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"So I'm having a little get together at my house on Saturday night. I'm making dinner and we're watching Madonna's concert DVD. You should come."

I'll be the first to admit that I encourage my boss. The way we carry on at work, there's certainly no reason he wouldn't invite me to his house for a dinner party. I have this annoying need for people to like me, regardless of my feelings about them. I'll invest all my available energy and anxiety in it only to regret having succeeded. I love all mankind, but in a sort of general, only-at-work kind of way. Once mankind starts inviting me to things, I freak out and start thinking about the social implications. Do we listen to the same kinds of music? Would we spend our money on the same stuff? Would my other friends like him/her? Are we the same kind of homo? Is he/she a homo at all? Do I really have the time and energy for any more straight friends?

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here didn't seem to be any way out of it, though. Danny had been trying to get me to party with him ever since my first week of work, so I figured it'd be best to get it over with and refresh the believability of future excuses. Plus, saying yes would get him to move along so I could enjoy my break and read in peace. It was hard enough to follow Pauline Kael's arguments against Flashdance with the weekly Dungeons & Dragons crew camped in the back room, the Dungeon Master endlessly listing the contents of an imaginary room with the perfunctory drone of a bureaucrat.

"Five spears, 14 morning stars, six javelins, a silver necklace with three gems, 50 gold pieces."

All I felt then, besides irritation, was an amused superiority, but it's hard to deny now that I too live in a fantasy land. At 27, I make people coffee for a paycheck and live rent-free in an all-female dorm on a small college campus. In my free time, I watch movies and try to avoid other people.

The idea of a life as a freelance film critic/barista sounded suitably romantic when I'd first conceived it. In practice, being the oldest worker at a cafe who isn't a manager just makes me feel like an ass with a hobby. I've also discovered that romantic writerly existences don't really develop in all-girl dorms. (I still plan, though, to sell my story to MTV Films and neglect to mention that I'm gay.)

My roommate works at the college we live in and gets as part of her salary a very lovely two-bedroom apartment, which used to be the residence of the woman who, a hundred years ago, was paid to make sure the young ladies kept their minds off their special places. My roommate's job, as far as I can tell, at least partly involves ensuring the opposite.

I'd never actually lived in a dorm in college, so when I moved back to the Bay Area from Mexico and my friend courted me for the position of live-in minister of companionship, I saw the cost-effective second chance for what it was. Though with my own bathroom, a full kitchen in the apartment, and a complimentary white-noise machine to block out nocturnal giggling, I really only get the benefits of dorm life. Those benefits, so far as they relate to me, are access to the trail mix bowl outside the RA's room and the mysterious appearance of my name in glittered construction paper on the apartment door, presumably the work of some shadowy student welcoming committee.

One extra, more dubious, perk of my special dorm life is the certain celebrity status I enjoy as the building's only male resident. I'm constantly greeted in the halls by people I don't know and I've put my all into the role of the gracious exotic. I'm also a subject of great mirth to a group of girls who live at the end of a corridor near the trash door. They've decided I'm an undercover security officer enlisted to protect them from the dangers of the outside world. I play it up when I pass by, shadowboxing and saying, "Rest easy tonight, ladies."

With my cushiness secured and my distaste for taxing work vacuum-sealed around my heart, I went in search of a job that would require as little from me as possible so I could concentrate on my little hobby.

I worked for about a month as a door-to-door fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee, and, after the worst professional experience of my or anybody else's life, I have two things to show for it: an outdated four-paragraph speech branded upon my brain and the knowledge that there are a surprising amount of really friendly Republicans in the Bay Area. I guess I also got a t-shirt.

After I quit that job, I bussed tables for a rival, fuller-service coffee shop across the street from the cafe where I'm at now. That didn't last long either.

When I interviewed with Danny, I didn't want to explain why I was only there for a month and a half, so he still doesn't know I ever worked there, even though old customers come in all the time for coffee and ask me-- more loudly than I'd like-- how I prefer this side of the street.

Seriously, the coffee shop is so close I can see my old coworkers serving food from my post at the register. The cafe's bathroom, in fact, occasionally served the noble purpose of receiving my morning ejaculate before a long day's bussing. I don't do that now that I'm on the payroll, though.

The cafe, where I spend way too much of my time not to resent the retinal assault, is one of those cultural cacophonies into which independent cafes can descend without the discipline and taste of corporate decorators. The walls are polypous with African tribal masks and Navajo weavings and didjeridoos and whatnot.

