Like an addict about to go into rehab, I binged on nightlife last night. It became one of the nights that I mark as a sign I need to change. One of those nights. Those Nights. A Those Nights night.
     First I saw this oily nosed person I slept with when I was 26. I remember I called him out of duty the next week and he didn’t call back and now we walk by and don’t even say hello, which is fine. Some sort of mutual agreement of ergonomics to cut the social fat out of life and streamline. He had his high collared v-neck sweater on and his scruffy hair in a pushed-around "rat’s nest".
     I passed by Dick’s Bar and stopped, remembered meeting Sean there one night last year – this month, April. Sean -- my last real, intense relationship. At least to me. Sean who was stocky in a muscular dwarf-like way and had red hair and became loopy and giggly when he got drunk, like he was in a medieval tavern. I called him a couple of months ago to reportedly "catch up," but really I just wanted to see if he was single and lonely and wanted to get back together. He never called back.
     For some stupid reason, at that moment in front of Dick’s Bar, I settled on that delusional, confidence-building philosophy that "The best thing to do is what you want to do!" and called him again on my cell phone and left this friendly message. As I was leaving it I surprised myself at the casual, strong, confident tone I had, perfectly bright and optimistic with jumpy phrases like "Hey dude!" and "Don’t be a stranger!" Proudly, I zipped up my cell phone and twirled the little earpiece around the phone and whistled cheerily down the street.
     Then, one block away, I ran into him. Sean – with all these little jute-handled shopping bags from 15 pointless stores fluttering in his hands and some guy, taller, with big frying pan pecs, standing next to him, staring at me with this frown of beef jerky and I swear I heard his voice telepathically in my head say "why are you talking to my boyfriend?" The large man stood there while Sean and I talked for maybe 30 seconds, enough time for Sean to say, "Have you met my boyfriend Naylor?" (or Mailer, or Railer?), and for me to just smile like a delighted hors d'oeuvre.
     "This is Mike?" the large man said.
     "No it’s Mike-Mike…" Sean corrected, "You know…"
     "Oh! Mike-Mike! Funny Mike!" the man said, his face lighting up.
     "That’s me!" I said, shaking my head like Sammy Davis Jr., practically doing a Bowery hobo soft-shoe routine in front of them.
     I rushed quickly into the Fat Cock and gasped out the story to Gordon who, after laughing, stood there and rolled his eyes for me. "Sean is such an asswipe!" he said, and I felt better. Later, though, he began analyzing me the way he does. "Of course, you realize you are simply jealous in this dynamic."
     ‘I know I am but—"
     "No no it’s not your fault," Gordon said, putting his hand on my forearm and shaking it chummily. "It’s our world. If the world were different it wouldn’t matter who was with who; we would all be having sex. God, I am so grossed out by our moral universe." Gordon was still smarting from the fact that he and his boyfriend got gonorrhea of the mouth and penis, as well as a weird, rare strain of chlamydia of the ears, which neither of them admits to being the carrier of. They broke up, and Gordon now believes the world is wrong on a paradigmatic level. "Even WE are conservative," Gordon said. "I don’t think in the 70s I would have to worry about who I was sleeping with or how much time I spent online looking for sex. In a sexually aware, non-violent world, we would be able to have sex anywhere and all the time."
     Alex swooped in on his Rollerblades with some cocaine, which I did in the bathroom with my key, making a little scoop and licking the residue off the key’s jagged metal mountain range. I walked out and saw the back of someone, in a cowboy hat, the rims curled into a particular potato chip shape, and I thought it was Sean, but it wasn’t him, just another cute, styled guy, and I spent the cheap three-minute surge of my sinusy high thinking about how I still see someone as Sean before I see a person as himself.
     I had two Cuervos on the rocks, and then Alex pulled out a long joint and we sat in the corner and smoked it. I sat there while a league of men walk by me, the oily nosed man I slept with last fall; Eric – the go-go boy I had a crush so long ago; Danny, who I should have called back, but didn’t for some reason, I can’t remember, and this man who was bald or head-shaved, who I got together with at the Gulch, the sex club down the street (I know I shouldn’t go there but I did.) I remember he started reporting the present tense like a golf commentator: "You are sucking my dick right now you are sucking my dick right now." At least, reader, I can report to you that on that night, I had enough self-respect to slip out of his dark booth. And as he passed by me at the Fat Cock, he didn’t even look at me, which is not surprising.
     The huge video screen hanging over the bar was playing old 70s porno, intercutting it with scenes from the 1985 comedic bomb, "Maid to Order," starring Ally Sheedy, who, riding on her success in the "Breakfast Club" and "St Elmo’s Fire," was trying to break out on her own as a leading lady, only to fail miserably. There she is scrambling around, trying to put on a funny face while doing a madcap pratfall into a vacuum – so sad to watch her desperate efforts to be "on" for everybody. I feel for her. I’m sure that there was a time in Ms. Sheedy’s life when someone she ran into on the street called her "Funny Ally!" and she just had to grin and bear it.
     Why am I here, I thought to myself. When am I going to look for someone real instead of having furtive sex that makes everything too uncomfortable to call them days after? When will I just flow easefully into a relationship like Greta, like Sean, god, even like Gordon, even though it ended in disaster?
     It’s been almost a year and I am clinging to the memory of Sean like he is some classic golden age film. Meanwhile, all I am to him is a dumb Sheedy vehicle. I’m one of those direct-to-video movies that sit in those pale, sad, faded video boxes, the forgotten displays in rental stores.
