition going on at The Bear’s Den’s nemesis bar, The Velvet Closet, which is seven blocks away from The Bear’s Den.

A U-shaped bar is being worked by a handsome college kid with an adorable overbite. The kid goes by the name Wall, probably because his chest is massive and squeezed into a too-tight T-shirt and looks like a wall of bricks. Wall serves Toby and Blue longneck bottles of beer. Madonna sings a song about Romeo and Juliet on the jukebox in the corner. The oval dance floor to the far right is empty. Two drunks sit at the bar. Both are in their forties, depressed, and attempt to salvage their pathetic lives and damaged livers.

Toby feels nervous about the date with Blue, but he really shouldn’t. He’s been on a number of random dates in his twenty-four years. Some were awesome and turned into long-term relationships. Others were a complete waste of his time. One date was so hot that he enjoyed it for over twenty-four hours with the guy. Because he’s nervous, he plays with the label on his beer. His fingers pry a corner away with diligent labor. He listens to Blue tell him that Blue enjoys Edith Warton over Jane Austen and that he used to be a faithful viewer of Gray’s Anatomy until his mother died of a heart attack two years before. Blue also mentions that he likes to color like a third grade boy. He says, “It’s how I release my stress.”

“Most guys masturbate,” Toby says, nervous about looking the guy in his eyes, but not square on.

Blue laughs. “I do that too, but what guy doesn’t? The equipment’s there, why not play with it, right?”

Toby learns other details about the professor. Blue lost his virginity at eighteen by his parents’ pool boy, a rugby playing badass who was twenty-one years old. Blue is a top, although sometimes he likes to be a bottom. “It just depends who the guy is.” Toby also comprehends that Blue likes rough s*x, and to be sprayed down with strings of semen, calling the practice his fetish. Blue’s father lives in Seattle, Washington and runs a company called Nature’s Touch, which produces a variety of organic apples. He’s a reader of classics too: Kate Chopin, Wilde, and Hemingway. But he loathes Fitzgerald and Buck.

Following all of this information, details packed together in an audible bundle, he says to Toby, “Tell me about you. I want to hear everything. Leave nothing out.”

Over another beer, Toby chatters for the next twenty minutes about himself. How he got started blogging. Where he grew up as a child, Pennocot Bay near Pittsburgh. Losing his virginity at seventeen by a nineteen year old clothes model by the name of Derek Chatham. His favorite color, mint green. His first boyfriend’s name, Rueben McKeith. And he says, “I used to have my left n****e pierced. It got infected pretty badly. I decided it wasn’t worth losing, so I took it out. The piercing scar is still there, though.”

“Maybe I can see it later.”

Toby laughs, somewhat buzzed because of an empty stomach, and replies, “Maybe.”