This is the second part of an essay I wrote two weeks after meeting Clyde. For the first installment, see yesterday’s entry.
Going Underground
We arrive too early at Underground Atlanta — 9:00 in the morning. Low gray clouds scrape the top layer of the deserted parking garage. We hear our own breath in the elevator, and our footsteps echo in the corridors. Bright paint and cheap spangles slather the damp, gritty concete walls.
In the food court, other humans bustle behind the tiled counters, juggling metal pots and scraping grills. Each concessionaire, hungry for business, peers out at us from under his buzzing neon sign. Even at this hour, a thin-limbed and long-bearded man offers us bits of seared chicken flesh on toothpicks, saying in a musical voice, “Try this. Teriyaki Palace. Try it, please. Very delicious.”
The meat tastes strongly of ginger. He smiles at us, his eyes dark and glowing. “See? Very delicious.” He points to a dark, narrow booth where an ex-army cook, his graying hair still flat-topped, teases wrinkled chicken breasts across the surface of a steaming griddle. “Teriyaki Palace,” our friend repeats, gesturing with his free hand.
We eat muffins from a near-by bakery instead, pausing before large and misted windows to enjoy them. In the empty courtyard below, we spot the Oribitron. Its operator, a well-muscled black man with a shaved head, fidgets in the light rain, drumming a rhythm on the contraption’s outer ring. I offer to wait inside while Clyde tames the thing; he declines. “I’m wearing underwear,” he confesses. “What would be the point?”
In the market area, more vendors than patrons crowd the narrow corridors. Merchants, their Gypsy carts piled high with junky merchandise, hawk everything from left-handed coffee mugs to pseudo-African jewelry. A tired clown sits on a trunk beside a battered “Faces Painted” sign. A knot of vacationing kids do their best to cross their eyes and see the 3-D image of the space shuttle reportedly hidden in a mounted print of computer-generated squiggles and dots.
At another junction, a small boy plays the violin with all the skill of a master. His mother accompanies him on a small synthesizer. A sign explains: “I love playing the violin. I have played since I was five years old. I perform everywhere. Your donations will help me buy a better instrument and pursue my career.”
As the crowd thickens, I see at least one other same-sex couple. They stand at a vendor’s cart, debating the value of a necklace of carved wooden zoo creatures. The shorter one of the two glances first at my eyes, then at our hands — Clyde and I are walking with his left index finger hooked loosely in my right. The same Public Display of Affection between men would cause a riot at any mall back in Jackson; here, however, the young man smiles and nudges his partner, who also smiles.
A gay pride slogan, so frightening to homophobes, drifts through my mind: We Are Everywhere. Except for that brief moment of recognition, we move through the maze of shoppers and vacationers, one couple among many couples, unseen.
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