The Tar Beach

My life at 44 was basically the same week on repeat. I want to be careful how I say that, because it wasn't a bad life. I'd moved to the city at 22 for a coding job, dated women off and on since I was 21, and just kind of never stopped. Work, groceries, dating apps I swiped on with the enthusiasm of a man filling out tax forms. Weekends were laundry and a run if the weather cooperated.

The weird part was that I knew exactly one person who lived completely differently, and I liked him more than anyone.

Kent. We'd been friends for almost twenty years. He was 42 now, freelance photographer, gay since basically forever, or at least since he came out at 23. He'd had a string of relationships, none of them long, all of them apparently interesting. He talked about men the way other guys talk about football. Openly. Loudly. Kent never met a comfort zone he didn't climb over.

Me, I didn't climb anything. I sat at a desk and wrote code and went home.

That Thursday in July it was about ninety-five degrees at eight at night and the whole neighborhood felt like a skillet. I was sitting in my apartment with two fans going when my phone buzzed.

Kent: come over. Roof. Bring beer.

Me: it's a billion degrees

Kent: exactly. Tar beach. You in or what

Me: what do you mean "or what"

Kent: walter. Beer. Roof. Now.

So I put on a clean shirt and grabbed a six-pack from the corner store and walked the six blocks to his building. His building was one of those old brick walk-ups in the industrial part of town, next to a warehouse that smelled like hot metal in summer. His fire escape was on the alley side, and it was the kind of rusted thing you'd never trust if you thought about it.

He was leaning out the third floor window when I got there.

"There he is," he said. "My favorite shut-in."

"It's a work night, Kent."

"It's Thursday. You work from home now. You're basically retired."

I climbed up and he hauled the six-pack out of my hand like I'd brought him a baby. He was in shorts and an open shirt and he looked great, which was annoying. Kent always looked great. He'd looked great at 32 and he looked great now, silver coming in at his temples like he'd paid for it.

"Up we go," he said. "Watch the third landing, the bolts are loose."

"How loose?"

"Loose enough to be exciting."

We went up two more flights of rust and paint flakes and came out through the roof hatch onto the tar. His roof was flat and black and soft in the heat, gravel sticking to your shoes. You could see downtown from up there, all the buildings lit up hazy in the warm air. Somebody a few blocks over had a window unit roaring. Other than that it was quiet.

Kent set two beers on an overturned milk crate he kept up there for exactly this, and we sat down on an old blanket against the low wall.

"Okay," I said. "This is nice."

"Told you."

"How long have you had this blanket up here?"

"Since I moved in. You're the first person I've brought up in a while."

I looked at him. "Seriously?"

"Don't make it a thing."

"You just said I'm the first person."

"And now you're making it a thing."

I let it go and opened a beer. It was warm in about four minutes but cold enough going down. The city hummed below us. Kent stretched his legs out and rolled his head back against the brick.

"God," he said. "I love this heat."

"You're the only one."

"You don't get it. This is the whole year, right here. Everything else is waiting for nights like this."

"You should write greeting cards."

"I'm serious, Walter. Look at this."

He waved his bottle at the skyline. "You're going to remember tonight. You're not going to remember the Tuesday you did your laundry."

"That's a fair point and I hate it."

He laughed. Kent laughed with his whole upper body. Then he got quiet for a second, which was rare, and took a drink.

"So what's new with you," he said. "Tell me something new. Anything."

I thought about it. That was the sad part, how long I had to think about it.

"I got a new office chair."

"Wow."

"It's ergonomic."

"Walter."

"It has lumbar support, Kent."

He turned and looked at me with that face he did, half amused, half genuinely pained. "When did you last go on a date?"

"A couple weeks ago. The woman from the hiking app."

"And?"

"It was fine. We had dinner. She was nice. She's seeing somebody else now, I think."

"Did you want to see her again?"

"Kinda? Sorta? I don't know. It felt like homework."

"Everything feel like homework to you lately?"

I didn't answer that, because the answer was yes, and he knew it, and we both sat there letting it sit in the warm air.

"Okay, different topic," he said, refilling the silence himself the way he always did. "You will not believe my June."

"Enlighten me."

"You remember Dev? The drummer guy, I told you about him, the one with the tattoo sleeve?"

"Vaguely."

"Well, that ended, obviously, and it ended in the most Kent way possible. He was here. On this roof. And it's hot like tonight, and he's got no shirt on because of course he does, and he looks at me and goes, 'So are we gonna do this or should I stop talking about the drums?'"

I laughed. "He actually said that?"

"Word for word. And I said, 'Buddy, you had me at no shirt.' And that was the end of it. Two months of very loud, very fun nothing."

"You make it sound like a sports recap."

"It was a sport," he said, grinning. "He was in tremendous shape. I'm just saying, the man had the stamina of a Labrador."

"Please stop."

"Never." He took a drink. "See, this is what I don't get about you, Walter. And I say this with love."

"Here it comes."

"No, seriously. You've dated women your whole adult life. Fine. Great. But you've never once even looked at the menu. Twenty-some years, one aisle of the store."

"I'm not gay, Kent."

