Let's Hang Out

Chapter 2

Let’s Hang Out

By David Connor and E.F. Mulder

On my way to the terrace door with a laundry basket tucked under my arm, I remembered it was June 1, which meant Pride Month was once again upon us. Trying to balance my clean, wet clothes against one hip, I grabbed a handful of shelled peanuts for a bedraggled but friendly squirrel who’d become the building’s unofficial mascot. Then, I stopped and opened the closet to attempt to bring my rainbow flag, too.

“Time to show my true colors,” I said to Nutter Butter through the glass, her little squirrely tail twitching with anticipation on the other side.

It was a cool day for June. The sun was shining, though, and there was a nice bit of breeze, perfect for drying my underwear and socks.

First things first, I slipped the flagpole into the bracket.

“Lucky bracket.”

Yeah, it had been a while. Just when I thought I might be ready to get back in the game after a broken heart—why do men cheat?—the pandemic hit. Since mid-March, I’d barely left the house. No meeting up, hooking up, or getting it up. Well, not with another guy, at any rate.

I did my part. I social distanced and wore a mask when going out for essentials or takeout to help keep the local family owned pizza joint afloat. My hands were chapped from so much washing, but on the bright side, the clothes drying rack I’d paid four hundred bucks for was actually being used as an exercise machine again. With the weather nicer now, I could hang the wash outside.

Air-dried laundry, the scent was comforting and pleasing. The loud squeak of the pulley as I tugged on the rope for the clothespin bag, that I could do without. An early bird most of my life, I tended to my task before five in the morning, the first hint of a new day just breaking over the Lowell, Massachusetts cityscape. I loved the feeling of having it all to myself. On the flip side, I couldn’t help but imagine sharing it all with someone special.

My unit was on the top floor of nine—way up there. The clothesline, already up when I arrived September of 2018, after moving out of Trevor’s, ran a good thirty feet across an alley between my building and the next one over. The neighbor on that side never hung laundry, preferring the dryer method, apparently. Having never met them, I didn’t know for sure. To me, there was nothing better than snuggling down in sheets that had been out in the sun all day. Sharing that experience with someone else might have been better, but that would have to wait a while, now.

“‘Morning, Nutter Butter.” She finally acknowledged me beyond “How about more peanuts?” A squirrel’s company, as I tended to my daily chores, beat no company at all.

* * * *

Laundry, treadmill, work from home, and more squirrel treats, the next nine hours got no more exciting than that. When I went out to retrieve my dry clothes and the sheets I’d put out an hour later, I did notice something interesting across the alley, though. The terrace railing below the other end of my clothesline now had a bracket as well. Coming out of that bracket was a pole, and at the end of that pole, a rainbow flag fluttering in the breeze just like mine.

“Well, well, well, Nutter Butter. How about that?”

* * * *

Intrigue got the best of me. I stood in my bedroom window longer than I would care to admit that evening, trying to get a glimpse of someone out on the terrace or inside behind the glass door. Was it a couple? Were they two men or two women? Were they family or allies? Maybe I would find out in time.

* * * *

Nice flag!

I was out on the terrace the next morning in nothing but rainbow boxer shorts. June was all about rainbows. Over the next month, my clothesline showed as many colors as my flag, T-shirts, socks, and especially boxer shorts. In July, I wore a lot of red, white, and blue, except on the twenty-fifth, when I’d put on undershorts with Santa or candy canes for Christmas in July.

Nice flag!

It was written in red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple Sharpie on a plain sheet of white printer paper. Delivered via the rope and pulley between our buildings, it had been attached with two wooden clothespins. I had to smile. Then I panicked a bit. Could they see me? My hair was wild, the hair on my head and my chest, the latter dotted with crumbs from my English muffin. I did my best to pat down and clean up both, as I sucked in my gut and tried to sip my coffee like a GQ model.

“Should I send a response, Nutt Butt?”

She said I should. Either that or “More peanuts.”

I knew I had crayons somewhere in the apartment. My nieces and the kids from the building they played with when visiting liked to color. None of them had been over in a while. No one had. No one could. Black magic marker wouldn’t do, so I kept searching, until I found a set in a box on the closet floor.

Yours, too!

Simple and to the point. I used the same six colors, repeating four because of the comma and exclamation point. I’d wasted five sheets of paper going from exclamation point to period, back to exclamation point, back to period, while also putting in and taking out the comma. Who knew punctuation could cause such stress? While I broke out in a sweat, Nutter Butter was having a field day batting around the crumpled reject paper balls under the table on my balcony.

“This will have to do,” I said on the seventh attempt.

Hung nice and straight using two of my own clothespins—squeak, squeak, squeak—I sent my message on its way across. Uncertain what the protocol was regarding touching a stranger’s paper during a pandemic, I’d left the original message as well. Still, once finished, I washed my hands to two full run-throughs of “Happy Birthday,” holding three of the last four notes for eight beats each and the final one for sixteen to scrub between my fingers even more thoroughly before rinsing.