Plus there's the poster of Che that keeps us in compliance with the local Kahlo-Guevara Image Saturation Ordinance (2838-6). One time, a very excited woman approached the espresso bar and batted at my fragile lattechino-assembling concentration with this unexpendable statement: "Oh, my God, that's so weird-- I have the very same picture of him on a t-shirt at home!" I would have called the producers of "That's Incredible!" but the show's been off the air for decades.

Though the busboy lifestyle was way less complicated and didn't require my rising at an hour that labor reformers don't even know exists, I think I really do prefer this side of the street. Not having "boy" in my title certainly goes a long way toward explaining it. (Though I'm not sure I have a title at all-- once when I actually used the term "barista" to describe us, I was roundly mocked.) It may also be that this is the first job I've had since leaving social services in San Francisco in which nearly every male employee is a big flamer. When I was in my early teens, I dealt with such internalized homophobia that, years later, it still amazes me how eager I am to surround myself with gay men, regardless of the subcultures involved.

We run the gamut, in fact-- we'd do nicely as a half-hour program about unlikely roommates (who perhaps live in an all-girl dorm and have to wear dresses in the hall to keep up the charade).

There's the bitchy hairdresser-in-training who can't wait for the civil rights train to come back around so he can get married and live in the richest corner of the Bay with his loaded fiancé; the pansexual (though conversationally frigid) belly dancer who looks like an emaciated Gael Garcia Bernal and dresses like a folk dancer from the Balkans; and Danny, the sex-obsessed slut extraordinaire whose hobbies include collecting and trading Madonna factoids and making appetizers.

I suppose it's only fair to whittle myself down to a glib classification, too, so here goes: I'd round out the unlikely-roommates sitcom as the delusional aesthete-in-training who's disillusioned with hipsterism (though terrified of free agency) and is also theoretically pansexual but half-heartedly so (I haven't had a clue how to find a female sexual partner since my late teens and am perfectly content to tamp down that outcropping of my libido with animated porn, and the tranny boys I know are all too cool for me).

There are overlaps with my coworkers, of course-- I am also sex-obsessed, and I like Balkan folk music. But I can never really feel connected to any of them in any honest way. I'm starting to realize, terrifyingly, that I don't much want to connect to anybody just right now, that, when interaction is necessary, I'm most happy with people who like to talk about sex and will laugh at my jokes. This, apparently, is all I currently want out of community.

No wonder I can't help encouraging Danny-- he seems to live permanently in this state. I feel like I'm in a masturbatory purgatory where reality must be avoided at all costs, a Dungeons & Dragons-esque fantasy world where mages and amulets are substituted for an impressively boring ideal involving a meticulously constructed dream boyfriend and an actual list of books, à la the Dungeon Master's inventory, that I read with completist speed in our cozy, amber-sunlit bedroom. That's right, I waste hours fantasizing about reading books with my fake boyfriend. Go ahead and stop reading.

Anticipated evening unfolds

But now back to reality, i.e. having to put up with somebody else's fantasy world. I was late to Danny's screening of the Madonna concert and realized as I circled his neighborhood on my bike that I was putting off calling to tell him I'd gotten lost. I am sensitive about my incompetence as a food-service professional, you see, and Danny's veneer of amiability doesn't always withstand the pressure of his irritation with my performance. It was unpleasant to discover I was still worried about screwing up with him even in other circumstances.

Danny, with his Euro-Filipino background and '60s Cher hair, looks stereotypically Native American. More than one person has betrayed shock when I tell them he's a dizzy, screaming queen. "Really?" someone said. "Funny, I'm not sure why, but for some reason I imagined him being more, I don't know, stoic." A cafe like this one-- an attempt at a global group-hug that instead looks like the showroom of a man who hunts people for sport-- has its fair share of clueless and self-pleased customers who'd like nothing more than to be credited with single-handedly repairing Native American/ White relations. I'm sure he's gotten a lot of stupid remarks and then a lot of stupefied reactions when he opens his mouth and sounds like Harvey Fierstein sucked a helium balloon.

Danny has a taste for hairy older men and, looking as he does, he has no trouble finding men who have a taste for him. One such fellow was sitting in Danny's living room with a beer in his hand when I walked in the door. He was an old fuck-buddy of Danny's who would soon introduce himself to the gathered party by telling a long and pointless story, featuring many guys he'd slept with who all knew each other in one way or another. "Yeah," he chuckled as we waited for the punch line, "it was crazy." The whole point of the story was that he'd had sex with all those men, which was crazy. This was how we met him.

