My husband and I met the old fashioned way, at a gay bar in West Hollywood, in the days before Grindr. Carlos is from Uruguay, and to him, a semi-employed Jewish writer from Jericho, Long Island was exotic. I liked his vaguely Italian accent when he spoke Spanish, and he liked my vocabulary. It’s like my grandmother always said, there’s a lid for every pot.
We moved together to an apartment in Silver Lake (back then, still affordable) and later bought a small house in Beachwood Canyon (ditto) and started a family. One night the supply line to the dishwasher broke and while we were sleeping the water spread over the hardwood floors and got sucked up into the walls. It was a stupid dishwasher leak, and the entire house was wrecked. Just bad luck. Our bulldog Peggy hadn’t so much as whimpered during the night although her basket was surrounded by water, like an islet. In the morning, still ensconced in her bed, she wagged her stumpy little tail, splashing us.
We had to move out immediately while the contractors ripped out the cabinetry and broke open the walls. We had no time to look around and grabbed an apartment that had two bedrooms and allowed dogs, close to the girls’ school in a new building on La Brea called El Palacio – it was no palace, believe me, just another high-rise thrown up hastily to house young professionals in L.A. Carlos and I were the oldest people in the building and our kids were certainly the youngest. Most of the tenants were starting their careers, many still living with roommates, seemingly all of them single, celebrating the end of the lockdown with late-night parties, loud music, and, I assumed, low-key debauchery.
I wore a mask if the elevator was crowded, but no one else did. To these kids, it was as if the pandemic had never happened. I found them fascinating, with their Trader Joe’s bags and takeout meals and poke bowls, the young women in their yoga pants on weekends, the young men in their shorts and flip-flops no matter the weather, none of them getting newspapers delivered – they found my subscription comical or bewildering, if they took notice of me at all. They liked Peggy, stopping to pet her. I felt a little like I was doing an anthropological study, although the conclusions that I’d draw were obvious to me from the beginning: I’m old. I’m a middle-aged married man and I had never felt so old. Also, we’d begun an epic battle with our insurance company regarding our repairs, so that was a lot of fun.
I was especially interested in a good-looking guy who lived by himself at the other end of our floor. His Grindr dates, also handsome, were easily identifiable as they walked confusedly along the hallway, searching for the correct apartment number. Sometimes, if I was getting into the elevator or throwing out the trash, I’d point out Ryan’s unit to them, and Carlos would berate me for getting involved and embarrassing the men.
“Just trying to be helpful,” I said.
Ryan Safaryan was probably twenty-eight or thirty, dark-eyed and curly-haired, and in good shape. Dark skin, sideburns, stubble he carefully trimmed. There had to be narcissism in the immense care he took with his beard, but if I looked like he did, I’m sure I’d be narcissistic too. My type back in the day, not that I ever dated someone that handsome. We bonded over Peggy. He thought she was beautiful, and I gave him bonus points for his acuity; I’m somewhat besotted with my bulldog.
My younger daughter Lily wasn’t happy about the move, nor for that matter was Peggy; they both missed our yard. My older daughter Sophia was fourteen and indignant that she now had to share a bedroom with Lily. Sophia was a would-be sophisticate who tried to befriend the young women in the building, convinced she was their contemporary. Meanwhile I was starting to spend time with Ryan, although Carlos said that our neighbor was just being polite. But I told Carlos that Ryan had intimated that I was a role model. I’d sustained a career, we owned our own home (granted, it was under water, literally), and Carlos and I had been in a relationship for twenty years; as Ryan understood, that’s at least forty in straight years.
“This isn’t going to end well,” Carlos said.
Carlos is very negative and usually right. He’s also a minimalist and saw the flood as an opportunity to rid ourselves of our clutter and start over. He always said the hardest part of being a parent was the paraphernalia. Maybe that was true when we had young kids, but Sophia was starting to make us miss those days when the biggest fights were about bedtime and the demands for additional plush toys. I remember we would play a game called “I’m Thinking of an Animal,” and surprise the kids when the animal turned out to be a human being… Sophia didn’t want to play those games with us anymore.
