Swish Read online

  As I double-clicked on the file I felt a frisson of regret at the thought of all the potential in the world. There are men to be had, I thought, men who will pull me into their arms and their apartments and spear me without knowing my name or, possibly, how to spell; but I have lost the knack for reshaping myself, and they are beyond my reach.

  I sat back in my chair as the file opened and prepared for the fond reminiscence of a time long gone. The man whose memory had given me so many pleasant moments appeared on my screen.

  And he was totally plain.

  He had mediocre teeth, and, though the photographer had caught his face at a good angle, two seconds of further examination revealed a visage no more comely than average, and from certain angles less so.

  The units did not exist capable of measuring my disappointment. How could ship.jpg have betrayed me so? Or was it my critical faculties that had betrayed me by changing their standards as I aged? The frisson of regret I had felt before opening the file was slipping away moment by moment, but I could not help suspecting that it was taking with it my sense of possibility.

  I deleted the file, put my computer to sleep, and left my desk. On the way upstairs I caught sight of myself in the hallway mirror and realized that, no matter what shape I took, the raw material would remain the same and that, no matter who I imagine myself to be, my reflection will never show me anyone better than I am.

  I knew I had to take strong measures to keep from sinking further toward despair, so I hurried to the bookcase for some Austen. After a few seconds’ thought, I settled on Sense and Sensibility, but though I searched the shelves for twenty minutes, I’m looking for Mr. Right but I’ll settle for Mr. Right Away was all I could find.

  ON CHEERLEADING

  “Let’s watch ESPN,” said my brother, grabbing the remote control. It was Thanksgiving morning, and we were lolling around the apartment we shared, whiling away the hours before dinner with my friend Debbie. We had no interest in watching the repulsive Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. I had lobbied for The Christopher Lowell Show, a program in which a flaming homosexual redecorates houses using only Elmer’s Glue and staples, but Jeremy would have none of it.

  As the TV flickered on, I opened my mouth to start complaining so insufferably that he would be forced to change the channel, but before I could speak I was silenced by what I saw on the screen in front of me. It was a college cheerleading championship. Thirty fresh-faced cheerleaders, boys and girls, were running around in perky uniforms, grinning like madpeople, shouting cheers as they flipped their way across a mat and threw one another thirty feet in the air and caught one another on the way down. It was like Bring It On, only real.

  I was instantly filled with self-loathing. During the activities fair in the first week of college, years before, I had stopped at the cheerleading table, but by the time they called to let me know about the informational meeting I had already scheduled a conflicting choir audition, so I decided not to become a cheerleader. (I also decided not to become a fencer or an appreciator of modern dance, and though I did go to a meeting of the Theosophical Society because I had a crush on one of its members, in the end the fact that nothing anybody said there made any sense proved stronger than my attraction to Jason’s cheekbones, and I didn’t go back.) But now, watching these children, practically children, flying into the air as if adulthood weren’t waiting on the ground to pounce once they came down, I was overwhelmed with regret that I had squandered my youth in serious pursuits. Choir, indeed. I should have been a cheerleader, and now it was just too fucking late.

  But after half an hour or so of vicious self-excoriation, I stopped short. Wait a second, I thought. I’m a twentysomething gay man living in Manhattan. There’s got to be a cheerleading squad I can join.

  And, as if it had read my mind, Google took me posthaste to the website for Cheer New York. More alive with joy than I had been since seeing my first opera at age six (The Marriage of Figaro), I left a giddy voice mail saying I was interested in joining the squad; on the way to dinner I made Debbie hold my keys and wallet and change while I executed a front handspring, the most complicated move I remembered from the gymnastics I’d done at Jewish Community Center summer camp when I was six. I landed precariously—I’d forgotten most of what they taught me in camp about equilibrium—but in the end I kept my balance. “I’m going to be a cheerleader!” I said, and when we got to the restaurant I was so inspired by my new life as a cheerleader-elect that I almost ordered a salad for Thanksgiving dinner. Then I saw the pie the waiter was bringing to somebody else’s table and I figured I could just as easily start my life as a cheerleader-elect the next day. During our meal I could barely concentrate on the conversation, so enthralled was I by fantasies of doing flips and getting thrown in the air and being caught on the way down by a fellow cheerleader who would fall in love with me and get me a dog named Spiffy and make me happy forever.

  Unfortunately, when I visited the Cheer New York website again after dinner, I realized that joining the squad wasn’t going to be quite as easy as I’d expected, because, according to the bios on the “About Us” page, every single member was either a gymnast, a professional dancer, or a former college cheerleader. The rudimentary front handspring I had performed for Debbie and my brother on the sidewalk was the most difficult gymnastic feat of which I was capable. I had taken some dance classes the summer after I finished college, from a woman named LaToya who kept a studio behind her hair salon. I would show up on Tuesdays and Thursdays at noon and spend an hour and a half attempting to plié and pas de chat and pirouette. The only other student in the class was twelve, and she was better than me. After class one day I asked LaToya if I could get a haircut; I may have been the first white person whose hair she had ever styled, but she did an excellent job. After brushing the stray hairs off my neck, she told me she was putting the dance classes on hold for the rest of the summer. I suspect she simply didn’t have the heart to tell me that I was not cut out for a life of kicks and chaînés.

