He was a small man. A peculiar introduction, but it was how he appeared against the crowds he moved as part of – even when they were few, the closing staff of one café or the thin ranks of club patrons at 4:30 in the morning. On the sidewalk, ahead of me, his shape dared relate itself to the massive ancient townhouses of brown, dark gray, and cream-colored stone, that opened up like so many immovable curtains to a strip of sky colored reddened gold or pinkish blue at that hour. He enlisted an entire body, all of his limbs, in the act of walking. He didn’t need to. It was his choice. Concomitant with his languid freedom of movement, there were times when he could contract – one of those insects that rolls into a ball at your slightest touch. His walk suggested this also, a little hunch-backed. But when he needed no defense, when the night hadn’t started, when I was far away but waiting visible down the street, he assumed full size – wingspan you could call it, as he strove to move differently, with levitating altitude, breathtaking, more weightless, than how everyday arms and legs trudged.
I remember him best indoors, the two of us half-dressed and trying. When I did touch him, he trembled like a weak fist; when we covered the length of the sofa in each other’s arms he was a line of knuckles, five, probably more, starting at his forehead and ending at his toes. His hair was light, on his chest it was lighter – on the skin of his breast it contrasted like the milky color of a fingernail against darker, oily cuticle. He didn’t work out, his muscles felt like calluses. Around each nipple the skin was a hard dark disk, and his belly could be soft or taut depending on how he turned – on his side, a straight line, his elbow planted in the sheets and face chinned up as he finished a cigarette, gravity tugged his belly down into a long thin puddle that lay at his base, chest to belt, getting deeper, more likely to trickle off him the longer we stayed.
I first saw him in a place crawling with strangers. He was at work, far away.
A waiter in Soho, the bar-restaurant a short-enough walk from Houston Street to attract tourists. He moved like the tail of a cat, addressed requests from all sides, and caught my eye because no other server or patron wanted to be seen. He worked with frantically-divided attention and athletic shifts of weight on the soles of his turning feet – the dining area cramped, so he had to take multiple orders from a single position and make the diners feel like he saw no one else. He wore only black. Just out of the kitchen, his arms loaded with plates, his shirt slipped up and a slice of his ghostly midriff showed. I was sitting near the bar with few things on my mind, just there to drink.
We didn’t meet that night. Later, he’d say that he saw me. I came back a few times and didn’t find him – and then when I did, slowly introduced myself.
After we drank in other places, he asked me back to his apartment. I stayed until morning – and he cohered. No longer was he someone new with each contact, but a face, body, and spirit on which I could trace change. Real as a figure trapped in a shimmer of electric light, on the side of your bar glass, passing just behind you – now the size of a fly, now of your hand, and presently gone, but certain to reappear in another passing form.
Fixed places, like bars where he was a regular and the living room floor of the two-bedroom he rented, kept me grounded despite some uneasy premonition that everything would change, our location first. But that was all the anxiety I could keep – otherwise, with him, any wraith or future mortification vanished, capricious fancy was deactivated in service to my body that needed all it could get just to stay in his presence. Whatever he dismissed, it came back when I tried writing, alone, at Alexa’s, so one evening I just brought the notebook with me to his bar.
He’d told me, early, that while a student of literature and criticism, he was truly a poet. Would be after a flood or sea-sized riot descended on Washington Square. That doom was tangible in his moneyed classmates’ fear – they planned to leave the city so nothing would be taken from them they had not planned to give. As weeks passed, we would speak less about other people.
His poetry was concise. He used “I” frequently, and the letter was different in every poem. I got the feeling they didn’t belong to him, which was difficult to talk about. They all happened at night, even when he described nothing you could see. Quickly he sent me a whole manuscript. The epigraph, a few words from a letter of Keats, was a dying man’s presentiment of his transfiguration to flowers.
I think young people – and the first to succumb are often poets – get enraptured by the possibilities of death in their own writing. As a way of humbling, maybe, or even reanimating their mute elders and unreachable masters.
The night I sat in his restaurant with my notebook, the minute he saw me, he said he had to read whatever it was. I hated showing my work, to the point that my handwriting had recently grown illegible, but then he glanced at me more often than usual from over his plates, and I got the feeling he would impose, and I didn’t want to make him do that. I invited him to Alexa’s. She was in D.C. for the week.
My stomach turned the minute we walked in the door – it was from the toilet that, for the next hour, I sensed the rustling of pages and the strengthening odor of smoke. In his hands was my only copy of all I’d written since leaving home, and I wondered what he might add to the smushed crumbs and coffee cup halos on the margins. I cleaned myself and walked naked into the living room.