But it’s true, we were animals, and Ryan Safaryan had his animal urges for sex. So did I – I think the young people were inspiring me, not that I could approach Ryan’s appetite.
My twenties were very different from Ryan’s. I was single then, my friends were getting sick, and there was no such thing as PrEP. “These guys don’t remember what it was like in the eighties and nineties,” I said.
“How could they possibly remember? They weren’t even born in the eighties.”
I wanted Ryan to understand what it was like to come of age and come out in the era when HIV was untreatable. To be a teenager and watch “Cheers” and worry about dying. “They don’t know how easy they have it.” I heard myself and was semi-appalled. “I sound like a grumpy old man.”
“Well, you are.”
I invited Ryan over for dinner, which really meant that I was volunteering Carlos to cook. Carlos disapproved, although not about the cooking assignment. “Why would he want to have dinner with us? Leave him alone.”
“He didn’t have to say yes.”
“How was he going to say no?”
“He could tell me he was busy,” I said.
“Then you’d just pounce on him in the hallway and reschedule.”
There was no pouncing, just for the record. I sat across from Ryan at dinner. He had intelligent eyes, dark and piercing and vigilant, like a junco or peregrine falcon. Carlos made his Milanesa, and we did our usual act, I suppose, as the loving but long-suffering couple who bickered over minor issues, corrected each other when we were telling stories, and were amused/annoyed by our various peccadilloes. Our message in a nutshell: opposites attract. Sophia pressed Ryan for details: did he have a boyfriend (not for a couple of years now), did he want another boyfriend (yes, but no rush), where did he grow up (Sacramento), was he close to his parents (not exactly), weren’t parents annoying? He said he’d wished he’d had parents like Carlos and me. A mixed blessing, that answer. See anthropological study above.
Ryan worked in marketing for a company that made fashionable hospital scrubs and advertised on billboards all over Los Angeles. The people on the billboards were beautiful and apparently the young executives were, too. Their headquarters were in Santa Monica, and he had a long commute given traffic, but he said he didn’t mind the drive so much. In his car he listened to podcasts, mostly true crime, the grislier the better, and audio books about family dynamics and self-improvement. It turned out that he was insecure: he worried about his career, his wastes of time. He thought he should be accomplishing more. He said he watched too much TV, mostly stupid reality shows, and felt he hadn’t read enough. I recommended The Road, a novel about fatherhood and cannibalism. I thought it was right up his alley. He said he wasn’t a fast reader, but he was a deep reader. I knew Carlos would make fun of me for this, ascribing my esteem to infatuation, but I did think that there was something deep about Ryan, some hidden pain that had given him insight and complexity.
Ryan liked dogs, the Sacramento Kings, the habits of highly effective people, and, I guess, screwing strangers. He said he wanted to go to a yoga class with me. Where was he when I was twenty-eight and no one talked to me at the Sports Connection gym? Although later I’d learn that Ryan hadn’t exactly specified an ability to do Downward Dog as a requirement on his dating profile. No, he liked muscular guys who weren’t afraid to express their feelings. Interests: travel, the beach, working out, hella spicy food.
“I think it went well. He stayed a long time,” I said.
“Of course he stayed. He likes the attention. You were hanging all over him.”
I couldn’t tell if Carlos was annoyed at me or amused. “I was not.”
It would have been nice to have a dating app when I was single, I told my husband. Not so much because I’d wanted to have lots of casual sex – I wasn’t theoretically opposed, but at the time I was too scared of HIV and too inhibited – but because dating had been difficult for me. Ryan was lucky. If he ever wanted to start dating more seriously, he could always adjust his profile and take things slower. I wondered what my life would have been like if I’d had Grindr back then.
“Yeah, not sure you’d get the same response as Ryan,” Carlos said. “No offense.”
I saw his point. I wasn’t exactly in Ryan’s league. I had trouble building muscle mass, mostly because it required me to get up from the sofa. My eyebrows were uneven, and I had a large bump on my nose from falling off a bunk bed when I was eleven. Somehow Carlos had looked past all that.
Ryan was so handsome, I said. Beautiful people had it easier in life, didn’t Carlos think so?
