Another Weekend Cowboy

I sat in my car outside a honky-tonk outside Dallas thinking about an encounter a few months prior. Two mustached cowboys had met my gaze with a smile at some forgettable pizza restaurant. Meeting their eyes, I had felt the two-pronged horror of being seen. In one way, I had found the attention electric, their wild eyes and weathered grins told me they liked my masculine dress. I had worn a camouflage hat from Wal-Mart with a Zoom Bait company logo. My Wranglers had been on another week of wearing, supported with a leather belt I had bought from a different cowboy in Austin and a short-sleeve Carhart tee. Their nod of recognition saw me as a valid owner and operator of the country aesthetic, a bona fide country dude like them. They validated my masculinity.

At the same time, I felt found out: they could tell I was faking it. They may also have been able to tell I was attracted to men and to men like them, specifically, with their coarse way of being in the world. If they had heard me talk and found out I left Oklahoma without an accent, then surely they’d have known I was an outsider.

I was sitting outside this honky tonk because I had had a similar encounter here, an encounter that went further: a few intimate touches in the gravel lot, mixed promises in his smile. That smile, the same as the Colorado cowboys’, enchanting and threatening all at once.

The gray clouds chewed up the cool evening above the Swingin’ Doors Saloon. Looking at the honky-tonk, corrugated and weathered like a barn shed, I tore some pieces of paper from a notebook in my car, folded them into my back pocket, and opened the door.

I handed my Oklahoma ID to the middle-aged bouncer lady and asked her about the commotion in the billiards section.

“Pool league tonight,” she said.

The tables were alight with folks dressed in competition attire. I sat at a two-person table nearer the empty dance floor. The dozen or so mostly white people stood and swung and chatted and drank in the familiar way regulars do. A larger, butch woman vaped while she danced to Bruno Mars and Pink and whatever played from the TouchTunes. I felt around for my weed pen in my pocket, and settled on taking a hit after a few sips of beer and some clarity. The bartender didn’t recognize me despite our having had several long conversations but handed me a Coors and a little napkin, and I returned to my seat behind two gruff middle-aged men, old cowboys sitting deep in conversation.

They fit the archetype of the cowboy quite neatly. I watched as their heads shifted to each other, to their plastic cups of liquor, to women at the table, to the women walking by, to the women they were talking to. I could only see the back of the man closest to me. His white hair silhouetted his stocky frame. I caught his friend’s eyes over his shoulder. Being seen, I instinctually, though not conspicuously, turned my gaze from his body back to my blank pages.

The first time at that bar, I ended the night wrapped in a brief hug with a cowboy cut from the same cloth as the others. Thinner and darker in hair and complexion than them, he and I wandered through political discussion and family history before arriving at an impasse outside the saloon. His eyes were wild in the same way, his smile, too. In the bar, he asked me to follow him to the bathroom, bragged about his seductive power, and let me feel his body for the strength he earned working his family’s land. Outside, he looked at me with a question he couldn’t put into words. So, I did it for him. “You want a hug, dude?” I asked. He fell into me with the wisp of fraternal affection and no more. We agreed to go fishing, but never went. Now, our message history stagnates. Unsaid, whatever desire was there hangs in the cigarette air.

The indica settling in, the paper still blank and creased, I thought of how my boyfriend and I navigate these same spaces in our own way when we go out together. Though he lives in rural Connecticut, he started dressing as a cowboy after a stint at a ranch in South Texas. We’ve been all over the state to spots like the one in Terrell. He’s like me in appearance: naturally masculine and unclockable. At a gay bar, we’ll dance together and kiss with lit up eyes, but elsewhere, no one knows our hidden desire. In certain contexts, our desire is a pleasant surprise. One night after a concert in Boston, a man approached us and said, “Fellas, I came over to commend you guys on the hats, but then I saw you smooch!” Smiling, he gave us each a pat on the back, the adult version of a little league coach amping up his kids: “Keep it up!”

I pulled my head from the empty pages and the coaster wet with condensation to go piss. The cowboy I had thus far only seen from behind had walked that way before me, his eyes turning to a beautiful young woman sitting with a suspiciously older man. The cowboy tripped over a chair, and the woman’s man laughed at him.

In the bathroom, he stood at the trough and I pulled up beside him.

