Tight
by Jamal Story on Tuesday, September 28, 2010 at 3:56pm

"Il est toujour bon, sur ma fois d'avoir les femmes avec soi." - Remendado and Dancairo trying to convince Carmen to go with them (Quintet, Bizet: It is always good, upon my word, to have women with you.)


The first thing important to know is this: in exchange for our bottomless offerings of support and willingness to be surrogate boyfriends in times of crisis, gay men get to be polygamous. I have four wives. Three were little sisters who upgraded to wife status when Krisha Marcano came along with the declarative, “I am your wife, you will act accordingly.”

This very humbling scenario does not begin with her, however. It starts with the sunny afternoon when Hollie, another wife, escorted me to the car repair joint down the block so that I could handle the loose ends of my Saturn's demise. Well, no that's not true. I asked Hollie to go with me since she was hanging out at the house and I have always understood the latitude that older men give younger men who have beautiful, upstanding women near us.

It worked. My mechanic was charmed, giving me ample time to sort out the mailing of the title so that the car could be released to a non-profit or church that needed one. “Don't worry about all this,” he said. “You two have a great time in Vegas.”

Of course I hadn't said she was going with me.

A week passed. I returned from Vegas for a few days and this time I confiscated Krisha's entire afternoon, included her in on my madness. A sunny day again, a jaunt to the car repair joint down the block. This time to collect my things out of the trunk. When we walked into the garage, the first thing I did was motion toward the woman I was with.

“Hey man, this is Krisha.”

“Oh yeah, we met before.”

“No," I said, "that was Hollie.”

Um, was there a reason he called me out? Didn't he know better than to ignore my lead? What player handbook was he reading from? I was glad that I'm not actually sleeping with any of my wives.

I asked Krisha to go ahead of me to the adjacent junkyard to see if I'd left the jalopy unlocked yesterday. After she was out of visibility, the mechanic came behind me with the key.

“Man, I hope I didn't mess you up just now. Sorry about that.”

“Nah, it's all good. My game is tight.”

Yeah, I said that. I went with this. It was a man moment, meant to be kept right there, between men.

When I got to the car, Krisha looked at me, her eyes showing me the folded arms she didn't feel like making.

"I know exactly what happened just now. He apologized didn't he?”

“Uh yeah he did,” I said, hoping that she simply applied an amount of common sense to get there.

“Your game is tight? Really?”

Wow. Had I said that loud enough to be heard? What player handbook was I reading from?

“And the extra bass in your voice, really? Where did that come from?”

The fact that she wasn't done made it clear to me that I would never live this one down.

“What extra bass?”

“Don't act like you don't know what I'm talking about,” she said, emptying the glove compartment. “Let me tell you something, you are a gay. A gay, a gay, a gay!”

I pointed to the items she used for emphatic gesticulation.

“Leave the owner's manual in there for the new people.”

“Did you hear me?”

This would be shared with the other wives of course. And although the stakes of my player moment were not Pastor Long high, I still haven't lived down a particular hop over the fence a few years back (no hypocrisy up there, just barbed wire, who knew?). Granted, I can keep both my gay card and my village, but perhaps my game isn't so tight after all.


"Et sans elles, les toutes belles on ne fait jamais rien de bien."
(And without them, the very lovely ones, one never does anything right.)