Excerpt from Before I Lose My Style by Mike Kaspar
This autumn a pirate radio station has begun broadcasting from somewhere in Silver Lake. They start playing music soon after sundown and are usually still on the air when I fall asleep. Russ mentioned the station to me a few weeks ago, and since then it has become the only thing I listen to in the evenings. Before the illegal station, I usually had my radio set to a jazz station from Long Beach. I’m not really a big jazz fan; I own a large library of CDs, but less than a dozen of them could be classified as jazz. I never go to jazz clubs. I enjoy the music enough, but the main reason I tuned in to the jazz station was the variety. It seemed like the only station in Los Angeles that didn’t just play the same twenty songs over and over.
This pirate station plays much of the indie rock loved by me, mixed with music I don’t know and overlooked bands from the past. Even a song you’ve played millions of times becomes a wonderful surprise when you hear it unexpectedly on the radio. Out of context, you never quite recognize the opening chords. For a few seconds you can’t quite place them, but they stir pleasant, if ineffable, memories. Yesternight I heard one of the best Yo La Tengo songs sandwiched between Jonathan Richman and a track from Dusty in Memphis. The dislocation made the familiar song revelatory.
Tonight the music is mellow electronic tracks, lots of Boards of Canada, it seems. It isn’t indie rock, but it feels right at this late hour. I pour myself a glass of water from the pitcher in the fridge. I live on a high floor in a building downtown; on clear nights like this, with all the condo lights off, the hills are sparkling sodium gold. While I drink the water, I look out the condo’s windows towards Silver Lake, towards the neighborhood in which somewhere, in some old basement or disused guest house, some anonymous guy is sorting through his favorite discs to choose what next to play and send out to the audience he is not quite sure is there, while, most probably, a van steered by some tired federal agent winds its way among the hills, looking for the source of the transmission, looking to stop the broadcast.
The guy I brought home from the club—excusing myself early from my friends—is asleep behind me on the couch, wearing only the boxers he pulled on after sex, dozing off without any blankets, using an armrest for a pillow.
He is young. Since my boyfriend left last year, this has become a habit. These boys are always over twenty-one (or at least savvy enough to get into clubs underage), so I’m not doing anything wrong. Yet I have at least a decade on most of them. I have my mortgage, my car, my career, my responsibilities—while they are in college, or finishing college, or skipping out on college to work some dead-end job or dead-end Hollywood fantasy. In summary, they’re not yet adults.
I’m hardly the first man to pick up guys much younger than him. What shocked my friends—and me as well—was that this constituted a sudden change of behavior. Before my boyfriend, I always dated guys my own age. Then again, before my boyfriend, I was these guys’ age. More importantly, while I did have a couple one-night stands and stupid flings before my boyfriend, I did, for the most part, date. I would become friends with guys, go to movies, have conversations over coffee, joke around. Whatever I’m doing now, it isn’t dating.
This guy tonight is quite handsome. He is muscular in the way some guys are after playing sports in high school, not in the calculated, bulging way of those of us who go to the gym regularly. A benefit of my expired relationship is a very well-built figure. My boyfriend encouraged me to go to the gym with him after work. As a result, I now find that I can wear a pair of jeans and a well-cut shirt to a club and be fairly certain that some young guy will come up and start flirting with me. I am not a fool. I know that nine out of ten guys in their early twenties are not interested in a guy in his early thirties. But that ten percent can be counted on to be out there. And some of that ten percent is ridiculously hot. I try not to think about their motivations. Whatever their reasons, it keeps me entertained on the weekends.
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