Carlos said it wasn’t very pleasant to hear how handsome I thought Ryan was.
“You don’t think he’s good-looking?”
“Yeah. Mostly he’s young. But why don’t you keep your crush to yourself,” Carlos said. “I’d prefer that.”
“It’s not a crush. Well, not exactly.” The truth was more embarrassing. “I want to be his friend.” I wanted to be his friend because I wanted to be younger. I know how stupid that sounds. I wanted to be younger, not just a guy with adult responsibilities and a dad bod and a career that was stalling. I loved Carlos and our daughters and the life we had built together. But I still had regrets about my past, about lost opportunities and mistakes, the zigzag path my life had taken. All the wasted years. Everyone was supposed to have had so much fun in their twenties. Instead, I remember a lot of worrying and a lot of loneliness. Was I listening to the right music, would I get promoted, did anyone else overhear the faux pas that I’d just made and that I’d obsess about for months, would I always be alone? I remember all of that. And I remember a lot of people with wasting syndrome, which meant I had no right to complain about anything. Friends were dying, and I was going to whine about staying home alone on a Saturday night? It was unseemly.
In the ’90s I stopped writing screenplays that weren’t selling and got a job in publicity and began to climb the corporate ladder. In Silver Lake Carlos and I lived in a courtyard building south of Sunset. A fountain in the middle of the courtyard burbled intermittently, erupting every hour or two, like Old Faithful. Our neighbor Alan in the unit next door lived a spartan existence. He was a travel writer who seemed quite old to me but was probably in his fifties, my age now, and who still had a thick moustache from his Castro clone years. He freelanced for an automobile club magazine and scraped together a living, and he was alone, very much alone. He slept in a twin bed under a giant poster of Ingrid Bergman in Stromboli, never went out at night, and he was rail thin. He kept to himself, but we had watered his plants (philodendron, ficus, Boston fern) and collected his mail (St. Jude’s, Pacific Gas and Electric, Time Warner cable) when he went out of town, and we’d taken the opportunity to snoop a little. We wondered about him. Was he mourning, was he celibate, was he infected? I couldn’t help thinking that if he’d been born a little later, just ten or fifteen years later, when gay couples were coming out of the shadows and beginning to celebrate their commitment ceremonies, he probably would have had a partner. Or maybe he’d had a partner who’d died; and maybe, if the men were a little older instead, they might have avoided the virus. He was born in a bad interval. It’s possible he was happy living by himself, but I thought he was lonely, and I felt sorry for him.
“I couldn’t live like that,” I’d said. “Like a monk.”
But to Carlos there was something appealing in Alan’s lifestyle. “The simplicity.”
He didn’t want to be monk, my husband told me, but as a young child and Jesuit educated in Montevideo, his career ambition was to be a martyr. “And I married you, so I got my wish,” Carlos said.
This made me laugh. He teased me and I liked it. Sometimes Carlos and the kids would whisper together in Spanish and make fun of me, but this was another of our games. They would pretend to make cutting remarks (I could somewhat follow the gist of what they were saying; mostly they were criticizing my cooking; I couldn’t really blame them, Carlos was much the better chef) and I would pretend to take great umbrage. I didn’t speak much Spanish, I’d studied German in college. Given that I ended up living in Southern California and married to a Uruguayan, Spanish would have been a wee bit more useful. Another of my mistakes.
After Silver Lake, we had moved to a cul-de-sac and there were two other gay families on our same block – what can I say, it was the Hollywood Hills – and then, when our kids were small, one of the couples split up. Daniel and Nathaniel (yes, the names rhymed) had been together for fifteen years, and the separation was hard on Matthew, their son. He was in Lily’s class, and he would break down crying in the schoolyard. Eventually Matthew adjusted, shuttling back and forth between his fathers’ households with great aplomb. I guess it was progress of a sort: gay divorce.
Now, at El Palacio, with Ryan as my neighbor, I had a front row seat for the Grindr age. Well, perhaps not front row. Perhaps a seat with partial view. I wanted to know what the experience was like: vicariously, let me be clear. My questions were basic. When someone came over, did they start having sex immediately? How much small talk did they engage in? Did Ryan see the guys again, or were these all one-night stands? Was it even called a one-night stand anymore? And did he ever feel the urge to reply to a ping: it’s Monday at 2am, what are you doing up? Don’t you have a job?