"I didn't say you were. I'm saying you've never checked. That's all. A guy who eats at the same restaurant for twenty years and swears he doesn't like other food, that guy's lying to himself about something."

"Or he just likes the restaurant."

"Or that," he allowed. "But you don't even like the restaurant. You just told me dinner felt like homework."

I looked out at the lights. He had me and he knew he had me and he was decent enough not to do the victory lap. He just drank his beer and waited.

"The way you talk about it," I said finally. "It always sounds easy."

"It's not easy. It's terrifying. Every single time. That's the point."

"You? Terrified?"

"Every time, Walter. The last guy, I paced my kitchen for twenty minutes before I texted him. You've seen me give a toast at a wedding in front of two hundred people without notes."

"I have."

"And I paced my kitchen over a drummer."

"Huh."

"Yeah. Huh." He tipped the bottle toward me. "The fear is the price of admission. You've been standing outside the venue your whole life reading the reviews."

"God, you're insufferable when you're right."

"I know. Isn't it great?"

The heat pressed down on us. Somewhere below, a car alarm went off and gave up. Kent lay back on the blanket with his arms spread out and his eyes closed, completely at home on a tar roof at ninety-five degrees, like a lizard on a rock. I sat there next to him, sweating, restless in a way I hadn't been in months, and I realized I was thinking about the drummer with the tattoos. Just picturing it. Kent flat on this same blanket, that same easy grin.

"Stop," I said, mostly to myself.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were about to."

"I'm literally lying here with my eyes closed."

"Your smugness travels through the air."

"Then lie down," he said. "Smugness can't get you through a closed eye."

So I lay down next to him on the warm blanket and looked up at the orange haze where stars should have been, and my heart was going faster than a chair purchase could explain.

We stayed like that for a while. The tar smell came up with the heat off the roof and the warehouse next door was still ticking away the last of the day. I could hear the traffic on the avenue, five floors below us and a whole world away.

"Can I ask you something," Kent said. His eyes were still closed.

"You just did."

"Ha. Something real. When you say you're bored, what do you mean? Bored like tired, or bored like scared?"

"There's a difference?"

"Huge difference. Tired means you need a nap. Scared means you need a push."

I thought about it. I thought about it longer than I wanted to, which was probably an answer in itself. "Bored like nothing lands," I said. "I do the work, the work is fine. I go on the dates, the dates are fine. I buy the chair, the chair is fine. Everything's fine and I keep waiting for one thing to actually arrive, you know? Like the rest of my life got sent to the wrong address."

"Okay," he said. "That's real. Now the follow-up. When's the last time you did something you didn't plan?"

"I came up here."

"Besides that."

"I don't know. It's been a while."

"It's been years, Walter. I've known you almost twenty years. You plan everything. You researched that chair for a month. You told me that. A month, for a chair."

"It's a good chair."

"It's a great chair, I'm sure. That's not the point." He rolled onto his side, propped himself up on one elbow, and looked down at me. "You know what your problem is? You've never once let go of the wheel. Not at work, not with women, not with me. You grip the wheel so hard your knuckles are white and then you wonder why the ride feels like nothing."

"That's not fair. I let go plenty."

"Name one time."

"I came up here tonight."

"Because I dragged you. Try again."

I opened my mouth and nothing came out. He waited, patient as a chess player.

"That's what I thought," he said. "So here's my challenge. One night. Tonight. You let go of the wheel and see what happens. No planning, no exit strategy, no weighing the pros and cons in that spreadsheet you keep in your head."

"What does that even mean, practically?"

"Means you stop performing. Means you say what you actually feel instead of the version you rehearsed in the elevator. Means when something interests you, you move toward it instead of writing a pro and con list about it."

"And if what interests me is a good night's sleep?"

"Then sleep. But you won't. Because you're not bored like tired, Walter. I called it twenty minutes ago."

The heat made the air feel thick as syrup. I lay there and did the thing I always do, which is run the scenarios, and for once I noticed myself doing it and stopped. Sort of. Mostly.

"Fine," I said. "One night. What did you have in mind?"

"Nothing. That is the entire point. Whatever happens, happens. You just have to actually be here for it."

"I am here. I'm literally horizontal on your roof."

"You're here physically. You're somewhere else on a committee deciding whether you're enjoying this correctly."

I laughed despite myself. "That's disturbingly accurate."

"I know you. I've known you since we were two guys eating bad Chinese food and arguing about operating systems, almost twenty years ago." He reached over and patted my shoulder twice, like you'd settle a dog. "Just be here."

Then he didn't take his hand away.

I don't know how to describe what happened next without making it sound smaller or bigger than it was. His hand just stayed on my shoulder, and then his thumb moved, slow, along the top of my arm, near the seam of my sleeve. That's it. That was the entire event. A guy touching my arm on a rooftop.

It went through me like current.

My whole arm woke up. Not like when someone touches you and you register it. Like the skin under his thumb was suddenly the only part of me that existed, and everything else was just scaffolding holding it up. Heat ran up my neck and down into my chest and I felt my face do something I couldn't control.

I should have pulled away. That's what the old me would do, laugh it off, roll a shoulder like a guy shrugging off a bump in a crowd. I had