2001-11-07 - 12:11 a.m.
Singing Out

Mom and Dad are visiting this week. We’re having a great time, but it has also thwarted my eager desire to tell all about my most interesting Sunday. Stay tuned for that mega-entry; I hope to…ahem…get it up soon.

In the meantime, here’s a beautiful thing that happened tonight.

Joey was supposed to come over for dinner. (I bought the groceries; Mom cooked up a pot roast with all the fixings.) But at the last minute, he couldn’t get away from the office so had to cancel. That sucked, but we will get together yet before Mom and Dad fly home Friday.

So I decided to call my friends Chris and Ty to see if they were available to come over for dinner. They were. Twenty minutes later, the four of us were chowing down.

The after-dinner conversation somehow got onto Keith Haring. Oh yes, I believe Ty asked me how famous Haring had been before his death in 1990. I responded—yes, he’d achieved an amazing amount of celebrity during his short life—and then said, “Hey, wait: none of you have seen the Haring documentary, have you?”

They had not. “Well, if you all love me as much as you say you do, you have to watch it!” I exclaimed, adding “But let me go for a smoke first—it’s time.”

(While Mom and Dad are here I’m not smoking in the apartment; now that I’m down to one an hour, it’s no big deal to step outside.)

Excited about watching the video again for the first time in a while, I paced up and down the sidewalk in front of my building, sucking back my hourly cancer stick. It tasted like shit, I noticed; the less I smoke, the less I’m enjoying it.

And then a black man crossed the street over to my side. He was wearing rustly nylon track pants, a t-shirt and a nylon jacket.

“Hey,” he said, his dark eyes gleaming at me in the dark. “I’m a 49 year old black man, living on the street. I survive by ‘entertaining’ people. You know, singing and such. So, I’m wondering: can I entertain you?”

Heh, I thought.

I stood there, slightly stunned, taking in his devastatingly handsome visage, his muscled neck, his big big hands.

“Um,” I said, my dick beginning to swell, “wow, you’re 49?” He looked at least ten or fifteen years younger.

“Yeah, I am,” he said, grinning. “But I’ve always kept in shape. Used to do two hundred pushups a day, but now I only do a hundred.”

I stared into his dark eyes.

“Here, feel,” he said, pressing his own big hand into his chest.

Beginning to swoon, I hesitated.

“No, here,” he said again, reaching for my hand and smiling at me.

I prodded his rock-hard pecs.

“Now feel here,” he said, moving my hand down to his abs.

“Yeah, you’re in terrific shape alright,” I stammered, reluctantly removing my fingertips from his wares.

“So, can I entertain you?” he repeated.

“Geez, that alone was worth a couple bucks!” I gushed.

I loved the way he laughed at that comment.

“Nah,” I continued, “You don’t have to sing for me – here, let me see what change I’ve got.” I fished in my pockets.

“No, you don’t understand,” he protested. “I like to sing. What kind of music do you like? Rap?”

“Well, rap isn’t really something I’m all that into,” I said.

So instead this beautiful 49 year old homeless black man sang me a ballad. I was so stymied and spellbound by his body—its tingle still vibrating my fingertips—that I cannot for the life of me remember what it was he sang. It was a well-known love song, from a movie I think.

But he stood there on the sidewalk and sang it at the top of his lungs. People walked by us and gave him a funny look. He swayed in time to the tune, his body more rhythmic than his voice at times. But he sang to me in the dark, and I got all misty-eyed and engorged.

The song was over. “Wow, thanks,” he said. “That really made me feel good to sing that.”

I handed him a pocketful of change. “My father died last February, you know?” he said. “And I don’t think I told him enough that I loved him. My mother, I told her all the time that I loved her, but I don’t think I did my father enough. Everyone says, ‘He probably knew you loved him,’ but I don’t think I expressed it enough. So that’s what I felt when I was singing to you.”

It was probably a good thing I had a houseful of company, because by this time I’m not sure I’d have been able to resist inviting him inside to tell me stories and sing to me and show off more of his body.

Instead, I said something I never say. “God bless you,” I said, shaking his big hand.

He thanked me and disappeared off into the night.

Moments later, I arrived back up here in my suite. Mom, Dad, Chris and Ty were visiting up a storm.

“Oh my god, I love this city!” I said, breathlessly telling them what happened.

And then we watched Keith Haring draw, and talk about art and creativity and love and what’s important to express to one another.

Rapt, tears welling in my eyes, I wanted to go kiss the TV; I wanted to kiss my parents and my friends.

Most improbably, I wanted to sing: my body chording a tune, the erotic strum of happenstance.