     I almost left right after that, and I would have, but then Gordon slapped my arm, "Hey Mike, that dorky guy over there is looking at you." I looked up and saw an incredibly cute, clear-eyed guy with a baseball hat on and a kind of high school letter jacket over his thick frame. He looked back at me, stopped, turned away, stopped, and stood by the corner. "He’s cute," I said, "don’t you think he’s cute?"
     "Whatever. He looks like a gym queen," said Gordon.
     "I think his name is Harry or Herb or something. He slept with my friend Burt," Alex said, sniffing. Before they could stain him anymore with their judgement, I got up and walked over to him, reached into that slowly drying, small reservoir of hope that I can’t believe still exists inside of me, the by now brackish pond of hope that encourages me to imagine that every guy I meet could be the one who has me believing in love like it is true and absolute and whooshing in that way it seemed to be when I was seventeen and I want nothing more.
     He was very nice, his name was Hal, and during the cab ride to his place he told me that he was a music therapist. I asked him to define what that was exactly.
     "It’s a modality used to understand behavior, essentially," he said and went into a long description I didn’t even hear because I was still thankfully drinking in the fact that he used the word ‘modality.’
     The cab bounced over the warped streets and we grabbed onto each other, him getting his hot mouth into my neck and making that area the same temperature as his tongue. And after kissing for a while, we heated up to the same degree. He paid the driver and I sledged my hand on his, but as we hiked up the stairs to his place, Hal Hal Hal, up the stairs above me, sorry Gordon I made plans with Hal tonight, sorry Alex it’s Hal’s birthday, sorry Gordon I can’t go out tonight Hal and I are going to a lecture on urban reform at the Cooper Hewitt Museum.
     "You have to be sort of quiet when we get in. My roommate’s asleep. It’s a loft space," he said and we walked up the stairs, then through the dark door, past a large white countertop that was probably the kitchen, through a living room, completely shrouded in darkness except for two tiny, floating and blinking phone lights, one red, one green, that were charging or recording or informing.
     We got to his tidy bedroom. By the bed, lodged into the wall, was a small, oddly placed white door, about shoulder height, with a golden latch.
     "What’s behind the door?"
     "My other roommate," he whispered.
     "It’s such a little door, like an attic door or something."
     "Do you want to see her?"
     "Who?"
     "My roommate."
     "Wait, what?"
     "My roommate is sleeping in her room behind the door, we could look at her. Do you want to?"
     "Not really…"
     "No, it’s OK," Hal said, "because she’s schizophrenic and she is on so much medication that she won’t even notice."
     "No, that’s quite all right."
     Hal then giggled to himself. I had to ask what he was laughing about five times before he finally told me. "Oh God it’s so bad."
     "What? Just tell me."
     "Sally doesn’t know it but she pays the whole rent. Yea, I know it’s weird. I’ve kind of tricked her into doing it. Every month I put out an envelope and ask her for the full amount of the rent and then in front of her pretend to put in money myself. Ha!" He blithely said, like it was a little side story of wit. "I mean whatever, she’s on disability anyway so it’s my tax money right?"
     Hal then pushed me down on the bed and started making out with me. Unfortunately, reader, I cannot report to you that I had enough self-respect to walk out of there. I lay there buried under his sloppy face, thinking about his poor strange roommate locked and catatonic in her weird Flowers in the Attic/Jane Eyre room. And he gets his hands down my pants and pulls out my dick, and he is jerking me off and I keep looking behind me, waiting for some knotty tangled-haired maniac with woodshavings and pinecones in her hair to burst through the door with a long sharp metal fork in her hand, stabbing the air with foam in her mouth, and then suddenly I turn around to Hal and he loudly says, "Bbbbrrrrrrrr! I wanna’ Beat that Meat! Beat that Meat!"
     WHAT IS WRONG WITH EVERYBODY?
     You’re my friend, aren’t you reader? If you are, you won’t think the answer for me comes in the form of those tired concepts that I am "going for the wrong guy" or "need to learn to love myself before someone can love me." I wish those lovely talk show concepts would work for me. I would give anything to find one self-help book, with a bold yellow title like "Unlucky in Love," that commands me to take stock of my life and make little lists, one that assigns me dream journals and affirmations in a clean, colorful workbook, and at the end of it, when I realize my wrongdoings, I walk into some clean space, like a Starbucks Café in the back of a Barnes and Noble, and there is my understated, understanding man, standing there, with round John Lennon glasses and a handsome face framed by a receding hairline, buying Mutual Fund magazine. If you promise me that this will happen, then I will begin to believe I am "going for the wrong guy."
     I have lived a life thinking that everyone I know could be the right one, so trust me when I tell you that the right ones for me are always wrong. The right ones are never single, never call back, or get together with the other right ones right in front of me. I think it’s more the overall system I am in. I feel horribly plugged into a system that keeps me in a perpetual slutty wheel of nights, those nights that never diverge from their same simple conclusions: me hung over, hailing a cab home after a one night stand. I can’t seem to escape those nights, and no self-help book or sudden religious notion can help me out. There is no one I don’t know or won’t know from those nights. Those Nights. Ahh! I am sick of Those Nights™! Please save me from them!

MIKE ALBO is a performer and writer living in Brooklyn. His first novel, Hornito, was published in 2000 by HarperCollins. He performs solo at various venues, and also as one third of Unitard, who will be performing at Joe's Pub on Thursday, Jan 24th. Then again, you can always experience the madness of Mike online at: www.mikealbo.com.