In the end, I asked him to show me his profile. I made a few editorial suggestions, I couldn’t resist. Although, as Carlos was quick to point out, it seemed like Ryan was doing just fine without my help. When I saw the photo of my neighbor’s abs, I understood why he was so popular.
There should be a word or expression in English for someone who’s between a friend and an acquaintance. German has it: gute Bekannte. Which means “close acquaintance,” but in English that sounds somewhat formal, whereas in German it’s, well, friendlier.
Ryan told me more about himself. His father was Armenian. His mother was Croatian and apparently crazy and had abandoned her children and moved back to Croatia when he was young. His father sounded difficult and judgmental. Ryan wasn’t close to either of his parents; he was raised mostly by his stepmother, whom he loved. He had a half-sister in Sacramento who had a young daughter. He loved his niece, too. There was sadness in him from his past, possibly some trauma. Although I don’t believe that’s why he arranged his Grindr dates, because of trauma. No, he slept around because he liked to have sex and it was convenient.
That’s what made me jealous, the convenience. Not to have to deduce if someone just wanted to be friends, not to agonize about making the first move: it was all clear cut. I would worry, however, about axe murderers showing up at my door and beheading me. Ryan said he didn’t worry, he got a feeling about a guy before inviting him over. But how much of a feeling could you get from someone’s text messages about penis length, preferred positions, and availability to hook up on Wednesday night? It was a whole new world.
###
Lily was adjusting to apartment life and had opened a dog walking business for tenants in the building. She had a captive audience of young people running around town without time to walk their dogs and she was making a killing. Now she was in the bedroom, counting her money, chortling like Scrooge McDuck. She was an operator, that one. Sophia was listening to David Bowie and The Who on Spotify – recommendations from Lucy Wang in 6L. Lucy worked at Bank of America and was engaged to an underwhelming actor-barista my daughter deeply respected. Any recommendation of mine, especially about classic rock, was suspect. But if Lucy suggested some music, well, then it must be good. And my daughters had been like this, one eager for autonomy and adulthood, one a go-getter and huckster, since they were toddlers. We’d adopted them as infants but sometimes I thought we’d had very little to do with how they turned out. They came the way they came.
I ran into Ryan at the mailboxes and invited him over for mojitos. He kept me company in the kitchen while I muddled the mint and prepared the drinks and crushed the ice. It was a Sunday afternoon and Carlos came back from his weekend shopping at Target, hauling his environmentally friendly canvas bags. He emptied the bags, and I could tell that he was annoyed to find that Ryan was there. Especially because the girls were out of earshot and we were talking about Grindr again. I’d already prepared a mojito for Carlos and handed it to him, but the drink didn’t seem to mollify him.
“The problem is, every date becomes disposable,” Ryan said. “There’s always someone lined up next. Yeah, it’s easy, but since it’s easy, nothing counts. Is that what it was like for you?”
“Uh – not exactly,” I said.
“You’d have to have dates for them to be disposable,” Carlos said.
This wasn’t his customary, good-natured ribbing. I didn’t know what he was upset about. The girls were home, it’s not like I was sneaking off to an assignation.
“I was particular,” I said.
“Particularly unpopular.”
Ryan laughed. “I don’t really believe that.”
I wasn’t sure I liked them laughing at me. Better to laugh with them. “I went on dates. Every few years.”
“I rescued him,” Carlos said. “He was locked away in his apartment. He sat on a folding chair and ate dinner at a card table. Pasta every night with canned tomato sauce.”
“Not true. Sometimes I had Progresso soup. I had no money,” I explained to Ryan. “I had no game, I couldn’t cook. And somehow I still ended up with a hot Latin lover.” I kissed Carlos in front of Ryan, to assuage my husband. “Even though I wasn’t much of a catch.”
Carlos softened. “Well, I thought you were.”
“Aww. Love at first sight?” Ryan asked.
