A Bit of Nothing

June 03, 1994

Winston insisted on taking his Subaru Outback into the desert. For some reason, he wanted the world to know he was gay and for some other reason, this car was the way to do that. He insisted that he read it in some Gay & Lesbian pamphlet on Castro Street, and soon the cash he earned from batting his eyes at old ladies and gentlemen at the restaurant all poured into his beloved Suburu. James, the man currently in the passenger seat watching the city behind them shrink and shrivel away, lectured Winston the second he first saw the car and heard the story:

“You know it’s actually a lesbian car, right?” 

A previously smiling Winston asked, “Huh?”

“The Outback is supposed to be the lesbian car. What you should’ve gone for is a Miata,” James answered as if he were some kind of expert on the “gay lifestyle.” At least Winston understood the subtleties of his own queerness — the codes in clothes, the smallest look in the right direction, the angle at which one’s smirk across the way signaled a romantic escape for another. James wore the same black shirt and jeans every day, a plain buzz of black hair, and the minuscule tilt of his smirk said nothing and thus displayed all of his uncertainties. And it was not good to be gay and uncertain. 

“Well,” Winston scratched his head in a menacingly thoughtful way that only James could notice and dread, “Let’s at least take her for a test.” 

And so here they were on their “test,” with no camping skills whatsoever, eight hours from home, stuck in an evening drive into an expanse of dirt that made them feel small and doomed. They were undoubtedly city boys, but somehow this eternal flatness called to Winston who “always wanted to see the stars,” and who also, “didn’t mean Hollywood, idiot.” 

At some point Winston wordlessly stopped the car, and his gaze kept forward. One of his short blonde curls drooped listlessly over his forehead, like a poisonous vine surrounded by other hanging temptations on his scalp. The air felt still and sound seemed to stop for a moment as a single particle of dust that flew by constituted the only motion between them. 

“I can still see a city behind me.” Winston glanced into the rearview mirror. James’ look followed. “And it’s just a spec. So much bullshit for a spec.”

Though James concurred he said nothing, glancing away at that empty star on the horizon, a helpless dot in a world of increasingly uniform deep blue. James returned his stare to Winston, who watched him with an impossibly cryptic smirk. A single dimple blew into his face like a crater full of mystery. James didn’t know why he felt so compelled to kiss him at that moment. And so he did.

Before he could fill the narrow gap, however, Winston recoiled back and James watched as he tried to decipher the world of his friend's heavily furrowed brow, of the words peering through that minuscule part of his lips that looked like an infinite void of all he feared to hear. The words slowly slithered through the cracks of Winston’s lips.

“So that’s what this was, find the first fairy you can in the big city and have them for a lay? And here I thought you were just an idiot.”

James swallowed an impossible lump. Before he could speak, the driver’s seat was empty and the door had opened to a hot flow of air and an endless sea of cracks in which James wanted to lose himself. Instead, he exited the other way, finding Winston leaning over the back of the car with a lit cigarette. He didn’t move when James appeared.

“I thought I knew,” James started, “I thought I could sense something,” he shook his head for himself, “Something I didn’t even want. I just wanted to think I could be right for once.”

Winston said nothing, and so they both sat in silence, looking back at their favorite star on the edge of the horizon, unaware of the thousands of miles of copy-pasted cracks in the dirt that relegated them to specs.

“You think too much about meaningless things,” Winston said, and a cigarette fell to his side, under his foot. 

“Says the one whose life revolves around a Subaru.”

They shared an unlit look, as the all-encompassing blue suffocated their vision and they appeared to each other as blobs among blobs. But James felt that he understood more in that moment, where the little things disappeared and he was left with himself. 

“Don’t insult her,” snorted Winston.

They watched the nameless city. James could fit it all under his finger.