Some people never talk to strangers, some never talk to anyone but strangers, and Cliff leans against nightclub walls, never talking to anybody. He's peeled off most of the label from his beer bottle. Turns to look across the dance floor, hoping to spot somebody he knows. Then he sees a face he recognizes, a handsome, sharp face, a dark-eyed devil bouncing in and out of the light on the mass of bodies. Wearing a T-shirt that reads "PRIDE."
         He reaches up and grasps a bright yellow balloon, looks through the transparent rubber and thinks of balloons he blew up as a child, chocolate cake smeared on 5-year-old faces, old black and white photos.
         "I could talk to other boys just fine back then..." he tells himself. Cliff stands back in the bowels of the club wondering exactly when he stopped enjoying getting drunk. He looks back at the bartenders laughing with each other, rushing back and forth, washing glasses. Sees the crowd surging forward to order their screwdrivers, the empty glasses hanging upside down. Peels his shirt away from his sweaty skin.
         1:15 am, and the club is packed. Cliff, still young and somewhat skinny, looks at the green "WORSHIP" stamped onto his wrist. He's standing at the end of a huge rainbow made up of balloons, all bright colors, arching across the long mirror opposite the bar.
         Cliff doesn't come here for the music. He wants to meet somebody. He'd rather hear Lou Reed or the Germs or Roy Orbison than the latest club mix. They call it techno, they call it deep house, but it's still disco; it doesn't fool him for a second. Still, he's tired of always waking up alone.
         Some nights he stands on the street corners and listens to the city scream around him while he stands there disconnected. He's got pale skin that doesn't tan, slate-colored eyes and wavy black hair, and he never knows how to make small talk. Cliff came over on the L-train, a straight shot under the East River from Williamsburg.
         One July right after he'd moved here, he met a handsome kid while waiting for the 6-train down in the heavy, sticky air of the subway platform. It lasted three weeks. Why is it that once it's gone, you can never bring it back?
         Out front, Lars the doorman checks two more driver's licenses, of boys who look like they're still in high school. Feels the music through the floor.
         "Where do all these guys come from?" he says to Jeanette, who's counting her change and doesn't like to be thrown off.
         "They come out of their mama's birth canal, where do you think? Some are bridge and tunnel, you know. Most of them are locals." She talks more to her stacks of ones and fives than to Lars. He's repulsed by the way she's chewing her gum. Wiping the sweat off his forehead with a bar towel, Lars says stupid faghags under his breath. Who does she think she is, some chick in the Ziegfeld follies?
         He sizes up two more guys coming up the block. His girlfriend Nancy wants to come down to dance, but it's his first gig in a club that's not straight, and it makes him uncomfortable to have her here. He's not sure why. A breeze off the Hudson brushes up against Lars and for a moment he feels cool and relieved. One taxi after another pulls up and dispatches men on their way in.
         Cliff is moving away from the arc of balloons. It's late, fatigue is taking over, but he's too hot to go home and sleep. He's lost track of the man he remembers. It had only been one night, but he wants to talk to him. Just wants to connect with him on some level, any level. Just wants to sleep without the mud in his dreams.
         And then the guy walks by, abruptly, glancing at Cliff without registering anything on his face. Cliff nods, smiling.
         "How's it going, Oscar?" Cliff shouts over the din.
         "It's going..." the man answers, takes a puff on a cigarette, and arches his brows.
         "Can I bum a smoke?" Cliff asks. The guy holds out a nearly full pack and Cliff draws one out.
         "Thanks. So what's new?"
         "Listen, can't really talk--I'm here with my boyfriend." And suddenly he's gone, plunging into the crowd around the bar, he and his "PRIDE" shirt.
"What kind of pride is this, anyway?" Cliff blurts out to Oscar, to the vast club, to himself. He thinks, YOU DON'T HAVE ANY KIND OF PRIDE THAT CAN'T BE SCRAPED AWAY BY A NIGHT AND A BAD MORNING AFTER. Cliff drinks the last of his beer.
         "Why do I keep coming back for more?" he mutters to his reflection in the long, streamlined mirror. To pretend there's some kind of camaraderie here? To pretend that nobody here can see the lie sinking down through the melting ice cubes and the go-go boys and the blasting speakers? All he wants is to crash his face into that mirror, to charge head-on into the shards of silver and broken glass, to charge into that parallel reality where people actually remember you and you can breathe the air, not like in this place, where it's all choked with strangulation and distrust.
         Now Cliff stares at the chests of all those dancing guys. And he can read it on their skin, all the shiny skin says that the ideal is to not feel anything.
         Cliff grabs a book of matches from a bowl on the bar. The cover has the sleek Club Worship logo. He lights the cigarette and turns back to that rainbow. He plunges the glowing tip into that yellow balloon, it goes "POP!" in his face--for a split second, even louder than the music. HE DOESN'T COME HERE FOR THE MUSIC. He came here with high hopes, but can't figure out, even after all these times, how they burst somewhere between his third and fourth beer. Between the blacklights and the starvation inside him. Where does that hope come from? Why can't he get it back?
         But Cliff knows that you can only lean against a wall, waiting, for so long; after that the wall starts leaning against you. He hears someone at the bar pop a balloon, and now every balloon in the place starts going "POW-POP-POW!.....POP-POP-POP-POW!". The wall's got a million mouths to feed. He just wants to go to sleep and talk to strangers.

Roger Pinnell is a regular contributor to The Y-Files. His fiction has also appeared in Holy Titclamps and Bananafish. He lives in San Francisco, and can be reached at rogerp4@mindspring.com