The other people in the room were two of my coworkers and a customer whom Danny had recently befriended. I was happy to see my coworkers-- they were two of my favorite people from the cafe: Maria, a girl of 20 who got this job straight out of high school and wants to be a health inspector (not a bad life, actually, if you ask my uncle), and James O'Grady (who knows I'm writing about him and suggested this be his assumed name), a 19-year-old straight boy who is just about the prettiest thing in coffee today. He's also about the sweetest, and there's a pleasant flirtatiousness between us that's all the more pleasant for being a dead end. Anyway, I don't think I could love up someone who, according to Danny, thought the weeds in the back of the cafe were tobacco plants sprouting from his tossed cigarette butts. With such innocence, I'd feel like a predator. Still, I couldn't help feeling hurt that he'd chosen to sit in a chair and not on the couch with me.

The customer friend of Danny's was a pretty forgettable woman who was here because she shared his love for Madonna. Danny had clearly been drinking long before I got there and was getting pretty chatty with her.

"How's Dave doing?" he asked her. "I haven't seen him at the gym in a while and he never comes to the cafe anymore. Dave," he explained to us, "is her husband. Very sexy. Especially in the locker room. I'm not gonna say any more, but you're a lucky girl."

She smiled uncomfortably. Danny's hirsute on-again-off-again interrupted, the distraction initially welcome, but soon regretted. It was another story, with little more point than the last one but was at least apropos of the subject at hand. It was a more significant story, though, because it called into question his claim to humanity and thoroughly disgusted everyone present except, I suppose, Danny, who was sloppily twittering about the premises with food platters and wine bottles.

"The other day at the gym, this really fat guy comes up to me, right? I mean this really chubby dude, and he starts, you know, hitting on me." After another sip of beer, "So I said to him, loud enough so that everybody could hear, I said, 'When was the last time you saw your feet under that fat belly?'" He started laughing, and we all just stared at him, except for poor James O'Grady, who was too sweet not to laugh.

"And I mean everybody heard it and that guy was so embarrassed he just ran out of there, and I was high-fiving people all around me."

The story was obviously, if not apocryphal, at least improved upon. I wouldn't be too surprised if he'd actually said what he claimed, but no gym full of adults, no matter where you are, is going to high-five some asshole for saying it. My guess is they were as disgusted as we were, and I had the terrible feeling he was scoring his anecdote a success with us. I'm sure when he recounts this evening to others, we'll all be high-fiving him.

Trailers finished, feature looms

If ever Madonna saved a dinner party, she saved this one. Oblivious Danny got the itch to watch what we'd come over to watch, Madonna's The Confessions Tour, so he popped it in the machine. I'd assumed the Madonna thing was just an excuse to get together, that we wouldn't actually have to sit there and watch a full concert, but we're all aware of the transmutative properties of assumptions.

My relationship with Madonna is even more fraught with ambivalence than my relationship with Danny. I'm in love with exactly "Deeper and Deeper," "Spanish Lullabye," and the opening notes of "Hung Up." The rest gives me the same bland pleasure any famous song gives you when you're drunk at a party, just by virtue of being recognizable.

The concert was impressive in an acutely unimportant sort of way, full of the type of stuff television shows us many times a day: astounding ideas and images from around the world that a century-and-a-half ago would only be accessible via book engravings and traveling enterprises but now are notable only when somebody makes an event of them, like Danny did. All of it very near breathtaking, but with a strong odor of stunted spirituality.

But one thing made me think Madonna needs to take one of those cultural-sensitivity seminars that contract with large companies. It was the part left out of the NBC telecast: an image of Madonna doing "The Christ" on a disco- ball crucifix. I didn't find nearly the significance in it that Danny and the customer lady did, but Madonna shows us time and again that a miserably failed shaman can still be an admirable showman. I wondered how much it would cost to get a facsimile of her crucifix for the living room.

But then a string of digits on a screen behind Madonna steadily and quickly rose until it was so high, and attended with such a somber air, that you knew it could only be about rain forests or Africa. It turned out to be Africa, the number of kids on the continent orphaned by AIDS.

I don't know that laughing out loud was necessarily the appropriate response, but it was my honest one, and I got glares all around for being disrespectful. I suppose I could just appreciate that Madonna is getting the message out somehow (though it's doubtful anybody in her audience isn't aware of the magnitude of the problem and that the number business will do anything but reinforce the well-assimilated American perception of Africa as a faceless continent about to crumble under the weight of its problems). I simply chose to be offended by Madonna's criminally inept muddling of metaphors.

