Rule Number One and Faulty Gaydars
How George W. Bush's "Reality" Drove Me to Kismet
About Kismet and Fire Island
There is probably no factor more responsible for Fire Island's laid-back vibe than the ferries. The ferries help keep Fire Island--for lack of a better term--"real." If you're coming from the City, you have to carry your bag to Penn Station, get on a train, switch trains at either Jamaica or Babylon, get from the train station to the ferry terminal, get your stuff on and off the ferry, and then finally schlep it from the dock to your house. Having to confront your baggage so many times inevitably changes the way you pack. People start to wonder whether they really need that pressed collared shirt, whether they really need those shoes and all of that makeup. People scale down until downscale becomes standard.
A limited number of year-rounders have permits for cars, and during the high season, even these people must get rid of them. Since many people attempt to broadcast their status or station in life through their cars, taking cars out of the picture democratizes the mindset while providing an effective jackass filter. The kind of guy who can't be separated from his car is going to end up in the Hamptons (where you also run the risk of being mowed down by a certain bottled blonde drunkenly driving her daddy's SUV).
Oh, but I kid the Hamptons! I am most grateful that the Hamptons exist, because those towns do an amazing job of drawing away the kind of people who wear their status on their sleeves. Paris Hilton will never come to Fire Island; Prada will never open a store here; Donald Trump will never erect one of his tacky monstrosities on our pristine island, because our egalitarian social landscape deters this type of riff-raff.
The closest that Fire Island comes to red velvet ropes is Ocean Beach, Fire Island's largest town. On weekend nights, the bayside becomes something of a fraternity party overrun with postgrads and kids from the mainland. Ocean Beach is the kind of place that I would have loved at twenty-two. Now, it just doesn't interest me. Ocean Beach is commonly referred to as "The Land of No" for its innumerable restrictions and its over-officious cops who remind me of a band of Barney Fifes on steroids. I like that Kismet doesn't have a police force or even a security team (as does Kismet's neighbor, Saltaire), relying solely on the Suffolk County Police who patrol from the mainland. Despite not providing private security, there are virtually no rules in Kismet--unlike Saltaire, which, until recently, banned barbecuing.
This blew my fucking mind.
Why would any beach community anywhere ban barbecuing? Forbidding a man to barbecue on his own property is just...fuck, it's downright un-American and nothing less than an act of cruelty to men. People should be free to do whatever they want so long as it doesn't hurt anyone else, and that more enlightened sentiment is pretty much what governs Kismet. While drinking alcohol on Kismet Beach is technically not permitted, open responsible consumption is perfectly tolerated. Bass fishermen coexist with bathers, and most people manage to get along without existing under a laundry list of oppressive restrictions.
While I'm obviously biased, Kismet best embodies the spirit of Fire Island. No one in Kismet dresses up, and few women put on much makeup before hitting the bars. If women were to deck themselves out the way they do in the Hamptons, they would fit in about as well as an Amish preacher in Lil' Kim's posse. (My own Kismet wardrobe largely consists of clothes that other people have left behind.) A good percentage of people who join my house have never been to Fire Island. For a few of them, there is a funny moment during their first weekend when they do dress up to go to the bars. I refrain from cracking jokes because they'll figure it out soon enough and then scale back, content to have flip-flops double as dress shoes.
As a community, Kismet cannot be pigeonholed. It is a provincial, blue-collar enclave; it is also a progressive, bohemian paradise. There are retired people and families. There are sharehouses and old-school group houses. While Fire Island is overwhelmingly white, Kismet is probably the most diverse community and a place where many foreigners feel welcomed. There are surfers and artists and fishermen and construction workers and even a smaller gay population that doesn't care to deal with the scene in The Pines. While we're all quite different, what we share is a desire and an ability to make our own fun. We don't need red velvet ropes. All we need are the raw materials to enjoy beach living and Kismet has them all: grocery store, liquor store, ice cream and pizza parlors, tennis and basketball courts, and, of course, The Inn and The Out.
Kismet's carnivalesque air encourages original forms of expression, and the town is a blank canvass across which anyone can boldly paint their own strokes, whether garish or muted, brash or elegant. All of Kismet's different kinds of people manage to coexist while respectfully doing whatever they want to do. In this way Kismet is the Fire Island community that I believe is also the most purely American.
Rule Number One and Faulty Gaydars
Sitting at my desk, I became hypnotized by the flashing curser in my e-mail message. It was my weekly update to house members that included everyone's bed assignments. As it was a C weekend, I had gotten hung up on where to put Rule Number One.
Scheduling her in her regular room seemed silly. Still, it would be pretty fucking awkward if she had met some guy in the City or had decided to pull the plug on our whatever-you-call-it. She had reserved a guest spot for her friend Elaine, and so I moved another woman around, scheduling Rule Number One and Elaine in Short Line, one of the smaller rooms. If everything was okay between Rule Number One and me, Elaine would end up in Short by herself--a pretty nice arrangement for a guest.
