Boston Boys Club. Johnny Diaz
sand dunes in Provincetown. The great body is the result of his boxing hobby, which he says is stress-release from his accounting job in the financial district. Boxing is great for cardio, he always says, but I’ll have to take his word for it. I’m a writer, not a fighter. Picture a more rugged and built Freddie Prinze Jr. before he went crazy-blond for the two Scooby Doo movies and that’s Rico.
“Good to see you, dude,” Rico says, handing his coat to the coat check dude and then giving me one of his rib-choking bear hugs that literally lift me off my feet.
“Want a drink, dudette? Let me guess, the usual, right?” Rico offers.
Vodka with Diet Coke, aka Skinny Black Bitch, is my tonic. I didn’t name it; that’s what the bartenders here tell me it’s called. A black bitch is vodka with regular Coke and the former is all I order. Blame my predictability on my mild OCD—the one in the medical books. I always order the same thing at restaurants and bars and I get stuck in ruts like coming to Club Café on Thursdays after 10 P.M. (Just don’t call me on Friday nights when Dateline and 20/20 are on the tube.) But some say I have another kind of OCD: Obsessive Cuban Disorder, since I manage to lace my everyday conversations with Cuban references or inject them into my feature stories. Plus, I love our Miami hometown girl Gloria Estefan.
But Beantown keeps growing on me. Although there aren’t many Cuban-Americans here, I always wanted to experience the seasons besides summer, write for The Boston Daily, and get in touch with my inner New Englander. I traded sopa de pollo (chicken soup) for clam chowdah. And all the buildings here have stories to tell. Being in Boston is like living in an urban museum. With a walk or a jog, you pass buildings from different centuries, each with a unique history and sometimes connected to a famous or infamous figure. Miami, my hot endless summer for twenty-nine years, looks like it was just unpacked out of a box on CBS’s CSI: Miami.
Rico and I are about the same height, five-feet-ten, and I have to say that the physical similarities end about there. I’ve got the tumble of dark brown curls and thick black eyebrows like two sculpted awnings that umbrella my Cuban coffee-bean eyes. People say I look a lot like a skinnier Ethan, the guy on Survivor who won the $1 million a few years ago and who plays soccer. I can see why people have told me that. Hey, I’m just glad that people don’t get me confused with the other Survivor winner, you know, the fat gay naked guy who has been fighting the IRS for not paying taxes on his winnings.
“Any cute guys tonight?” Rico asks as I recover from his bear hug with a d-e-e-p breath.
We make our way deeper into Club Café, also fondly known as Café SoGay, which is a restaurant in the front, with a lounge and bar in back. We pass a row of guys, spectators in a parade, as they stand along the walls of each room.
Another crush of younger guys, sporting American Eagle T-shirts, Old Navy hoods, blue jeans, and baseball caps tilted to the side, plop themselves in the middle of the room, like an island of youth. Like piranhas, the older guys—awkward in youthful garb that doesn’t quite disguise the fact that the salt in their hair pours out more than the pepper—circle around and watch their potential gay prey. Destiny’s Child pops up on the monitor and Beyoncé, Kelly, and Michelle’s voices ricochet off the mirrored walls behind each bartender’s station.
“Can you keep up baby boy? Make me lose my breath…” the trio harmonizes.
“Yeah, there are some Twinks here and some new faces. Like Mary J. Blige says, let’s go percolate around the club,” I tell Rico. (For the uninitiated, Twinks are late-teen or early-twentysomething gay guys who are uniformly thin, wear tight A&F shirts, and who are new to the whole gay bar scene. They look like any one of the boyish, teenage hunks you’d find on The CW network, formerly The WB and UPN.)
Rico flashes his smile as he passes each guy, almost like a Miss Little Italy would when greeting her public. His smile can be compared to a gamma ray. When he smiles, which he does often, you need sunglasses to protect your eyes. It’s that bright. He knows his smile is his trademark and he flashes it often, almost like a reflex, in a Tom Cruise sort of way. It’s how he meets guys. He smiles and they come, in more ways than one. Problem is you never know what Rico’s thinking when he smiles. Whether he thinks you’re an asshole, hates what you’re wearing, or doesn’t exactly get what you’re trying to say, the smile appears. It’s mischievous like a Cheshire cat. Even at funerals, the smile makes a cameo appearance. And he gets away with it.
When Rico doesn’t smile, he has mournful eyes that seem to harbor something deep and dark. His smile seems to mask some sort of pain, some longing. I can only guess because he’d never talk to me about such things. He can be inaccessible emotionally. We basically talk about guys and how to cut corners financially. Whatever he hides, he keeps it close to his vest as he does his boxing gloves. He’s never told me and I suspect that lots of spontaneous sex is his panacea.
As Destiny’s Child winds down from their booty-shaking video, Laura Branigan suddenly appears on the monitor, belting her 1982 hit “Gloria.”
“Gloria…I think they’ve got your number…GLORIA.”
The music mixes with and seems to add new life to the chatter from the scores of simultaneous conversations in the jumping Club Café. By the entrance near the lonely $1.50-service-charge ATM, a couple of guys seem to be whispering to one another as they look up.
It’s a bird. It’s a plane. No, it’s The Kyle, whose arrival is marked with his usual flair for dramatic entrances. By this, I mean he stands under one of the brighter lights in the bar and starts waving to people across the room like he is a victim drowning in a Baywatch rerun, just so people will know he’s in the house.
This six-foot-three, lean, dirty-blond curly-haired former model from the Midwest walks into the place like a movie star of Brad Pitt caliber, waving to people and nodding his chin up to greet folks he doesn’t necessarily recognize but who definitely recognize him. He stops to sign a few autographs. Really.
He’s no movie star although he is a dapper dresser with khaki pants and long-sleeved Polo shirts. He’s a reality show has-been whose once shining star has begun to fade and fall. Kyle still acts like a coterie of cameras shadow his every move, record his every word, and capture his every drama-dripping moment.
Kyle was the gay dude on the reality show The Real Life, which chronicles seven twentysomethings as they live together under one roof in Somewhere USA to see what happens when you put seven unstable opposites together with cameras all around them.
Kyle was on the Boston season, which airs in rerun hell on the weekends. Modeling scouts discovered him on the show, and he graced runways in New York, Miami, Los Angeles, as well as Milan and Paris. But as soon as the show wrapped up its fresh crop of new episodes two years ago, Kyle found himself without a televised runway to showcase himself.
Editorial modeling jobs and runway work dwindled, and his fizzling star dimmed and now barely flickers. His latest venture is to try to enlist in the Battle of the Genders challenge, which pits former Real Life contestants against one another in extreme sporting competitions. That season airs now and sometimes you can see it on the monitors here at Club Café. Kyle firmly believes the show will resurrect his career, whatever that may be.
Kyle (we call him KY for a sloppy KY Jelly incident inside a hot tub during a threesome on one of the most-talked-about Real Life episodes of all time) soaks up every stare and bit of attention he attracts wherever he goes. Tonight included.
Rico and I see him coming our way near the bar. Mr. KY spots us right away. Like a head-on collision, it’s too late to avoid him. Kyle has always seemed like a good guy but his constant need for attention has made me wonder: What wouldn’t he do to get it and what happens when no one cares anymore to ask him about the show? So I chitchat with him now and then to be socially diplomatic but I keep it simple and brief.
Rico, who doesn’t care for Kyle and even rudely ignores him sometimes, manages to turn around. He focuses on flagging down the bartender and scans the rows of beer and liquor bottles that bedeck the wall mirror and shelves at the bartender’s station.
I’m on my own here with The Kyle and there’s nowhere for