The last time I bought Converse All-Stars I was eleven.  My age barely bigger than my shoe size.  Black high tops, that's all I really remembered.  Over two decades later, I was in a Foot Locker, looking for some new kickers, and these oddly verdant blue All-Stars sat at the center of adult sneakers that looked desperately childish.  Sneakers that looked like they were made of teething rings and mobile parts.  Bright orange and pink coily disasters of sneakers.

I needed new sneakers because, like everything else in my life  in 2011, my sneakers were  falling apart.  Frayed heels.  Permanent knots in the laces. 

Still, I wandered around Downtown Crossing in my comfortably ruined sneakers searching for something better suited to my feet than the Converse All Stars.  Six stores later, I returned to Foot Locker to buy the Chucks.  The very nice lady in the referee costume informed me that you want to buy All-Stars a size smaller than your usual size, because they run big.

This is not, precisely true.  The reason Converse All-Stars run a size too large is because the soles are made of onion skin and  sneezes.  You buy them in your normal size, and then buy support pads to put in the bottom.  Otherwise, your feet constantly feel like you're walking on syringes and seashells.  Like you're walking in the junkyard where Tooth Fairies dispose of the useless baby teeth they collect.

By the time I arrived at Zuzu's house, one of the many places I'd been crashing since the last time the world ended, the backs of my ankles were practically worn through to the bone.  

Two weeks, and an assortment of cushiony foot pads later, I went to visit my father.  I decided to test my foot endurance by walking  a mile and a half round trip in the shoes with the pads, and then without the pads, and then barefoot.  After nearly five miles, I came to the conclusion that I would be better off wearing two pairs of socks than these fashion accessories that Americans have been conned into believing are shoes.  If only eleven year old me had written a blog about these when I was younger, I wouldn't have spent the first half of July limping like I'd just gone river dancing with Jeff Gilooly.

Last night, I put on my starting to conform to my feet All-Stars, and headed to Gayme Night.  Gayme Night being an assemblage of queer friends who meet bi-weekly (which definitely calls their real sexuality into question) to drink and play board and card games.

This was to be my first night at Gayme Night, having been invited by a recent poet transplant to Boston.  The night itself was a blast.  Four definitely gay guys, one definitely bi girl, and a couple who may or may not be gay or bi, but one was definitely a man, and the other a woman, but it was their house, and their party.  If they were, indeed, straight, they were at least the sort of people who surrounded themselves with gay people without making it a point to surround themselves with gay people.  At no point did either of them fawn over our sarcasm, refer to any of us as precious, or attempt to put any of us in their purse for the next time they go shoe shopping.

After four beers, and two rum and Cokes, I noticed that the other guy who wasn't coupled had been complimenting my Apples To Apples skills more than can be considered polite or accurate.  Especially as he ended up winning the game, with five exciting adjective cards like Graceful, Charming,  Worldly, Intense, and Nerdy, while I came in dead last, winning only one round.  The adjective that I won was Busty.

As the game neared its inevitable conclusion,  the future game winner began to casually mention how he loves hairy guys, while alternating between looking at my arms, typing things on to his phone, and then showing his phone to the gay guy sitting next to him.  I couldn't decide whether he was hitting on me, or whether he just had five drinks.  Partially because I, myself, had had five drinks.  And partially because less than a month before, a guy had fallen asleep in my arms after an amazing date, and amazing sex, and told me he thought we were perfect for each other.  Then he gave me a morning blowjob, sent me an e-mail about what a great time he had, and stopped returning my calls and texts.

So, instead of flirting or Stereotype Forbid, actually saying "Hey, I think you're smart, and attractive, and funny, and I would like to spend a long time pressing various parts of our bodies together.",  I shook his hand, and left.

While we were playing, I was fielding texts from an old high school friend who needed some relationship advice. And, as soon as I was out the door, I decided to listen to her predicament, so I could forget about mine.

It was nearing midnight.  I had the choice between a ten minute or so walk to the nearest T, or thirty minutes or so back to the place I was staying in Cambridge.  I decided to walk all the way, and invested myself in the phone call.

According to my phone,  the call lasted one hour and three minutes.  At which point, I looked up and had absolutely no idea where I was.  I saw a street sign that said Broadway, and figured, I (like many very gay scripts) used to live just off  Broadway a few years ago, and I could easily get from any point on Broadway to get back to Cambridge by taking a right and walking to either Mass Ave or Somerville Ave, depending on whether I was on Broadway in Cambridge or Broadway in Somerville.  But while all of my surroundings looked sort of familiar, none of them looked actually familiar.  Oh sure, there was a laundromat.  Hey, there's a liquor store.  A chain pizza place I ordered from that had locations in Cambridge, Somerville, and a few other places that didn't help me determine my location.  

I decide to take a right on a side street, because, regardless of which Broadway I'm on, taking a right will take me in the proper direction.  Unless, of course, I took a wrong turn directly out of the house, and am in neither Cambridge nor Somerville.

