I decide that today my depression will end, but it all depends on the Ear, Nose, and Throat clinic. They're going to clean out my ears and I'm going to hear cigarette ashes falling on asphalt. But then the doctor looks into my ears and says there's no wax, we need to wait two months to see if you'll need surgery. That just fucks up my plan. I thought I was going to leave the clinic doing runway, and instead I leave thinking I'm dying.

The dying part happens because the doctor gives me some anesthetic up my nose so he can stick this little camera in and look around. Good thing I'm not as paranoid as some of my friends. The anesthetic makes me all nauseous, I feel like I'm going to pass out right there, lying on the floor unable to hear anything. Then the doctor says do you have any risk factors for HIV, I mean what kind of question is that? I say sure, he says well this could be HIV-related.

He might as well say you've got the fag's virus sucking up your hearing like a Slurpee. I leave thinking no one's ever come in my ass; I've swallowed come, but maybe it was that time someone shot in my eye. Later on, I decide to go to the Boiler Room for a beer. I never go there because everyone's working that cult of masculinity thing, but for some reason I suddenly have this idea that I'll meet my dreamboy there. I get a Bass Ale and squeeze a bunch of lemon in it to keep my electrolytes balanced. I drink the beer SLOWLY-over a whole hour and that's good, makes me kind of happy and calm.

But the bar is boring, nothing happening and hardly anyone to cruise and my dreamboy just doesn't show up. To tell you the truth, I'm not even looking for my dreamboy, I just want to fall asleep in some guy's arms. Two a.m. comes around and I don't want another beer so I go over to the Bijou even though I'm not that horny, just unfulfilled. Before I left Seattle, I thought a sex club couldn't get any worse than Basic Plumbing, but Basic Plumbing was like heaven compared to the Bijou. The Bijou is worse than a bar, at least at a bar people talk a little and laugh and sort of have fun. At the Bijou, people just walk around in circles looking dazed.

Everyone waits for a cubicle to open up because this is crackdown time and there won't be sex in any public space inside a fucking sex club. In every cubicle, there's some worn-out guy with a vacant, dazed look on his face. Some guys will hog a cubicle for hours. Not that I'm all excited about getting in on that action; I go to a sex club to get on my knees and suck five guys' cocks, to fuck some guy against a wall while someone else is eating my ass and I'm making out with a third guy who's got his hands around my neck. But not at the Bijou.

If there's a cure for horniness, it's the Bijou. Ten minutes there and I want to go home and go to bed. But of course I wait. I try to talk to a few guys and they can't deal. So I wait. I mean-no question about it-I'm one of the hottest guys there by just about anyone's standards, but nothing is happening for me. I try to go into a cubicle for a threesome, but the cubicle-holder won't have it. I tell myself I'll leave by three. Then I say after I go to the bathroom and get hard at the urinal to see if I can start something. But I'm so bored that I can't even get hard.

Three-thirty comes around and I'm still there. I figure I better get something out of this place so I take all the condoms from a basket and put them in my pocket. Twenty-three Kimonos, so I guess that's worth the ten-dollar cover plus seventy-five cents for a locker. I leave that dump wanting to SCREAM, thinking just take me back to my empty apartment where I don't have to deal with any of this shit. I find a good luck penny in the cab because I sure need some.

When I get home, I put on Armand Van Helden's Witch Doktor c.d. and that brings me right back to Boston. I know it's bad when I start thinking about Boston. Ritchie would play a runway song and the floor would clear, all the black queens would come out and walk, and sometimes the clubkids too though usually we'd just screech and yell work mama, make space for the queens and turn it out on the sidelines. Ivari would walk out like a three-hundred pound trannie supermodel, waving her fan with letters that spelled it all out: IVARI. We'd all be saying walk for me, and the queens would walk. I liked Deena the best, she'd walk back and forth all night fanning herself with a handkerchief and somehow that just sent me to the sky. None of that Ru Paul hips to the walls sort of thing, just a subtle swing.

But anyway I get back from the Boiler Room, take off all my clothes, put on my gold house boxers and black stacks, and I just use that room like I'm living large. First I'm practically stomping across, witch doctor, shrieking and laughing, throwing up my right leg and doing my special fly-through-the-air-and-twist-around crowd-stopping move. Then I switch to the Fugees version of "Killing Me Softly," and I slow down and do runway like my life depends on it. Because it does.

Matt Bernstein Sycamore is the editor of Tricks and Treats: Sex Workers Write About Their Clients (2000), and Dangerous Families: Queer Writing Beyond Recovery (Haworth, 2003). His writing has appeared in Best American Erotica 2001, Best American Gay Fiction 3, Best Gay Erotica 2000, 2001, and 2002, Blithe House Quarterly and numerous other publications. "Runway" is an excerpt from his novel, Pulling Taffy—he's ready for the million-dollar contract. He can be reached by email here.

read Digestion from Issue 7

read Falling In Love With Francis from Issue 3

read Ten Dollars from Velvet Mafia

email Matt Bernstein Sycamore

email jsun Van Tatenhove