Disco Jesus for Affordable Drugs aside, just having to sit there and watch the concert for so long was kind of an awkward experience. Danny's childlike transfixion made us all afraid to talk through it. It really was like disco church, the levels of awe varying wildly from person to person. Poor James O'Grady, fidgeting in his pew, had been to Danny's parties before and was actually sitting through the thing for the second time.

Getting personal

Danny had kept drinking through the concert and was pretty trashed by the time it finally ended. His affections, which are hardly concealed to begin with, were now exuberantly telegraphed. I was asked, for one thing, about the topographical particularities of my ass. I was drunk enough myself, unfortunately, to answer him candidly-- Maria brings it up at work from time to time.

Danny then started telling all kinds of secrets about cafe people he wasn't supposed to tell. It appeared as though one of the owners, who mainly worked at the downtown cafe, had just been trashed on the comments page of a local consumer-interest website for leering at the female customers and paying the pretty ones more attention than anyone else.

They even got nasty about his physical appearance. I took this hard for some reason-- he works with us one day a week and I always look forward to my time with this funny, foul-mouthed Swede. (We have a vaudevillian sort of relationship that must be irritating to any non-participants within earshot. When he had to go to Stockholm to attend his mother's funeral, he told me to look after his wife. "Make sure she doesn't stray." He wasn't referring to his real wife, who would be going with him, but any number of beautiful women to whom he claims lifelong devotion on a bi-hourly basis. "If she's still mine when I get back, you get a nice something from Stockholm."

"Get me one of them Nobel Prizes," I told him, calling up the only thing I knew about the city besides the syndrome. "I don't care which-- except for Peace, of course. Might as well get honorable mention at a third-grade tap-dancing contest."

Joran and Danny were very close, and there was a sweet brotherliness to Danny's spilling the beans. While he snorted about it, though, I couldn't help thinking of his wife and teenaged daughter reading the comment and what that would mean to Joran.

Danny also told us about this annoying customer who never shuts up about her gallery shows and the unsatisfactory temperature of the decaf. "Oh my God, let me tell you, she is having an affair with her married masseur! She just told me this morning. But now he's starting to ignore her. I think it's because the wife knows. But none of you heard that, okay? God I hate her." He'd taken the reigns of the party fully from his fuck-buddy, whose only other major contribution that night was to tell James O'Grady that if he ever decided to become a gigolo he should settle for nothing less than limousines and Cristal.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, Danny remembered, or likely never stopped thinking about, the customer lady's husband and his testicles. "You don't have to answer this, but does he like to have them licked?"

She stammered and finally said, desperately, "Yeah, I guess."

"Oh, I'll bet he does."

You could tell she was thinking, "If I'm offended, does that make me a homophobe?"

An earful, an eyeful

Maria, an observant Catholic who can't get into a bar but already has a fiancé and a mind to demarcating the next several years of her life with consecutive nine-month sentences, sat there quietly listening. She wasn't in the least shocked-- she just took it all in so she could remind me what to laugh at when next we worked together. Maria has to hear all about Danny's exploits, so she's no stranger to the capabilities of his tongue. "Oh, this FB of mine's got a sling he just put up in his bedroom," he told us one day. "I'm gonna go try it out, but I don't want to drive all the way to Hayward, so I might cancel." Or a couple of days later: "You guys! I have to tell you about this guy I met online yesterday. He's this big hairy dude. I call him Thor. He has the biggest thingy you've ever seen. He was supposed to come over for a quick blow-job, but he ended up fucking me through the end of next week! He's married, but it's okay-- his wife's been terminally ill for, like, ever."

Maria's always charmingly pragmatic in her disapproval: "So much time wasted!"

I've gotten into the same confessional habit with her, but only because Danny had blazed the trail long before. The morning after a particularly magical evening involving bodily fluids and an inadequately-positioned Democratic National Committee t-shirt, I was reminded of some specifics when she got a shot of dish soap in her eye. "Let me guess," she stopped me, squinting, and performed a near-telepathically faithful pantomime of the story I was about to tell her.

Working with Danny for the past few years had totally schooled her in the ways of the gay hoochie. It's only fair, I think-- she tells us all about the church dresses she puts on her baby cousin and what she's giving up for Lent. It's just cultural exchange.

Actually, we've bonded mostly over Mexico: our shared love of Cantinflas movies, her loyalty to the teen telenovela "Rebelde," my unrealized dream to sing ranchera karaoke at the bar near my old rented room in Mexico City.

Otherwise we talk about how ill-suited I am to this job. It's my favorite subject and I think I've really brought her around to it too.

