"Some Well-Earned Fun"

The Coffee House

There’s a dark cloud hanging over Fort Hill, and the wind is tossing the flags outside City Hall. The night is over, and part of me is smiling because I let myself have some well-earned fun. It was Friday night, after all—the kind of night you don’t need to examine too closely the next morning.

Reading The New York Times online now always takes me back to the way I used to read the print edition in the 1990s with a lover. We’d have coffee, breakfast in bed, and slowly make our way through every article.

Sometimes we’d walk down to a café just to be around people for a while. There was one place in Cole Valley, on Cole Street, that I especially loved. It had a gay, easygoing feel, and you saw all kinds there—not just pretty boys or men who always seemed to have sex on their minds.
 
And now here I am in Peekskill, and in some ways life feels much the same. Men in the Coffee House still read print editions and still seem to be thinking about the same things they were back then.