MEMOIR

The Fruit and Cheese Plate

Culture and Debauchery in Seattle After A Year of Cultural Deprivation And Enforced Celibacy in Fairbanks

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I moved at a full jog across SEA-TAC Airport, a twenty-pound backpack slung across my shoulders, from the Pacific Southwest Airlines arrival gate on one side to the Western Airlines departure gate on the opposite side. My incoming P.S.A. flight from San Francisco was an hour late. My Tokyo-bound W.A. 747 that would stop at Anchorage for refueling was boarding. I had twenty minutes to make it.

It was August. I headed to the second leg of my three-leg, three-thousand-mile journey from San Francisco to Fairbanks to start my new job as the law clerk to the chief judge of the Alaska Superior Court, Third Judicial District, based in Fairbanks. I was a newly certified and licensed California lawyer, having passed the Bar Exam in July along with the rest of the 31% of test-takers to pass.

I had said goodbye to my boyfriend Tyler the night before. I wanted him to come with me, but he was in the second year of a three-year architectural internship and had his career to pursue, so I hadn’t pushed.

Having not broken a sweat, I arrived at the W.A. gate breathing hard but not out of breath. I was used to running six miles at a six-minute-mile clip, so the little ten-minute jog hadn’t taxed me that much, the backpack notwithstanding.

I was wearing my favorite form-fitting, cream-colored cotton shirt with the black and red horizontal stripes across the shoulders and chest. It tapered at the waist. The stripes and tapering accentuated my shoulder muscles, which strained at the fabric, and my chest’s dimensions. I was also wearing my favorite gray cotton West Point gym shorts with a five-inch inseam. My muscular thighs and calves extended down from their hems like long, naked lumber-jack legs. Except mine were sexier, and instead of ending in heavy work boots, ended in blue-and-white-striped Adidas cross-trainers.

Dressed more for cross-country racing than cross-country travel, I was a notable hunk. Notable, that is, for anyone interested in noting such things.

Noting them, the towheaded, sinewy gate agent with adorable green eyes said, “All passengers have boarded. We are closing the jetway. I’m sorry, but we gave your seat to a standby passenger.”

“But first class is nearly empty. Would you mind sitting there?” he asked.

First-class in a Boeing 747 is something else from coach altogether. I couldn’t believe my good fortune.

“Well, I suppose I can force myself,” I said, winking, “but only because it’s you asking.”

I gave him my most winning smile and knowing look. I knew he was gay from our first eye contact. He winked back, walked me up the jetway, and delivered me to a black leather, reclining, arm-chair-sized swiveling seat in the first-class cabin. Having stowed my backpack in a nearby overhead bin, he nodded and turned to go, but stopped to speak to the first-class attendant on his way out.

In the backpack, I had a rolled-up pair of button-down Levi 501s and a blue-and-gray-striped, heavy-wool Eddie Bauer long-sleeved shirt along with my Dopp kit and several hard-copy books I was reading. I may have been dressed in gym wear, but I prepared for less clement weather. I was bound for the far Northwest, after all.

While the coach attendants locked down the doors and prepared the plane for push back, our attendant Andrew brought each first-class passenger, all three of us spaced apart throughout the cabin, a flute of champagne and a little plate of chocolate-covered strawberries. He collected the glasses and plates as the plane taxied to its takeoff point.

When we were airborne, Andrew toured the cabin, stopping at each passenger’s seat. He got to me last.

“Which would you like for dinner,” he asked, “the roast beef or chicken?”

“Oh, I’m a vegetarian. Would you have something like a fruit and cheese plate?” I asked as if Western was prepared to suit all manner of finicky first-class diners.

“I’m afraid not. All we have are the roast beef and chicken,” he said with what I supposed was an obligatory sad face.

“That’s OK,” I said to the sad eyes. “I’ll be alright without.”

He nodded and went to get the other two their dinners. After a while, he came toward me carrying a wine glass half-full of red wine and a full, cut-crystal decanter.

“At least let me offer you some wine,” he said in an apologetic tone. “I took the liberty of choosing our best Shiraz.”

I nodded and pulled the tray out of its cubbyhole. He set the glass and decanter down with a winsome smile and turned back to his business.

I swiveled the tray out of the way, got up, reached for the overhead bin, and took my copy of John McPhee’s Coming into the Country out of my backpack. It is a must-read for anyone moving to Alaska, even if for only a year. I had started it on the P.S.A. flight.

Sipping wine from time to time, I read. In roughly twenty minutes, Andrew reappeared at my side, holding a silver platter with an arrangement of fruit, cheese, and rolls on it.

“You said you had none,” I reminded him.

He said, “I cannibalized eight coach meals to put it together.”

Grateful for the special attention, I sat leisurely eating fruit and cheese and sipping Shiraz while reading McPhee. According to McPhee, native Alaskans call Alaska The Country. Everywhere else is simply Outside. Occasionally, if they wish to be more specific, they might refer to The Lower Forty-eight. When one moved to Alaska, one was said to be coming into The Country.

