This is a true story.
It was my last night in Austin, Texas, just before Ramee and I pulled up stakes and hauled them all the way out here to the East Coast. I was having a night out with friends, swapping appetizers at an overpriced tapas restaurant on 6th Street, cracking lame jokes, and all sort of quietly avoiding the topic of my leaving tomorrow. I was hurting. These were the last days of college for most of us, and there was something that was both resigned and desperate in the nostalgia we all felt. I didn't want to lose this town or any of these people, ever.
I was despondently poking at the hummus bowl with my fork when Sarah Hepola suddenly announced that she had always wanted to go to this campy gay bar across the street — what was the name? "Chaps," or something equally ridiculous. It was disco night, and she wanted to dance.
The girls were all for it. The guys looked uncomfortable as they tried to think of a way to back out that didn't make them look like dorks. I scarfed the last quesadilla and said, "Game on." When Sarah Hepola gives you a choice like that, you take it. You don't argue with her, because first of all you'll lose, and even if you win she'll just go without you, and then you don't get to hang with Sarah Hepola for the rest of the night. And now that I was going, the other guys couldn't refuse without losing face, so we settled the bill and made for the club.
As soon as we walked in, we were submerged in disco and lasers and artificial smoke. You couldn't hear yourself think through the music. I felt an urge to walk in slow motion, like Chow Yuen Fat in The Replacement Killers. To get to the main floor, you had to pass through a gauntlet of male dancers, grinding away on steel pedestals, buff and disturbingly shiny in their speedos and thongs. I'm not sure even Chow could have looked smooth walking through that.
The girls hit the dance floor. The rest of us — the guys, I mean — ordered drinks and huddled at a table near the bar. If we were just a little bit cooler we would have been dancing as well; sadly, we were not that cool. Oh, we acted nonchalant and made witty, self-deprecating remarks to each other and tried not to attract too much attention to ourselves (as though any self-respecting gay man in a place with a name like "Chaps" would pay any attention to a trio of nervous, dorky, and screamingly hetero college boys in the first place). But mostly we stared wistfully at all the fun that less self-conscious people were having with pretty girls who were not our dates.
I drank my bourbon and coke in slow motion, like Chow Yuen Fat.
Suddenly Aaron bugged his eyes out and, forgetting himself entirely, pointed. One of the pedestal dancers had stripped off his thong and was now gyrating in a sort of . . . er . . . this sort of sleeve, like a big nylon condom with ties around back, that allowed him to show off every dimension of his not-unimpressive anatomy without actually exposing anything. He swung his member around like a bored cop twirling his nightstick, and the women — there seemed to be tons of women in this gay bar — went nuts.
And at the very moment that I turned to look, the dancer whipped out a can of lighter fluid — God knows where he'd been hiding it — sprayed fuel all over his swinging unit, and proceeded to light his wang on fire.
There are moments when social inhibitions fall away like an old skin, and we all join together in transcendent brotherhood to participate in the unfettered joy of pure spectacle — when your jaw hits the floor and all you can do is just stare, insecurities be damned. Who wouldn't? Who, gay or straight, free or inhibited, could deny the awesomeness of that sight: the flames curling and popping like a flag in a high wind; the dancer still gyrating, arms outstretched as though delivering a beatitude; his face lit from below with a rapture that could only be described as childlike, as if to call out, laughing, "Look at me, Mom! I set my WANG on fire!" And then, when one of his cheering onlookers stepped up to the pedestal, a Winston Ultra Light perched in her outstretched lips, and leaned over and lit her cigarette from his flaming cock! . . . who could gaze upon such a scene and ever deny that, when all is said and done, a world in which this sort of thing can happen is indeed a great world in which to be alive?
No one I'd ever drink with, that's for sure.
The next morning, I didn't feel any better about leaving Austin. But I had something special that I could take with me when I went, something that I shared with a select few people. Most of those old friends have fallen by the wayside; I still keep in touch with Sarah, though her visits are few and far between. But I will always, always remember the guy who lit his wang on fire.
Flame on, my friend. Flame on.
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