I like Maria more than the homos, to be honest. The possible exception is Danny, though working with him can be stressful. He's equally likely to call me over to the corner of the cafe to bitch me out for putting the wrong bread with the Sicilian salad as he is to say "Oh-my-God-I-want-that-guy-so-bad-I-bet-he's-got-a-beer-can-down-his-pants!"

As for the two other queer boys-- the one with his monogamaniacal contentment and the other with his vague and boring sexual fluidity, to say nothing of our non-carnal interests-- we just don't have anything to talk about. Taylor is a bleached-blond pretty boy with just enough baby fat to make him look vaguely like a circuit party Cabbage Patch Kid. He's likable enough in a snotty sort of way, but his only real foothold in my life story is his mega-fruity enunciation, which I envy with the white-hot intensity of a guy who doesn't know what it was like to go through high school with said enunciation. I try to reproduce it, to myself, almost daily. I sing whatever song is on the radio in his voice while I do the dishes, though I add way more breathiness and sibilance. And lots of vibrato. I like the way it massages the tongue and throat; it's a kind of meditation. I serenade James O'Grady in this voice when we work alone in the evenings.

The belly-dancing Burning Man type is probably the person I least enjoy at work. Though I suppose it doesn't help, it's not that I'm put off by his style, which is basically the cafe's. He is a cultural cacophony of one. If he stands in one position for any sustained amount of time, he blends into the background and only his eyes and teeth are visible.

Bernie Mann, as we'll call him for mnemonic purposes, is a perfectly nice guy, but his incessant staccato of pseudo-philosophical sentence fragments gives me white spots behind my eyes. I know there's more pathos there than I have the patience to absorb-- nothing's sadder than a person who has no idea what he's talking about but so badly wants to.

Back at the drunken Madonna party Danny hinted that Bernie might have the hots for me, which obviously changed everything. I'm not proud-- a boy's personality is at least two-and-a-half feet from his party platter, and Bernie was tall at that. Completely divorced as I was from any hope of finding a guy I liked on all levels, Bernie was just the type I went for, so I decided to.

Bernie had never actually come out and said he preferred gentlemen, so that had to be addressed first. "So, Bernie," I said to him. "What's the deal? Are you gay?" I was blunt, to be honest, and only had the nerve to approach him at all, so I could get whatever story out of the experience I could before press time-- I honestly don't know how people have the guts to get laid without deadlines. He responded to my question with some long and complicated bullshit answer about free love and individual spirits, all of which told me what I wanted to know: it wasn't entirely impossible for his penis to be in my mouth by the end of the night. I endured all manner of poorly conceived ruminations on unfettered sexuality and the merits of polyamory, all at my own prodding, just to determine if he might want to put any of his philosophies into practice in the back supply room. He didn't, it turns out. Danny didn't know what he was talking about. I thanked him so very much for exposing me to the singular pleasures of rejection by a strident champion of free love. Danny apologized and laughed in equal measure and by the end of the week the rest of the cafe knew all about it. That night I went home, cuddled with my perfect boyfriend, and finished the last four hundred pages of The Pickwick Papers.

Party's over

After everyone else went home from the Confessions Tour dinner party, I stayed for a couple more beers. Maria gave me a look of warning as she left, but the rest of the night couldn't have been more innocent. Danny and I sat around getting still more drunk, spilling our guts to each other. Laundry lists of exploits in the bedroom, coming out stories, medical tragedies. He told me about the first guy he messed around with in high school, about how the guy's mother found out and dragged her son along to beat the shit out Danny in a parking lot, how Danny's best girlfriend started dating the guy and stopped speaking to him. We bonded over the coincidence that our mothers both died when we were fifteen, and that our fathers were both financial disasters. We talked about a lot of other things. I enjoyed the evening and I suppose I was glad I came. I rode home early that morning thinking, once again, that it was probably about time I stopped inventorying my javelins and morning stars.

Jesse J. Peralta is the pseudonym of a writer/barista in the Bay Area. His debut novel should have come out six weeks ago, but his publisher, who has been incommunicado for 12, is either a terrible person or in a coma. The author isn't sure which he'd prefer. You can e-mail Jesse J. at jjj335@hotmail.com

Author Profile:  Jesse J. Peralta
Jesse J. Peralta is the pseudonym of a writer/barista in the Bay Area. His debut novel should have come out six weeks ago, but his publisher, who has been incommunicado for 12, is either a terrible person or in a coma. The author isn't sure which he'd prefer.
Email:	jjj335@hotmail.com