  And so now it was with a heavy heart that I shut my computer down, made three cups of chocolate pudding, and turned on the Golden Girls marathon on Lifetime Television for Women and Gay Men. I would obviously never make the cheerleading squad. I was barely able to brush my teeth without tripping; what could I hope to contribute to a cheerleading squad populated by experts? I finished the pudding and considered making more. The best dream I had ever had was dead, and in its place I felt a void that not even the Golden Girls’ biting insouciance could fill, not even in the episode where they sneak into somebody else’s high school reunion so they can meet men and Rose has to pretend to be the school’s Korean exchange student Kim Fung-Toy.

  But the next morning, when I went again to the Cheer New York website immediately upon waking up not that I was obsessed or anything, I understood that fate had spoken, because there was a new section that said they were having tryouts in a week and a half. If I had to claim to be a gymnast or a professional dancer or a former college cheerleader in order to make it onto the squad, then so be it; neither mortal nor god was going to keep me away from the Alfred E. Smith Recreation Center come Monday week.

  When the appointed day arrived and I walked into the huge gym on the second floor of the dilapidated building, it appeared empty at first, but then through an open door at the back I saw a group of homosexuals filling out pieces of paper en masse. I joined them and started answering the questions on the form they gave me. Mercifully, it did not ask anything about dancing or gymnastics or prior cheerleading experience. There was a section for “Special Skills” in which I wrote “speak French, German, Italian proficiently; have eliminated gag reflex.” This was a lie; I had not eliminated my gag reflex, but I figured that if they insisted on a demonstration I could always say I was still three days away from being officially STD-free. The form also asked for my weight, and I wrote it down honestly, possibly for the last time in my life.

  Once the co-captains of the squad, who introduced
themselves as Horace and Javier, had collected all the forms, they led us over to the bleachers, where the coach, a queeny, mous-tachioed martinet the size of Tinker Bell, welcomed us to the clinic. His name was Christopher, he told us, though on the squad people referred to him as Princess. “But calling me Princess is a privilege,” he continued sternly. “You have to earn the right to call me Princess.”

  He went on, but it became somewhat difficult to concentrate on what he was saying when a dozen guys and one woman in startlingly bright but uncampy uniforms (shortsleeved shirts and long pants for the men, a short halter top and a pleated skirt for the woman—all, lamentably, polyester, but I came to learn that this was standard fabric for cheerleading uniforms) began practicing behind him on the other side of the gym. My heart leapt within my breast to see a grown man jump into the hands of two other grown men who hurled him up into the air, where he executed a complex maneuver that had undoubtedly required years of study to master but that filled him in this moment with the grace and fire of a sub-Saharan predator or a bird long dead even to myth. Then he fell back down into his protectors’ arms as if they had been formed to fit him.

  Watching this, I became, if possible, even more determined than before to become a part of the squad. I tore my gaze away from the practice and unobtrusively surveyed the other homosexuals gathered around me. There were a couple of women and perhaps two dozen men, all of whom I hated. Who knew how many new squad members would be accepted? What if they were looking for ten new cheerleaders and I was number eleven? Two or three of the hopefuls were unspeakably beautiful and I hated them most of all. To my left in the row in front of me sat a gorgeous Latino with a Japanese character tattooed on his arm; I wanted him to ravish me and then die.

  We started the tryouts, in which we had to perform complicated cheers like “Go, New York, let’s go!” and “New York, let’s hear it! Yell ‘Go, fight, win!’” I spent the entire time with a look of grim concentration on my face, hoping that my cohorts would trip and fall while I got everything right. Every once in a while I would remember that I was supposed to be cheering and freeze my face in a rictus of joy for a minute or two. Then I would forget again and go back to using my psychic powers to give my competitors acute appendicitis.

  At the end of the tryouts we were given the opportunity to show off any special skills we might have. Since I suspected that my proficiency in foreign languages wasn’t particularly relevant to the duties I would be asked to perform as a cheerleader, and since, looking around, I thought it likely that everybody on the squad had long ago extinguished all traces of a gag reflex, the only thing left to display was my front handspring, which went beautifully until I landed and fell on my ass. Humiliated, I asked to try again; a lanky homosexual who looked to be about twelve years old grabbed my arm and hissed under his breath, “Lean forward when you land.” I did, and I stayed upright. Figuring I should quit while I was at least not behind, I fled as soon as the tryouts were over. “Phone the hotline after noon tomorrow,” called Princess as I made good my escape, “and there’ll be a message with the names of the new squad members.”