It wasn't long before I saw a sign welcoming to Winchester.

I've lived in Boston for over ten years now.  I had never even HEARD of Winchester, let alone been there on purpose.  This was.  This was bad.  It was at this point that I noticed that my backpack, which was filled with formerly blank books, and my computer, and an assortment of other heavy books was starting to chafe my shoulders.  And my shoes.  My goddamned feet.

In front of me was a rotary.  The most hellacious of all traffic  inventions.  A paved crop circle whose usage laws vary from state to state.  The one useful thing about them is that most of them have to be marked very well with bright green signs directing you which exit to take.  Such was not the case with this one.  

The road I came from had a bank on one side of the street, and a restaurant with a very distinct retro font.  I took a mental snapshot, checked my phone to see what time it was, wished I hadn't, and made my way toward what appeared to be either a small lake or a bay.  The perfect place to look in the distance and see how far I was from the city.

I could not see the city in the distance.  Thus, I figured, I was facing the wrong way.  I was not taking into account that, technically, there is not just one wrong way to face, but a nearly an infinite amount of ways.  In fact, there was really only one direction to look in that would be correct, so all I'd proved was that I was currently walking the wrong way.  It did not tell me which other way was right.  Still, I walked back to the rotary, and couldn't find Broadway.  I saw the bank, and the restaurant with the odd font, but no Broadway.  I looked all the way down in each direction until I saw another rotary.

Emily's house is in Arlington, not too far from two rotaries.  Arlington, I guessed, was near Winchester.  It's at this point that I realized that I had walked an hour and a half in the completely wrong direction.  Still, now that I knew where I was, I could walk toward Mass Ave, and either catch a late bus or a cab back to the house.  So I walked, and I walked, and I walked.  None of the landmarks I was expecting were popping up.  I figured maybe I'd gone the wrong way, so I walked back to Rotary #1.  Bank, check.  Weird font, check.  I walked back to Rotary #2.  Bank, check.  Weird font, check.  What the fuck?  The names of the restaurants were different, but that was it.  I walked back.  I walked forth.  I backed.  I forthed.  I...completely lost track of which rotary was #1, and which was #2.  

A bus approached.  I rushed toward one of the oddly shaped Bus Stop signs and waited to find out which bus line it is, and where it's headed.  Thinking I could either hop on it, or else realize it's going in the wrong direction, cross the street, and wait for a bus going the other way.

Alas, it was the dreaded Out Of Service bus.  The most popular line in the Boston area.  In fact, it's the only line that runs between 1:30 AM and 5: AM.  And it was, of course, well after 1:30.  I looked up at the bus sign, it said Lechemere and Davis.  I wasn't sure which one was closer to where I was currently standing (since I was no longer sure I was in Arlington, and not some sort of netherworld that had cropped up in the last few weeks), but I do know how to get to Cambridge from both those places, so I began walking.  Well, to be exact, I began limping.  Possibly lurching.  Why Chuck Taylor decided to install a vegetable peeler on the inside heel of his sneakers, and why he designed an apple corer into the soles of his shoes is beyond me.  

Around Fuck No O'Clock, I reached Davis Square, which is about a four minute walk from the house where I'd left Gayme Night behind, four previous hours ago.  I grabbed a cab to Central Square.  I got out at the CVS to buy some Hangover Prevention Juice, and then began to walk to the couch I'd been sleeping on off and on for the six months since I'd moved out of my terrible apartment.

I was about a block away when a date rape of Frat Rats stopped in the middle of the road, and pointed ever so slightly behind me.  "WOLVERINE!!!!!"

What?

"Look the fuck out, it's a WOLVERINE!!!!"

Central Square in Cambridge is known for many things: homeless people, rats, buses, urine, poetry, a wide variety of perfectly mediocre cuisine, expensive housing.  It is not known for its dangerous animal population (the rats are nice enough).  Still, I slowly turned and looked over my shou--

"WOLVERINE!!!!!"

It was at that point that I realized, he wasn't pointing behind me, but, in fact, pointing to my shirt, a bright yellow t-shirt with a picture of...Wolverine on it.

Kimberly Hyphen-Surname was still awake when I let myself into her apartment.  "You're home earlate." She said.

I gave her a not so brief rundown of my evening.

"So the lesson here is 'Always keep your eye on the present, instead of getting consumed by phone calls from your past?'"

There's no lesson here.  Every road is traveled the appropriate amount.  Perspectives, like grammar, be what they be.

I chugged a can of Watermelon Fruit Punch, took off my horrible shoes, and my wonderful shirt. 

"Seven more days to the end of the world." Kimberly Hyphen-Surname said.  Smiling.

Oh, right.  Fuck.