He was on a car ride with my father that lasted several pages. Asked me what it was – I said nonfiction and it sounded like an excuse. I stood at the center of the room, the carpet like grass on the soles of my feet, and he told me what I could, hesitantly, recall: that I hadn’t decided on a location, and between paragraphs the road jumped from Delaware to South Carolina, Vermont, Lake George. The occasion had taken years to develop as a repeated event, and I had apparently tried to condemn natural temporality to the most crude, economical space conceivable, literally the cheapest notebook I could find at a drugstore – he flipped the softening cardboard cover back and forth. It’s like I feared, he swore, the paper I wrote on was going to reject me. With his right hand, he held a cigarette like a lamp does its shade, and read something out loud – the narrator and his father look out their windshield and see the sun getting tug-of-war pulled from the sky. He didn’t do anything about it, just heaved a sigh – his breast grew and deflated, and momentarily the more visible amber hairs inside his neckline were closer to me. I found sweat pants and sat on the floor as he kept reading.
I tried to bend my eyesight and catch the expression falling off his downturned face. Its serenity was graver than I imagined.
I blinked, opened my eyes to his neck having straightened. He looked straight ahead for a moment, and then dropped his gaze on mine. On the ceiling Alexa still hadn’t found a fixture for the lightbulb. His eyes competed with it and won. “You write so much about your dad,” he said.
It was a quiet voice, and not a question, but there might have been one following that he didn’t, ultimately, say. He turned a few more pages, quicker, laid the notebook like a heavy thing on the next cushion, and joined me on the carpet.
We slept on couches. Both of them – in Alexa’s apartment, in his – had been picked from the curb, the cushions were pads and their dilapidated springs threatened to send you through the floor. Our arrival at either one would determine we spent the whole night there, on top of each other. We woke early with bad circulation in entire bodily regions, necks cramped, red-eyed. I wouldn’t remember a thing from the night before, like I’d been unconscious or dreaming.
It’s one thing to sleep next to a man like fallen tired brothers, and another to let him enter you, knowing he could break something if he wished or dared.
I would start stiffening when we entered the apartment, all our clothes still on and the noise outside like rush hour. On the way our talk buoyed with the conspiratorial buzz of business associates off-hours, persisting until the doorway, when our silence as someone looked for his keys commenced. Once inside, not a word: I took his shirt first like ceremony, and with his face caught in fabric he fell into my waist, so by the time his shirt was falling, but still in the air, we could kiss. Stood like that for five minutes. Picked a wall to lean on. Someone opened his eyes, broke away – that took faith – and moved, focused on his destination, to the couch. If one of us had more clothes on, he corrected the inadequacy just before taking a seat. Sitting up we continued to kiss, until whoever was less tired (usually me) or more eager (a toss-up) leaned forward, further until we were flat. His head supported by one arm of the couch, my legs hanging off the other, and while I ran a palm up the side of his face my eyes, nose, and mouth fell on his breast, dug into his skin until I saw black, my nose squished or inhaling all of him that odor could convey. My mouth just where his pectoral leveled off to his concave stomach, I started laughing, and the sound or my breath toasted his skin, where, if I had the idea, I could have counted the hairs with my tongue. He started laughing too, and if any pants or lone sock remained, they were removed, and then I don’t know.
It would have done me well to realize we weren’t the only people in that room. I forgot something. Men can be: hawkish heads of states entrenched, bishops or bodhisattvas under their chimeric robes, lone widowers counting, through the window, the homes of their surviving friends – and ultimately lovers, whatever ancient or unprecedented compulsion is their means to that end. They can be brutalized for the margins of their difference from the norm, they can be named, at different volumes, monsters or worthless. But if they find a lover and try, still they will be no more than human, in the arms of the same. It has only so many possibilities, and the one I’ve seen this world corroborate is fear. Changeless, the same element everywhere, filling every river basin and hair’s-width brook. And the fear of a man for a man differs from the fear between men and women. That’s how I felt at twenty-one – now, I get to be wraithlike and reject them both.
To beat a dead horse – we could have been oil barons executing a war no one knows, or neighbors meeting middle-aged and seeing in each other’s gray faces boys, or high school seniors beating someone half-alive. Maybe these were all on my mind, but not in it – as I lay next to him, shaking and hard, knowing that my silence or the quick coolness of my fingertip had power.
Reprinted with permission from I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine by Ryan Schulte, published in © 2026 by Rebel Satori Press. All rights reserved.
