Denis burns squinted into the mirror. Were those the beginnings of crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes? He would be thirty-five in just two days. Maybe he should pack it in; that was what everything said to do. In the gay world his friends at The Factory, Milwaukee’s most swinging gay bar, told him you might as well forget it when you turned thirty. Stay home and knit socks for servicemen. There is no point in going out. Nobody wants you. You will go home alone.
Well, Denis was nearly five years past the deadly thirty and maybe he did have the beginnings of crow’s-feet, but he also had an eighteen-year-old blond waiting for him in his bedroom. It was easier for him to pick up the young ones now that the Wisconsin liquor / laws had changed, and teenagers could drink hard liquor in the bars. Every weekend the chickens converged on the gay bars from miles around, some from as far away as Chicago or Rockford. It seemed as if all Denis had to do was walk in and take his pick. The funniest part was that he was never sure how it happened. He just had a way of doing it, that was all.
It had always been that way, ever since he came out. He could remember his best buddy, Mike, kidding him about it more than ten years before. “I never saw anybody like you…