“You get distracted looking at that girl?” I asked him in jest.

He misunderstood me.

“Yeah,” he said. “You should talk to her. She’s beautiful, but I think she’s with that guy.”

I noticed him glancing down at me, but I didn’t mind. He looked at me with some kind of amusement, and as I walked back to my seat, I saw how the reds and blues of the saloon’s neon lights bathed everyone in deep hues of purple. I felt the weed rush in and mix with the beer I now sipped. The bartenders gossiped among themselves and their friends. The pool players played with increasing volume. The two cowboys continued their conversation. A table of young people danced to music they queued up on the machine. Left alone, I began thinking, the blank pages egging me on to some realization.

I looked around again, checking for data, to see whose eyes met my own. The bartenders were still wrapped up in each other and their pals. The pool players were finishing scoring. The two cowboys found themselves in silence. The young people were animated. No one’s eyes met mine.

In these extended moments of invisibility, I realized: not a single person paid attention to me. Another look around assured me, and I even let my eyes hang on each body a while longer, looking at all of the background characters like me, actors dressed a certain part, seen but not recognized, paying cash for liquor instead of card, liberation in ephemerality. In my not-being-noticed, I felt my keenest sense of belonging.

I tried to write this down in some stoned lyrical way. At some point, I put the pen down and returned to the bathroom. By chance, I pissed next to the same cowboy. This time his glances were more obvious, and I managed a glance at him, too. We made eye contact. Recognition, of the good sort. I realized that the moment of desire had resurfaced as his penis got erect, and we went for it.

I leaned in for a kiss catty-corner to the urinal, and the cowboy’s lips switched lanes to miss mine as his strong hand found my penis at a convenient distance below. Raw adrenaline made the words struggle out slowly like square wheels in wet sand. “Wait,” I told him, stopping the action before it started, before someone could walk in.

“How about you hang around?” he said, as I walked out of the bathroom and back into the dancehall of the honky-tonk.

Oh my God, I thought, utterly surprised by a repeat encounter.  Again?

I wanted to call my boyfriend, but decided to wait until whatever happened happened. The cowboy looked like John Wayne with a beard and had a deep and coarse Texan accent that buttressed the intimidation of his large, rugged frame. His stare pierced your eyes like hawk talons. He seemed like a guy who would beat the hell out of you for looking at him the wrong way, but he initiated the encounter: the cowboy wanted me.

Outside again, I took another hit. The cowboy’s buddy walked out, and I returned. Karaoke night followed pool league in a variety of country and sad dad rock. The cowboy sat alone.

“Mind if I join ya?” I asked him.

“Go ahead,” he said.

We passed through formalities without a real need for a name or other identifiers.

“So, a blowjob?” he asked. His eyes flicked around the bar, as our context necessitated a covert transaction.

“Sure,” I said.

I walked outside first, to avoid suspicion, and he joined me and walked us to his brand-new Chevy pickup, the kind with an interactive dash and perfect climate control. He laid the situation down, and asked again and again if I was from there, if I knew anyone he did. I assured him this would stay between him and me. He told me this was a part of him he had explored despite his marriage. “What would she think if she knew?” I asked him. “She’d divorce my ass,” he said.

I felt up his body, his thighs, his chest, his belly. He felt up my legs, then grabbed my cock. Then, it played out: a desire satiated in the parking lot, swapping blowjobs without undue intimacy, without too much noise. No kissing. No strings. Just release, some guilt, and an image of a pickup driving out into the night, the air as dark and radiant as a family of corvids filling up the sky.

I kept what I’d written folded in my back pocket and savored my newfound revelation, seeing myself as a background character in the honky-tonk space became the catalyst to true coziness in my own masculine presentation. A young gay country boy with a penchant for writing and a strong attraction to the men I grew up with, I was an archetype. I was a familiar background character, someone people could recognize and talk to (or not) in the way they talk to the grocery store person, to the old man at the gas station, to the bartenders at every little saloon in Texas. Not an outsider: I belonged, in my own way. My own kind of outlaw.

Sober and driving east, Dallas began to stretch like taffy in all directions of highways and skyscrapers and strip malls, and the strong country of rural Terrell became little wisps of cowboy signage and Texan billboards until it faded away for true city altogether. No desire left in the empty air. No one knowing where I was. ▩