SHOOTING POOL

First “date” and your left hand.

Christmas came and went. New Year’s Eve too. A new century rolled in, and finally, you called. “You around?” 

“Yeah, why?” 

“Wanna grab a drink?” 

You were living at your mom’s house in your old childhood bedroom and carless. And Sam - also living nearby at his own mom’s house, had a car. The two of you would regularly shoot pool at a dive bar on the edge of our hometown’s downtown strip. Sam would pick you up on the way. And so our first meetup was me crashing your bro-hang. 

Sam was nervous and shy, friendly, smiled and laughed easily, made light chitchat happen. He’d gone to our school a year ahead of us, so I recognized his face but we’d never spoken. He was an eager-to-please wingman and I could sense his internal nod of approval as the evening wore on. It was too easy. Sam thought I was funny and giggled at everything I said.  You were quieter and let us do the majority of the talking, but the way you looked at me made it feel like we were in cahoots, on the inside of some private joke.  Your stoic face and friendly silence felt alluring, like confidence.  Years later, I’ll realize that silence is social anxiety. We ordered whiskeys and sodas at the bar, grabbed a nearby pool table. The place was a dark and divey restaurant bar where divorcees our parents’ age mingled. We were the youngest patrons there by about 20 years. 

You’d bend over the table to break the set with your long arms, cue resting between the long pale fingers of your left hand. You were good at the geometry, careful and calculating. I sucked. I could get a lucky break now and then, but I wasn’t watching angles or lining up deliberate ricochets. 

I distinctly remember feeling so at ease, like you were already my boyfriend by the second set. Our chemistry was obvious enough that when the bar closed, it wasn’t even awkward when Sam excused himself and left me to give you a ride home instead - even though you lived clear across town in the dead opposite direction of my house. 

“You guys good?”, said Sam, excusing himself like the good wingman he was. 

“Yeah, I can drive him home”, I said, looking at you for approval. 

As we exited, you opened the door and gently placed the palm of your hand on the small of my back, sending electric shivers down my spine. 

I got into the driver’s side of my brand new Subaru Forester. After surviving 7 years of college on a Schwinn cruiser, it was only weeks old, a guilt-driven overly generous graduation gift from my dad. It still had that new car smell. I didn’t yet understand the true cost of cars - or the difference between buying and leasing. I didn’t yet know that my dad couldn’t afford this car he gave me, so he’d leased it on a horrible plan, and that later, I’d need to take out a loan in order to keep it. But for now, life was simple. I had been gifted a beautiful new car and a beautiful boy was about to sit in it. 

I leaned over to unlock your door and you slipped into the passenger seat. Having you enter my vehicle felt intimate. My heart was racing, blood rushing like a mountain river after the melt. Your long legs were out of room, knees splayed up on the dashboard until you felt around for the manual crank and scooted it further back on the rails. 

Your left hand was resting on your own thigh. Long smooth fingers - ‘piano hands’, as my mom always said. The hands of an artist, a thinker. I projected a LOT of value onto those beautiful long fingers with pristine nail beds, trimmed, clean, delicate but strong. I kept my eye on your hand for hours while we traded secrets on fire. 

Everything you said turned me on. You’d just produced a short documentary about a day in your life. “Peter, the documentary.” You told me how you’d hosted a premier of it for all your friends at a local movie house in Sacramento. I’d later realize that you kept a very tight crew, and ‘all your friends’ really meant Sam, Ben, your then girlfriend and her friends. 

You loved all my favorite authors, directors. We liked the same things but not so exactly it was boring. Wherever our overlap ended, feverish and passionate recommendations would begin. 

“You’ve never heard of XTC? Oh I’ll play Oranges for you and it’ll blow your mind.”

“You haven’t read White Noise? I’ll lend you my copy. It’ll change your life.” 

I noticed you were a lot more animated and opinionated when we were alone. 

I told you about reading The Tin Drum in German and you said it was already on your long list of must-read books. I could tell you were impressed I’d read the original and was fluent in German. Intellect was hot for you. 

After dating a film buff in Germany for a year and a half, I knew just enough about documentaries to be dangerous, but was hungry for details and history. 

You told me that your favorite documentary filmmaker was Frederick Wiseman, and told me which ones we’d watch first. Our conversation was implying an immediate future of shared plans.

This was during the very beginnings of the internet when we still needed people to tell us about good things face to face, so all these recommendations of fresh art to devour had me in a frenzy. Is this how life partners are chosen? Books, movies and music? Were we both so weird that finding another person stranded in the burbs who liked both Errol Morris and Lynda Barry meant we were destined to mate? Apparently so. 

Beyond art, we spilled secrets like we were reading our most private diary entries: past loves, current dreams, deepest wounds. 

Desperate to touch you, I asked you how long your fingers were. 

And since no one knows the length of their own fingers, you flipped the hand closest to me, palm up on your leg like an invitation. 

As if stepping off a cliff’s edge into a cold mountain lake, I placed my right hand upon it, lining up the base of our palms, fitting my thumb against yours, matching up our fingers. Your fingertips remained uncovered, extending much farther than mine.  Your hand was ice cold and slightly damp, clammy. Mine was warm and dry. 

The places our skin touched lit up like fire; I imagined my heat turning your ice into steam. 

Before you or I ever used the term “anxiety”, I learned that your hands turned clammy and cold when you were afraid, filled with dread, panic or doubt. I’d also learn later that your hands were almost always clammy. 

How do we love people? Why do we love people? 

Do we fall in love with people piece by piece? An explorer documenting each fresh discovery with vigor. Eyes, nose, cheekbones, chin, jawline, earlobe, hair, nape of the neck. If we do, this was the precise moment I fell in love with your left hand. I fell in love with its damp vulnerability. And later, after I knew how self conscious you were about your clammy hands, every time I reached across the gearshift to hold it, I was saying: I am not afraid; I love you and all your fears. 

I have always had a thing for left-handed boys. And though you weren't a lefty, it’d turn out you were ambidextrous and used your left hand to write and do other dominant-hand things when you felt like it. And that counted in my book. 

We sat in that dark parking lot talking until 4 am and then I drove you home. You navigated us back through the quiet pre-dawn city streets, over the hill towards our old high school and back into a tiny dead-end drive with a gate. I couldn’t really make out the house behind the gate and the shrubs, but I dropped you out front and made sure you got in before reversing out and driving home in a state of dopamine glee, holding the wheel softly so I wouldn’t lose the memory of your smooth cold palm etched on my skin.