I hit "send" and then began fielding the requests in my inbox, including an e-mail from Clay, a new house member who had purchased two of the spots vacated by Wayne and Troy. Clay worked at a brokerage firm on Wall Street and was one of those guys who put off looking for a sharehouse until May. Having finished hosting meetups at the White Horse, Clay and I met up for a beer. He seemed balanced, smart, and considerate, and I offered him a spot. During his first night at the house, I walked past him on the couch bank where he was holding forth with four women. Speaking in a raging gay voice, he had them in stitches. The following day at the beach, I found Clay once again surrounded by women while doing his flaming voice, his wrists flapping and his eyes rolling as he became rather touchy-feely with them. When I spied him doing this a third time, I realized that it wasn't a voice he was putting on--it was how he talked. (To top it off, Clay had a Danny Bonaduce-like shock of orange hair, completing the overall flaming picture.) By the time we sat down to dinner that night, half the women in the house had asked me if Clay was gay.
I have a decent gaydar for a straight guy--something I credit to years of being wrongly perceived as gay myself. While I'm not effeminate, I was, at one time, a nanny who lived in my brother's building in Chelsea with my two cats. On paper, I was as gay as the day is long. Toss in the fact that I speak French, am into cooking, am involved in the arts, and that I own a house in Fire Island, and people do the math. Even though no numbers are involved, they still do the math because when you add up all of those stats, you get ONE BIG HOMO.
Anyway, my years of being sexually profiled helped fine-tune my own gaydar, yet when I first met Clay, he did not register so much as a blip. As a stockbroker, however, I wondered if he was one of those gays capable of closing the spigot of their effeminacy in homophobic settings, and if now, in the free-flow environment of Kismet and Chance, he no longer felt the need to cover. If I were meeting him now for the first time, I would assume, unflinchingly, that he was gay. Anyone would. Still, even though again no numbers were involved, something about Clay hiding in the corporate closet just didn't add up.
"I don't think Clay is gay," I said to Mandy, the fifth woman to have asked me.
"Really?"
"Really," I said. "I think he's just fem."
Gay men have frequently gravitated toward me, as my stats rendered me the straight-male equivalent of the woman with whom guys can watch football. Clay, however, began edgily avoiding me, exuding a rather discomfiting vibe, as though he were stealing something. Possibly the different ways in which he had presented himself began to settle in my mind as dishonesty, creating a bad-vibe downward spiral. Now, however, in his e-mail, he wanted to know if it was okay to pay cash for his additional spots. Asking me if it's okay to pay cash is like asking Michael Jackson if he would chaperone a sleepover party for Cub Scouts. At least Clay understood what many house members don't get--that being good about money is the foundation for anyone's standing. I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt; if he didn't feel comfortable being himself on Wall Street, I should feel flattered that he settled into his own skin at Chance. I e-mailed him back: Cash would be great. Thanks.
On Friday, I began to get antsy, wondering which boat Rule Number One was coming in on. As people started to trickle in late Friday afternoon, I busted out on an OCD tear, tidying up the house, refilling all the shampoo and sunscreen dispensers, doing anything that popped into mind. I was carrying out a bag of trash when Rule Number One wound around the walkway, flashing that devil grin. I dropped the trash. Two women called out to her from the deck above, but before she could answer, I had my arms around her.
"Well, hello," she said, breaking away from me. "Are we out?"
"I don't care," I said.
"Where am I staying?" She started in to the house.
"You're staying with me." I grabbed her bag.
"Oh, am I now?"
"Uh-huh." I carried her bag into my room, closing the door behind us, recalling the folly of the bed arrangement in the house e-mail. She was going to stay with me, in my room.
"It's nice to see you," I said.
Embracing her, my fingers got lost in those thick curls and I pulled down, raising her chin for a kiss before losing my balance.
How George W. Bush's "Reality" Drove Me to Kismet
Later that night, Gwen reappeared at the top of the stairs, clutching her bag. She hugged me good-bye and said, "Well, back to the real world."
People frequently uttered those exact words upon leaving the house. I think what they mean is that it was time to head back to that fast-paced environment where they earned their money. I took it as a compliment; stressed-out days at the office followed by nights forking up takeout in front of Law and Order were not as fun as the slower, epicurean days at the beach. The closest I came to hacking that so-called "real world" was when I left the pleasant work environment of the Authors Guild for an associate editorship at a large magazine conglomerate.
Insert here the sound of a needle screeching across the record, because here's what I traded in to: two weeks of vacation; an environment that valued the amount of time present over the quality of work; the worst watercooler conversations on the planet. All while being bunched up in that business-casual bullcrap. (I deplore wearing clothes that don't reflect my mood, and as you can imagine, it's pretty rare that I'm ever feeling pastel or beige.)