I would come into the country not by air from Anchorage to Fairbanks, but by the Alaska Railroad. I didn’t know why they called it the Alaska Railroad when the only places it went were Anchorage and Fairbanks, one round trip daily but never on Sunday. The nine-hour, 360-mile rail journey to Fairbanks was the more fitting way to come into The Country. I could see the landscape, pass Mount McKinley closely enough to marvel at it, and finish McPhee.

The following July, at the end of my clerkship year, I headed for Seattle to spend August decompressing. After a year of forced cultural deprivation and involuntary celibacy, I was looking forward to immersing myself in both high culture and libidinous debauchery. I had advance tickets to performances at the Seattle Opera House, the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, and the visiting Tutankhamen exhibit at the Seattle Asian Art Museum. For the other half of my enterprise, I had a well-thumbed copy of the Damron Guide with every gay bar of note highlighted in one of three colors, yellow for the commonplace, green for the more inviting, and bright orange for the more devilishly promising.

I stayed on Capitol Hill’s E. Prospect St., the southern border of Volunteer Park, with a San Francisco friend who had moved back to Seattle. I ran three circuits around the reservoir and one around the park’s southern half in the early mornings. Then, I spent the rest of the morning sitting in a favored bistro on the west side of 15th Ave. E., the park’s eastern boundary and the Hill’s bustling shops, cafes, and entertainment district’s principal thoroughfare. It was also the heart of the city’s gay village.

In the mornings, the bistro served coffees, pastries, bagels with lox and cream cheese, omelets, and most ambitiously, dessert soufflés to the Hill’s fashionable, young, gay in-crowd. I allowed I fit all those categories, my being 29 notwithstanding.

The street-side wall was a bank of four enormous bifold wood-framed glass doors that opened onto a sidewalk dining area and the glorious rising eastern sun. That August was indeed glorious, with mild, 60-degree nights and balmy 78-degree days. It rained not once, and the sky was always a brilliant cloudless blue. The doors always stood open.

Dressed only in my running gear and shouldering my backpack, I habitually sat at a table in the light just inside the open doors. I would sit there for hours, having something for breakfast and reading or writing letters to friends and family. I had never drunk coffee, but I learned to like it there. When I sat at the table for so long, I thought it only fair to buy something additional after finishing breakfast. Coffee it was.

Late one morning, I had several letters to mail. I turned left out of the doors and headed up the sidewalk to a mailbox across the cross street.

Halfway across, an engaging baritone voice called out to me, “Need a ride?”

I turned and saw to my left a striking, cherry-red Mustang convertible. Sitting at the wheel was the most remarkably handsome, blond-haired, blue-eyed young Adonis I had ever seen.

“Thanks,” I said unthinkingly. “I’m just going to the mailbox.”

“There’s a mailbox near my house,” he replied.

How slow on the uptake can you be, I thought, figuratively slapping myself upside the head.

I crossed the distance to his passenger-side door in four strides. The door already stood open when I got there.

We spent a lazy afternoon doing all manner of affecting things in every corner of his bed. I thought I had found in all of Seattle the one man in whose company I wanted to spend the rest of the month. Then he asked me to help him strip the bed and put the sheets in the washing machine before his lover came home. He drove me to my friend’s house on E. Prospect. We parted, two ships passing in the afternoon.

By the third week in August, I had satisfied all my cultural and most of my debauchery goals. On my penultimate weekend Friday, I went to late-afternoon tea at my favorite gay bar. It was a chic bar with a dance floor and hip young D.J.

I don’t circulate in large crowds. I’m fine when meeting new people one-on-one. But I’m uncomfortable handling large groups. I don’t mingle well.

I had been standing an hour with my back to a wall, sipping my double bourbon, and gazing across the dance floor, every so often ogling one man or another, when I spied the silhouette of a familiar figure with his back to me. He was talking to a man facing me with whom I had several times made eye contact. Between two gay men, It was eye contact that said, “We’re going to fuck.”

I meandered my way through the dancers and glided up behind the silhouette. The man smiled in acknowledgment of my approach to him. To his disappointment, I instead tapped the silhouette’s right shoulder and softly said, “Hello, Andrew.”

With apparent displeasure at having his conversation disrupted, he turned and looked questioningly at me. On his face, consternation first appeared, followed by dawning in his eyes.

“The fruit and cheese plate,” he ejaculated.

His smile lit up the room. The hug he gave me, grinding crotch to crotch, lit up my libido in expectation of what would follow. Staring fierce lightning bolts at me, the other guy gave up and walked away. Andrew scarcely noticed his departure.

Andrew was not due to fly again for fourteen days. We spent my last week in Seattle exploring the city and each other with equal delight.

On leaving, I asked him what the gate agent had said to him after seating me in first-class.

Andrew laughed and replied, “Take good care of him. He’s one of us.”

“I hope I have,” he added.

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