“Not at all.” I told him how we’d got into a fight on our first official date after meeting at the bar – a fight about parking. Carlos always said if there hadn’t been a parking space on Sixth Street, as I’d insisted there would be, we wouldn’t be together now.
After Ryan left, I helped the girls with their homework. I didn’t have a chance to talk to Carlos until we got ready for bed. “I know you’re kidding, but can you not insult me in front of Ryan?”
“Okay.”
He’d agreed too readily. “Okay?”
“Yeah. And can you not throw yourself at Ryan in front of me?”
“This is stupid,” I said. “You’re mad about the mojitos?”
“Yes.”
“I knew you’d be home any minute. I wasn’t doing anything clandestine.”
“That’s not the point,” Carlos said.
“Then what is?”
“You’re embarrassing yourself.”
“I can’t have friends?”
“Oh, he’s a very good friend,” Carlos said. “You have a lot in common and have deep philosophical conversations. You know he’s closer in age to the girls than to you?”
###
In the late eighties I was in college in New York and sporadically, very sporadically, attending ACT UP meetings. My hero was Vito Russo, a writer and AIDS activist. I wanted to show his famous “Why We Fight” speech to Ryan. “If I’m dying from anything, I’m dying from homophobia. If I’m dying from anything, I’m dying from racism…” I had also found this quote from Russo online: “It is incorrect to say that leather is presently making a comeback. Like Ethel Merman, it has never been away. Also like Ethel Merman, it lasts forever and you don’t have to have it dry cleaned.” It was a mode of gay witticism that had died out – that died of AIDS, because the great wits had died. I wanted to show the quote to Ryan, too, but I worried he would ask me who Ethel Merman was.
Carlos came in while I was cueing up the “Why We Fight” speech on YouTube. “I’m not having drinks with him,” I said quickly. “I’m not talking to him about Grindr.”
“No, you’re preparing a lesson plan. Did he ask you for that?”
“I thought he’d find it interesting.”
“Does he strike you as the type who likes a history class?” Carlos sat down with me. “We’re going to move back home soon and you’re probably never going to see him again and you’re going to be hurt. You know that, right?”
I took that in. “Probably. But at least it gives me something to do.”
“You’re bored?”
“My midlife crisis is wanting to have young friends and wanting to have a lot of sex with you.”
“Oh.” He feigned disappointment. “Can’t it be a nice car instead?”
But here he was, making me laugh again. Was there something masochistic in my liking the way he needled me? Was there something off or unbalanced in our relationship? Maybe. But there were worse dysfunctions. And did I really imagine that a friendship with Ryan would rescue me from myself? Maybe not. Maybe it’s just that he was hot and I liked looking at him. I think that was Carlos’s theory, and as I mentioned, he’s usually right.
Ryan had a big date, not a hook-up but an actual date, someone he’d met online but wanted to get to know better. When he knocked at our door at ten, we were surprised he was home already. He said the date hadn’t gone well. He was dejected and wanted to talk. I felt vindicated, not because the date had gone badly, but because Ryan had reached out to us, proving that this wasn’t a one-sided relationship. I hoped Carlos was taking note.
Ryan said he knew his date would start ghosting him, he could tell. He’d liked James but James wasn’t into him. Maybe James just liked the chase and he’d lost interest once Ryan was hooked. That was the problem with Grindr. It hardened people, desensitized them. Everything was transactional. And Scruff was even worse. Or maybe better: at least there was no ambiguity with Scruff.
I’d never heard of Scruff, that’s how out of it I was.
I asked him why he didn’t try the dating sites that were more relationship-oriented, like OkCupid or eHarmony or Match.com.
Ryan shrugged. “The guys aren’t as hot.”
Carlos gave me a look; now he felt vindicated.
“I’m never going to have what you have,” Ryan said.
“That’s ridiculous. You’ll meet someone,” I told him.
He said it wasn’t just that. He’d never be able to afford a house, he couldn’t even afford a down payment. And he didn’t think he’d be able to afford children either. Surrogacy and adoption were expensive. And who knew if his partner would want kids, if he even had a partner? Who knew if he’d have a job in a year?
