The Grizzly Man of the Meat Rack
How I Turned a Fanny Pack and Sheer Audacity into a Place to Crash on Fire Island
“I’m just gonna do it!” I declare with manic zeal, nodding along to the beat of my own reckless disregard. I stuff my fanny pack with paper napkins, just in case I end up sleeping in the Meat Rack and roll through human shit.
“It’s the underwear party,” says Jade behind the reception counter of the Grove Hotel, glancing up from her iPad reassuringly. “People are nice.”
The previous night was spent in a hotel room with two Australian friends, a safe night in both accommodations and experience, a first time for all of us. An hour before sunset, I kissed them goodbye at the ferry pier, one with a dog to return to and the other fighting off some kind of gross lung infection. With the cheapest last-minute Labor Day weekend economy room clocking in at an unjustifiable rate of $500, I decided to roll the dice on utilizing my sexual prowess as a survival tactic and stay another night…somewhere on the island.
Heartily, I wave goodbye to Jade as if I’ve known her all my life and skip through the lobby to the adjoining Ice Palace. “Happy crashing!” She calls to me.
With over half of my weekend provisions remaining, I weighed how I would spend the four hours between the party’s end and the first ferry off the island the following morning. Maybe I’d sleep on the beach, a pillow made from my praying hands, the crash of violent swells shooing away the sand fleas. Or perhaps the temperature would drop low enough that I’d have to exchange sex for the use of someone’s outdoor dog bed. I’d convinced myself that it’d be a fun experiment on whether I still possessed the cache and intrigue essential to mooching my way into a safe night’s sleep, something that was more of a given than a feat throughout my brazen teens and twenties. Foolishly, I reassured myself that the more unsafe and unsavory the outcome, the juicier the story. Any second-guessings were promptly hushed by swigs from my Gatorade bottle filled with tequila and pea-sized nibbles from a block of melted and resettled mushroom chocolate. Sure, tens of thousands of gay guys had probably voluntarily shipwrecked themselves in the middle of gay Eden and made it out just fine through the island’s decades-long history. But still, I lavished the belief that somehow, my doing it intentionally and beyond what I deemed an acceptable age threshold was nothing short of renegade.
Standing in the Ice Palace coat check line, I’m already naked save for my underwear, baseball cap, fanny pack, and an overstuffed backpack. The fanny pack, meant to get me through the night, contains half a gram of ketamine, a half-eaten CLIF Bar, and my half-charged iPhone 8. My backpack, meant to get me through the morning, contains the rest of my survivalist provisions. Around the backpack's handle, I’ve looped a stolen hotel towel that I’ll later use as a blanket or cape or maybe set ablaze to send a smoke signal. The coat check twink grimaces at the weight of the backpack while planting it amongst a sea of identical drawstring bags, their empty folds obscuring the Scruff branding.
I check the time: twenty minutes until the last ferry of the night departs without me.Deranged by my own self-satisfaction, I chuckle smugly, the way a train-hopper might chuckle at a private jet. Two gays working the event ask to take my picture in front of a large step-and-repeat featuring Andrew Christian-clad hotties sharing a seductive embrace. Riding high on my gallant spontaneity, I pose in a dramatic lunge, my knee popping audibly along the way.
I text Sam, a smiley, twenty-five-year-old blonde I met on Grindr about a month prior, saying that I’ve decided to stay and have arrived at the venue. Following our beach fuck earlier that day, I left my backpack at the house he’s sharing with about a dozen other he/they twinks before we all left for Low Tea. Several in the group echoed the perhaps sincere sentiment that, of course, they’d offer me a couch if they weren’t all taken, but each time, I hastily shook off the notion. I’d rather surrender to quicksand than permit the hesitant generosity of well-meaning twinks—a dying Snow White, too prideful to accept a handout from pall-bearing dwarves.
Momentarily the nightmare fantasy of my irrational and inebriated mind convinces me that all one thousand party fags are maintaining a tally of every time I check my phone or pretend to wait in the bathroom line. After some stress-dancing, I leech myself to a welcoming married couple willing to shelter me from my psychedelic storm of self-doubt. After some labored chat, they invite me to join them in the darkroom, not because they’re interested in fucking me, but because they already feel a sense of responsibility towards me, like a carnival goldfish in a plastic bag they’ve won without wanting to.
Soon, it becomes apparent that the darkroom is just an area of the dancefloor sectioned off by the same cloth tarps used to give a false sense of privacy between salon chairs at Great Clips. It’s early enough in the night that the attendees are primarily made up of those motivated by genuine horniness rather than insecurity and despair. I can tell because those in the latter group have a knack for identifying one another. Before long, the couple recognizes a familiar silhouette and latch onto each of his nipples like carabiners. Should I leave a note? I wonder before leaving them to it.