This office was one of those cutthroat corporate settings where possessing a moral compass and an ounce of self-respect amounted to little more than bad career moves. It was the mind-numbing conversations, however, that pushed me to the brink. I soon learned that there were rules to these conversations. For instance, if someone were to ask you what you did the night before, it was perfectly fine to reveal that you took full advantage of Tijuana Taxi's two-for-one margaritas, that you were dragging ass today, but still managed to get those pages over to the art department before lunch. People would nod their heads knowingly because not too long ago, they too had gone straight from work to that same crappy hour, downing two-for-one of those corrosively sweet, piss-yellow concoctions criminally represented as a "margarita." Like you, they made a meal out of free chips and salsa, paying the following morning for their excessive intake of well-grade tequila, corn syrup, and a dinner that consisted of yet more processed corn. They too managed to achieve a modest amount of work before rewarding themselves for overcoming their self-inflicted wounds by sneaking in an hour of online shopping. At this office, shopping was huge and the cubicle standard was to carry thousands of dollars in credit-card debt, paying late fees and sliding-scale interest rates that would make a leg-breaking loan shark weep.
Imagine, however, if you described your previous night this way:
"I went to a friend's house, ordered some sushi, did a couple of bong hits, and then watched The Deer Hunter."
Now, while I've never done that--precisely--when you provide an answer like that in a corporate environment, people will look at you funny.
I found myself further ill equipped for workday chatter because a majority of the conversations had to do with prime-time television. With a few notable exceptions, I just didn't do prime-time television. Whoever decided, for instance, that "Everybody" loved Raymond, well, those people never asked me. So I never knew what anyone was talking about. Prime-time network television still pushes me within a hairsbreadth of full-fledged misanthropy. Believe me, I understand full well that I'm a nutjob for harboring the notion that in exchange for our getting to live in the world's sole superpower--instead of some corrupt outpost perpetually dry-raped by Texanoco--that we have the smallest responsibility to have some clue about the shit our government does in our name. I think a lot of people feel this way, only by the time they get home from work they're too tired to notice that what passes for "news" on their flickering TV screens is not news at all. When a corporate news program serves up a teaser on Michael Jackson, Botox, and kids snorting OxyContin, that's not news; that's infotainment fear-mongering bullshit feces designed to sell Range Rovers and Paxil. And you know what? If I were some fuck-face CEO hellbent on finding newer and better ways of rimming my shareholders, this is exactly what I'd want my workers doing: tying one on until going back to work saves them from themselves, and hooking their minds during off-work hours on the lowest level of stimulation that instills fear--not a crippling fear, but a low-grade nervousness that scares them just enough to keep them afraid of losing their jobs and being unable to buy all the newfangled bullshit offered up by our turbo economy.
Amazingly, I lasted six months at that job. Thankfully, I got out of there before 9/11, because if I had had to deal with all of that middlebrow corporate know-nothingism during that hysteria, I would have fucking cracked. Because this was when the river of bullshit breached the levees. After 9/11, George Bush addressed our nation and delivered a hard message: We would have to conserve energy and reduce our dependence on foreign oil…
Yeah. And I've got a fourteen-inch penis that speaks Dutch.
In the wake of 9/11, we weren't going to hear a message of conservation from an oil man any sooner then we'd hear an anti-drug message from a crack dealer. When my father was a boy during World War II, people grew "Victory Gardens" to save food for the soldiers. People lived with rations, proudly sacrificing to help the war effort. (During World War II, no one got a tax cut.) This is what Americans were supposed to do during a war. If George Bush had only asked, millions of Americans would have proudly sacrificed something to support our troops beyond a buck shelled out for a tailgate magnet saying that we supported them. The real sacrifice fell upon the shoulders of so many poor- and working-class kids. And what was George Bush's message to the rest of us?
Go shopping!
Considering the Bush Administration's extreme hostility toward homosexuals, I found it more than a wee bit ironic that he might implore us to go shopping.
I mean…shopping?
HOW FUCKING GAY IS THAT?
Still, when George Bush stood tall and made that call to action, we didn't let him down! We marched out of our houses and drove straight to our nation's malls, the American flags flying from the antennas of our SUVs flapping proudly in the breeze. We were going to show George Bush and the enemy just how much we supported our troops! We ran up credit-card debt equal to the GNP of Guam. And once our cards were maxed out, we refinanced until there wasn't enough equity left in our homes to buy a twenty-piece McNuggets.
I now understand that I turned up in Kismet at a time when I desperately needed a sanctuary from the so-called "real world." I pray that I'll never have to become a part of it again, because for me the "real world" was nothing more than a Company Store with consumer electronics. That's not the real world. It's just so many perverted notions strung together into an existence that has veered far off course. For thousands of years, humans have sat around a fire or across a table to eat together, taking stock of one another while unwinding and getting out of their own heads. A band of Senegalese peasant farmers crowding knee to knee in a hut around a communal plate of fish and rice that they eat with their fingers is far more civilized than what we've become. Too many Americans have been denied this part of being human because we've been made to spend too much time at work. That other existence in the City--as it has so degenerated--is not the real world. It's just a tawdry, second-rate theatre where we surrender the best part of ourselves, leaving fuck-all for our friends and family.
Please. Don't even get me started on that "real world" stuff…
Sharehouse Confidential
Sex, Drugs and the Single Life Inside an Epicurean Beach House