I want my excuse to be that I was still in my single digit years, and therefore more vulnerable to the Disney like nature of musical theater.  But I distinctly remember living in the Lakeview house, and we didn't move there until I was eleven.  One of those friends of the family that my parents had me call Uncle was on the outs with his wife.  While I was shipped off to summer camp, he stayed in my room.  He brought with him clothes, a stack of magazines ranging from The Weekly World News to Newsweek, and a small beige briefcase full of cassettes.

My parents listened to oldies, classic radio shows, and country music.  When I was six, I told my grandmother that I didn't like any music made after 1967.  That Christmas, my parents gave me a copy of Michael Jackson's Thriller, and an incredibly premature Best Of The 1980s collection.  Tony Basil and Donna Summer became my favorite contemporary artists, and my favorite song on the Elks Club jukebox was Kool & The Gang's Celebration.  So maybe the whole musical thing shouldn't have come as too much of a surprise.  Still, I'm thirty-four now, and much more comfortable talking about that hilarious time I ejaculated into a man's anus, then I am talking about the first time I listened to Cats.

Of course it was Cats.  The green eyes on the black background, the catchy poems that Andrew Lloyd Webber set to saccharine music, the obligatory tacked on diva belted ballad.  If you're going to leave a copy of Cats in an eleven year old's boombox the same week he gets the lead part in a play about fairy tales, you should go the extra centimeter and paper his bedroom's wall with pictures of greased up men with little or no clothing.

It's never been discussed why Uncle Mo spent two weeks living in my room while I slept in leaky cabins, and on the beach, but I suspect it had something to do with marital problems stemming from his pronounced lisp, gravity defying hands, and bright floral print blousy shirts.  Or possibly he just needed a break from his own pre-teen boys who, the next year, would introduce me to ACDC, A Clockwork Orange, and the curious site of a twelve year old boy shoving a harmonica up his ten year old brother's ass.  Whenever I start to think my own childhood was perversely gay, I think back on Cousin Bruce and Darren's oddly incestual Truth Or Dare games, and a wave of heteronormalcy washes over me.  It feels like the opposite of a facial.

Once I'd memorized the lyrics to Cats, I moved on to Phantom Of The Opera, Les Miserables, A Chorus Line, and Hello Dolly.  Later that fall,  I grew tired of the weirdly homosexual overtones of Boy Scouts, and quit the troop to be in a production of Bye Bye Birdie.

When you grow up knowing all the lyrics to An English Teacher and Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend, you have two choices: be a debonair straight boy who spends his teens and early twenties  training to be a professional cunnilinguist, or be a fat homo with body issues and a fake girlfriend.  All my exes describe me as "charming".

Even at eleven, I knew that liking musicals was, like waking up hard with your arms wrapped around your tentmate in Webelo camp, something you kept to yourself as long as possible.  His future boyfriends would call him "charming" too.  His ex-wife has other adjectives.  Very few thesauruses connect her descriptions to "charming".

When Queen Sarah The Formerly Popular had her parents turn their loft into her Phantom Of The Opera style bedroom, I was the only one who described it as "cool".  A week later, we sang a thirty second variation of All I Ask Of You on my answering machine, recording over my auspicious hip-hop debut. "You have reached 428-1383, we're not home right now, as you can see.  Leave your name and your number right after the tone cause right now we can't be reached by telephone right now right now right now."  I was born a decade too late to be a Beastie Boy.

Our recording caught the attention of precisely no one except for my parents who erased it because it was "too long".

The first musical I was in was You're A Good Man Charlie Brown.  I played Linus.  I had a crush on Schroeder, and rat tailed Lucy with my blanket on opening night because she decided to improv and kiss him on the lips.  That the actor playing Schroeder was hopelessly straight, or that the actress playing Lucy was his sister didn't cross my mind until I was in my twenties.  That there was a disturbing amount of vaguely incestual sibling activity on Cape Cod didn't occur to me until I started writing this paragraph.

I'd like to thank my parents for making me an only child.

The closest I had to a brother, growing up, was Kevin Harris, a professional wrestling fan who used to Weird Al Yankovic lyrics to pop songs, and expose himself to passing traffic.  But if we were brothers, then our relationship was aggressively incestual.

Cats led me to try out for musicals.  Phantom Of The Opera influenced my outgoing message recordings.  Les Miserables enticed me to read the unabridged Victor Hugo novel when I was twelve.  It wasn't for another decade, when I was playing Eddie and Dr. Scott in The Rocky Horror Show, that I started connecting the dots between my affinity for musicals and long showers after gym class.

Last week, I found myself at a party with Wiz, Emily, and an assorted mix of poetry friends and strangers, when a girl pulled a eukalale out of her backpack, and began playing songs from The Jungle Book, The Lion King, and Evita with honest to tone deaf sincerity.  A group of lispers and belters joined in.  I knew all the words but had no desire to sing them.  This is what I call Gay Pride.  Unfuck parades, drag shows, quilts, and rainbow glow sticks.  I am proud every time someone shouts "One!" and I don't reply with "Singular sensation!"  That's what I call progress.