* * * *

It was a workday, which required a shirt and tie for a Zoom meeting. Pants, however, remained unnecessary. Clean rainbow boxers, a yellow shirt with green cuffs and a purple collar, and a tie-dyed colorful necktie; even if only electronically, I shared my pride with my UMASS coworkers and friends.

I checked the clothesline for a response around lunchtime. There wasn’t one.

“Of course not, dummy.”

As Housing Director for a college campus, there was always paperwork. So, after sharing PB&J on toast with Nutter Butter, it was back to work until four.

“Time to pack it in, Mr. Humphries.” His dispute with the university over our refusal to return his son’s deposit after discovering the boy had set fire to his mattress was likely going to court.

As a pot of water simmered for dinnertime pasta, I checked the clothesline for the four hundredth time. Still nothing. One and done, I figured, just like dating. But this time, I hadn’t even gotten a d**k pic.

* * * *

The next morning, I washed a load of shorts and shirts. Up before dawn, even on a Saturday, the smile that spread across my face upon spotting the two sheets of paper back on my side might have rivaled the eventual sunrise. My mystery communicator’s first message had taken up the entire front of the page. This time, on the back, he wrote smaller. He or she. I’d been imagining a he. Was I sexist or a hopeless romantic? Maybe I was horny and bored.

We went through reams of paper at my job, often wastefully. I admired the fact this person was trying to conserve. The amount of space left also indicated the possibility of more exchanges forthcoming.

Hi. I’m Christopher, AKA Kit.

Kit stuck with one color ink this time, purple.

New to the neighborhood. Just arrived yesterday.

Wow. Really new.

Nice to meet you.

That was it. Three sentences.

Kit was a night owl, I deduced. The notes weren’t on my side of the alley when I’d turned in around ten. I doubted he’d gotten up first. Even Nutter Butter slept later than I some mornings. Not that day. She gobbled a peanut like a sideways corn on the cob as I sat to write at my patio table.

Nice to meet you, too, Kit. Welcome to the neighborhood. I’m Dillon. Been here going on two years.

I held my orange pen so long and so tight after that my fingers started to cramp.

“What else should I say, Nutter?”

Thinking of stuff wasn’t the problem. I had a million questions, but they all sounded lame. I considered offering up my digits or Insta handle for DMs. Was it perfect timing, since we couldn’t get together any other way, or too much too soon?

Not much celebration for pride his year. Bummer. I’ll miss hanging out with everyone.

Since a Sharpie eraser hadn’t yet been invented, that was my message. It was either stick with it or have Kit think I didn’t care about the environment by starting over with a clean sheet of paper. Hoping he’d never find out how many sheets I’d wasted that first day, forgoing my contact info, I clipped the note to the clothesline, and off it went. Then, it was back inside to wash and sanitize my hands.

“Happy birthday, dear pri-ideeeeeeeeee!” Though voice wasn’t my main instrument, I managed to hold the note and scrub for nineteen and a half beats.

My dialogue with Kit—I liked the name Kit—felt safe. I only touched my own paper. The most dangerous part was leaning over the railing to read what he wrote without falling nine floors to the pavement below.

Preventive measures against the virus were rather simple. Isolation was the worst of it. The masks, the soap and water, staying distanced—anyone who had a problem with such minimal effort, knowing it could benefit someone else, even if they didn’t care about themselves, was a selfish jerk, as far as I was concerned.

* * * *

Kit got back to me sooner this time. His next message—a two-parter—arrived by three that afternoon. It might have come sooner, had the line not been filled the entire way across with towels.

Let’s hang out together. Hang out…Get it???

He’d drawn a smiley face, but there was more to it still. Hanging to the right of his note was a baseball jersey with a name on the back. His name. Kit.

“I think I’m supposed to hang one with my name on it, right, Nutt Butt?”

I didn’t have a baseball jersey. I didn’t have a football jersey, a basketball jersey, a figure skating costume, or a bowling shirt. Athletics wasn’t my thing. I was an information junkie and a violinist. A mediocre one, even after eighteen years of practice from age eleven into adulthood.

I decided I’d have to make a shirt.

A plain white undershirt would have been easiest to monogram. That seemed boring, though, so I searched my dresser drawers for something else.

I discovered a UMASS shirt I never wore, size Large, way too tight. It would make me look slimmer, I mused, as long as my body wasn’t actually inside testing every seam. I wondered what Kit would think of my subterfuge. Could it be considered Kit-fishing? Like catfishing?

No one was around to tell me how clever I was.

* * * *

Nice!

Kit seemed pleased with my effort. The name of the college on the front—white against burgundy—I’d painted Dillon on the back in leftover ceiling paint using a Q-tip. The little bit of rain we’d had overnight hadn’t washed it away or ruined Kit’s latest note. Both pieces of paper looked damp, but still intact. I was happy about that.

You a college boy?

“s**t, Nutt Butt. You think he’ll be disappointed to find out I’m not?”

Let’s hang all month.

This time, Kit also included his phone number.

Hope to hear from you. Middle of the night’s best. I get home from work at midnight-ish and go to bed when most people are getting up.

* * * *

I wanted to call. I summoned the courage.

“Hi, Kit. It’s Dillon.”

I practiced.