In a sea of groping hands, there’s bound to be one outstretched and pointing home. The body language in the darkroom is a fascinating sight. A lingering glance is a maybe, a brisk look in the opposite direction, a stern, smearing No. You can’t be certain of a yes until you’re already going into each other, and even then, nothing’s promised. I make out with someone, then someone else. Soon enough, things have escalated, and I’m being blown. Super, I think. I’ll have a quick nut, then carry on with the night, clear my head, and prioritize my survival.
But wait. I pause. I must ration this nut. What if the kind soul who fosters me for the night has no use for my little bit of K and four hard-boiled eggs? This nut is the only official currency accepted on the island. It doesn’t just regenerate like the limbs of a lizard. I’m not in my goddamn twenties.
With arms pawing at the air, I stumble back into the light and see that Sam has responded that he’s arrived. But this is quickly followed by a text that he has to leave because a friend is overwhelmed and having a bad time, presumably from drugs. The drug freak-out is the nightlife equivalent of diarrhea in that no explanation or follow-up is required or expected, so I don’t bother wondering if it’s a fake excuse. Instead, I dance by myself, courageously inhabiting the irresistible vigor of someone with a bed.
The intoxicating pulse of my self-assurance soon enchants the attention of Horatio, a Venezuelan almost-daddy with the crescent of a stark-white tan line rising from his mammoth ass. I’m uncertain what he’s taken, but our dancing can only be described as ketamine theater. The way I dance with close friends, in which every maneuver is themed, a gag, a bit, a reference, a knowing wink to an actual dance move. We oscillate between pornographic making out and separating twenty feet apart across the dance floor while maintaining fixed yet playful eye contact. I’m sure that any onlookers must be marveling at how unseriously we’re taking things and how much fun we’re having just being silly. But little do they know there’s twenty minutes until the club closes, the temperature’s dropped twelve degrees in two hours, and I need a place to sleep tonight.
Momentarily, I zoom out of my turbulent forest of worst-case scenarios and see the bigger picture of what would become of me should I not find a home for the night. Maybe I’d become a tourist attraction, The Grizzly Man of the Meat Rack, a spectacle for visitors to take photos with and twinks to throw rocks at but miss. Occasionally looked upon with a pitying sneer, maybe invited inside for a hot shower and cold seltzer before being nudged back out the door—a cautionary tale to anyone wishing for an endless summer. Or maybe the island has a strict policy against visitors exhibiting the reckless arrogance required for something so irresponsible. I pray that the community-not-a-resort enforcers give me a ten-second head start through the Meat Rack before the staff of teenage Pines Pantry employees chase me down and shoot me in the back.
By the time the DJ plays the final track, it’s me, Horatio, and a dozen stragglers, likely trying to relinquish a last-minute nut or waiting for someone to initiate an afters. Holding back on verbiage like my place, I ask Horatio if he’d like to carry on at the beach. He smirks before offering, “Or we can just go to mine.”
The wave of euphoric relief nearly knocks me to my knees. I’ve won. I’ve embarked on the hero’s journey from drifter to shelter. I’ve navigated a rejection minefield of my own making, successfully churning my charm and sexuality into the most unimaginable gift an aged-out party fag could possibly beg for: an invitation.
“Your place sounds good,” I say, barely containing a victory lap.
We walk to coat check, Horatio receiving his sensible fanny pack and me hoisting my bulbous backpack over my shoulders, the towel swaying like a limp beaver tail. He smirks knowingly. “Carry on at the beach, huh?” Once the water taxi delivers us to the other side of the island, it’s a two-minute walk to the wooden structure he calls home twelve weekends out of the summer. Oddly, the power’s out, so we hike up the loft’s narrow staircase with our phone flashlights and push two twin mattresses together. Halfway through the night, I’m awoken by the barnacles of conjunctivitis caking my eyes, and I paw my way into the bathroom to peel my contacts off. I inhale three glasses of water and the other half of the CLIF Bar before hitting my head on my way back up the stairs. The sun begins to rise as we sleep naked with the blankets kicked to the floor.
The following morning, he threw on a leather vest and cowboy hat to walk me to get breakfast sandwiches from the pantry. We spend the day lounging on the beach, playing paddle ball with his friends, drinking, familiar faces in packs of twos and threes, stopping to greet him every fifteen minutes. After my third and final Tea dance, I left to catch the sunset ferry.
I gaze out at the water wistfully, a survivor’s moment of reflection as he’s whisked away by the rescue chopper. I deem my little experiment a success, feeling like I could show up just about anywhere alone and unplanned, and make it out alive, fed, and fucked–just like I’d do in my twenties. I’m seated behind three still-drunk young people. They gather in for a goodbye Fire Island selfie, hanging on one another with prepared pouts. I smile at their youthful abandon like a village elder watching the children practice archery. My smile falls as I notice the one holding the phone zooming in on my fucked-up looking face in the background as they share a laugh at my expense. Rather than shake my fist in rage, I close my eyes and pretend to have died: maybe of dehydration, possibly of old age, but certainly not of defeat.
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