  The next morning, I showed up trembling for my wretched day job. (I spent hours every weekday transcribing tapes of interviews in which people said things like, “Yeah, as I told you, we are a very vanilla house, even, as I told you, futures are mainly used to hedge some positions or to implement continuing duration strategies, but not as an important distinction or asset class.” I did not know what any of this meant but it was clear to me that I was helping rich people become even richer while I had to pull out a calculator to see whether I could afford to buy peanut butter.) At the stroke of noon I tore off my headphones, ran to the phone, and dialed the Cheer New York hotline. My name was the third or fourth that Princess’s voice lisped on the message, and the instant I heard it I began jumping up and down and running around the office shouting, “New York, let’s hear it! Yell ‘Go, fight, win!’” and doing toe touches. I tried to figure out a way to insert an i into my name so I could dot it with a heart, and I started making plans to be really mean to all the unpopular kids.

  The next day, unfortunately, I had my first cheersetback. There are two cheerleading positions, flyer and base; flyers are the people who get thrown in the air and caught on the way down, and bases are the people who do the throwing and catching. On a traditional squad, the flyers are petite girls and the bases are burly boys. However, since there were only four girls on Cheer New York and only two of them were petite, we had to bend the rules a little bit and let men do some of the flying. I am under five-six and 140 135 pounds, not as tiny as Princess or the bird long dead to myth, but still much smaller than most of the other guys on the squad, so I looked forward to lording my position as a flyer over rivals and loved ones alike. All my friends would be stuck on the ground and I would float above them.

  Except that Cheer New York had assigned me to a new category, that of “mid-base flyer.” In the e-mail Princess sent out to the squad informing us of our positions, he explained that mid-base flyers would indeed fly, but never above the bases’ heads. I understood immediately that this meant he thought I was too fat to be thrown in the air. I sent a brittle response saying that I thought more useful positions to designate would be “top” and “bottom.” Princess replied, “LOL!!!!!!! But seriously, we discourage squad members from sleeping with each other, for the benefit of team morale.” And I was like, why the fuck didn’t you mention this at the orientation?

  That weekend there was an LGBT athletic team Christmas mixer, to which Cheer New York was invited, at a bar in Chelsea called XL. I hate bars with a deep and abiding hatred: they are loud, so I can’t have a conversation; often smoky (depending upon city ordinances), so I can’t breathe; and full of intimidating people with stylish haircuts, so I spend a lot of time in the corner repeating over and over the words “I will not die alone.” I went to the mixer fully prepared to spend an anguished hour failing to mix with anybody before going home and eating a pound of M&M’s.

  Instead, I had a totally great time.

  From the instant I walked in, the cheerleaders were so welcoming that I felt as if I were at a party with old friends where the music just happened to be too loud. It was also heartening to see that, of twenty-five squad members there, perhaps seven were white, a marked contrast to the racial segregation that pervades even the gay community. Furthermore, the cheerleaders were so flaming they could have melted granite. Nobody who spends more than three seconds in my company can say that I am a paragon of traditional masculinity. But next to some of these guys I was Arnold Schwarzenegger. And, to top it all off, there were presents: a “Cheer Loud, Cheer Proud” T-shirt, which I immediately put on and tied very tightly to expose my midriff, and a really gay silver sparkly Santa hat. The cheerleaders were the most touchy-feely group of which I have ever been a part, and within moments I was leaning all over people, hugging them, putting my hands in their pockets, and being swishier than I had allowed myself to be in fifteen years of being out, sucking my teeth and saying things like, “She’s such a bitch!” while pointing dramatically at a big, beefy man holding pom-poms and a cosmo.

  It felt like home.

  Two days later I went to my first cheerleading practice, and it was a joy from start to finish. The ratio of bases to flyers was off, so I learned the flyer parts, the first of which involved my placing my hands on the shoulders of two rugged men named Andy and Gian, leaping into their hands, and being lifted up so that my feet were at the level of their chests. This was called a half extension and it was terrifying.

  It wasn’t so much that I was so high up—I was maybe four feet off the ground—as how unstable it felt. When you’re on a four-foot-high wall you can just walk along it as if you were on the ground. But in Andy and Gian’s hands, though the two of them were doing exactly what they were supposed to do, I might as well have been trying to balance in the middle of the air on Jell-O. The rest of the squad was gathered around us, so if things w
ent awry I was unlikely to crack my head open, but while my brain understood this my trembling body did not.

  And then came the dismount: on Princess’s cue, Andy and Gian flung me up into the air, and I became briefly perhaps not a sub-Saharan predator but still a creature I had never been before, bound not by the laws of physics but only by the reaches of my own vision, which seemed in that instant fierce and limitless. I hung for a heartbeat weightless and immortal, filled with possibility, and then I fell.

  I do not usually remember my dreams; when I do I find that they have been stories of writing sequels to Paradise Lost in ungrammatical French rebus, or of silencing my critics by producing a knitted model of the human brain and naming all its parts correctly, or at least faking it in such a way that they don’t realize I have no idea what I’m talking about. On occasion I also dream, boringly, that I am falling. The instant before I hit the ground I wake up with a start, my heart racing and my eyes wild and my breath short, because what choice do I have but to die, if not tonight in my dream then tomorrow in an explosion or next year of a disease or at any moment of despair?