We reminded Ryan that he was still very young. Carlos served him a glass of wine, bucked him up, told him he was a catch and assured him of a successful future. I realized that’s why Ryan had knocked on our door, he’d been looking for this ego stroking. Which was understandable, but I was getting irritated.
After Ryan left, I put my head in my hands. “I’m so lucky.”
Carlos kissed the back of my neck. “I’m the lucky one.”
He didn’t understand. “It makes me angry,” I said.
Yes, angry, I explained. Because it was all luck, all dumb luck. Our flood was dumb luck, and our life together was dumb luck. Meeting at the bar in West Hollywood was dumb luck, finding the parking space on our first date was dumb luck, raising two beautiful children was dumb luck. My crooked eyebrows were dumb luck and falling off a bunkbed was dumb luck. It was dumb luck that Carlos liked to tease me and that I liked to be teased, dumb luck that we bought a house when the market was soft, probably dumb luck that Daniel and Nathaniel got divorced and not us. And most of all, it was dumb luck to be born where and when we were born, spared from the self-loathing of the closet, spared from HIV if we were careful, spared from coming out under the magnifying glass of social media. We’d lost out on the opportunities and ease of Grindr, but we’d been spared the ghosting and coarseness. And while trans women of color were being murdered, we were spared from that, too. We were able to marry, to adopt children. People like Vito Russo had fought and died for those rights, and my generation got to enjoy them. It had nothing to do with our intelligence, our charm, our desires, our determination. It was all just dumb luck. What a terrible system.
“I don’t think of it like that,” Carlos said.
“No?”
“I moved here because I wanted to come out. I made a decision. I learned English, I studied engineering. Those were decisions.”
“They were good decisions,” I said. “Lucky decisions.”
“I took a chance on a Jewish boy who didn’t have a steady job but had a nice smile. Maybe that’s luck, maybe that’s good judgment.”
“But that’s just it, you don’t know,” I said.
“You try your best with what you have. What else can you do?”
Here we were at El Palacio, some of us raising kids and some of us getting married and some of us on PrEP, with no way to express gratitude to the people who came before us, no way to greet the people who came after. I wish I could live in different time periods, or at least sample them, witness those lives in the past that were heroic or warped, share confidences and music as contemporaries with Ryan Safaryan and Lucy Wang in 6L. But it didn’t work like that, we were all locked in the cage of our respective generations, locked in our narrow lives, in the narrow present. These thoughts were painful to me.
“I want to go home,” I said.
“I know.”
We were still fighting with our insurance company, but the house would be ready in another month – if we were lucky. We’d move back in, and I’m sure, as Carlos predicted, I’d gradually lose touch with Ryan. Occasionally I’d check out his updates and his abs on Instagram. We’d raise our girls and we’d grill on the weekends, Carlos would make his Milanesa and I’d make my mojitos, and Peggy would race around the backyard, barking at squirrels she could never quite catch.
“My Generation” was a runner-up for the Brooklyn Review’s 2023 Short Story Contest.
About the Author
Eugene Stein lives in Los Angeles with his husband and children. His short stories have been published in Iowa Review, North American Review, Colorado Review, Witness, Catamaran, and Michigan Quarterly Review. His story in Iowa Review won a Pushcart Prize, and his story in Michigan Quarterly Review was reprinted in Harper’s. He is currently working on a novel.
About the Artist
Paul Anagnostopoulos is an artist whose paintings explore mythological desire and melancholy through contemporary queer narratives. He graduated with his MFA in Studio Art from CUNY Hunter College in 2023 and earned his BFA in Studio Art and Art History from New York University in 2013. Anagnostopoulos presented solo exhibitions at Dinner Gallery (New York, NY), Leslie-Lohman Project Space (New York, NY), and GoggleWorks Center for the Arts (Reading, Pennsylvania). His work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art Archives and Library, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, and Yale University. Anagnostopoulos participated in 10 acclaimed artist residencies in the states and abroad, most notably the Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT), the Wassaic Project (Wassaic, NY), and the Association of Icelandic Visual Artists (Reykjavík, Iceland). His work has been featured in Hyperallergic, New American Paintings, Artnet News, and VICE. Anagnostopoulos is based in New York, NY and his work is visible at www.panagnos.com.