Some of his longest friendships were guys he met at Metropolitan, you valued their presence in his life.
You often stayed home while he went out to play pool or sing or hang out. Christopher liked to go out on weeknights to avoid the big crowds and you had gotten a 9 to 5 gig answering the phones at the museum of Modern Art. You stopped going there as much after you moved in with him. The criticisms aren’t untruthful but these are qualities that preserve it. Reviews complain that the bathrooms are dirty and that the bartenders are cranky to everyone who isn’t a regular. It was unfussy, you could be anyone and still have a good time there.
METROPOLITAN GAY BAR BROOKLYN FREE
We both liked Metropolitan because it managed for the most part to stay free from the influence of all the youth and fashion that had invaded the borough since its opening in 2002. His go-to song was “Wicked Games” by Chris Isaak. Obviously he went there for sex, too, but he could take it or leave it. Where you went for sex – fun, validation, distraction – he went to play pool with his buddies and shoot the shit with the bartenders. Metropolitan brought him joy and peace too. I’m always bouncing off the walls, he used to say. He had a lot of energy, he knew the value of directing it to good things. So were books, playing guitar, The Simpsons, eventually you. He flocked to the things that brought him joy and peace, the vest and the pins were among them. The vest had pins with the logos of heavy metal bands stuck to the front pocket. The night we met, he was wearing the same denim vest that he wore the night he died two and a half years later, when along that same route he fell from his bicycle and was hit by a car.
He wrote his name and number on a little slip of notepad paper and gave it to me. The next morning you poked fun at how small his bedroom was, The last guy I met at Metropolitan had a way bigger room, you said.
He made the right onto Meeker Avenue and for the first of what would be a thousand times you walked beneath the elevated section of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, bathed in the ghostly yellow of the streetlights. What seemed like only a few minutes after asking Christopher for a light, he was leading the way to his apartment in Greenpoint. You wish you had told Christopher that, it was fate just as much as anything else. That guy had excused himself to use the bathroom and not come back. You never told him that you had been talking with someone else earlier that night, a potential fuck abandoned when you tried to take a casual sip from a can of PBR and let some of it drizzle down your cheek. His sense of wonder was one of your favorite qualities, one of the things that fueled your relationship before it ended in his death in a bicycle accident less than a mile away from Metropolitan. Who else were we going to go home with ? Christopher would marvel at fate, at how he wasn’t even going to go out that night. Later, the two of you would joke about how you met on Wednesday. You were outside, you politely interrupted his conversation with the bouncer to ask for a light. You learned that from the life and death of a boy you met at Metropolitan. The real game starts when you find someone you want to stick with, maybe forever. It’s always a game of chance, but there was never a night where you couldn’t meet someone.
And there you’d been, night after night with your debt, your hunger and anxiousness and a need for a place to put it all. You read a review of the bar in New York Magazine that called it the best place to meet a guy with $80,000 in M.F.A. Or if you had been working on a short story from noon to 10pm and it was time to slither out into the night and not come home until the next morning. It was a good place if you’d been out with friends but weren’t ready for the night to end. You were 21 and it was the closest gay bar to where you lived in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.