This thing with Batch has been nice, fo' shizzle. No complaints so far.

I was over at his place last night for vegetarian tuna steaks, with Chernobyl fig cake for dessert, and we were drinking red wine, and the cat was eating shrimp off the floor. It was decadent, let me tell you.

I know it sounds twee. Twee writing about furry little creatures. But I like ol' Batch and his funky cats, and I haven't felt like this for a long time (there, I said it) and I am determined to be as twee as I wanna be, for once.

I gotta be me
I gotta be twee
what else can I be
but—oh, I gotta pee—be right back!

Am I getting soft in my old age? Well, aside from my rock-hard abs, that is. (Haven't seen them yet, eh?) Squishy on the inside is what I mean—like, I don't know, a stale Twinkie?

Could happen.

Even the hardest-abbed of men become manqué in middle age. (But since when is 37 "pushing forty," people?) Of course, it could be that maybe there's something wrong with our concept of masculinity, since so many of us seem to outlive it.

Which is another thing about Batch that I like. He's not caught up in all that "macho shit." The other night we went out to dinner—to Petit Robert's in the South End—excruciatingly slow service, but on the plus side plenty of time to get your date liquored up. I couldn't tell you how the food was, I was three sheets to the wind by the time it came.

I do vaguely remember the, erm, vegetarian pate we shared as a first course being pretty tasty. (We did not do the foie gras—Batch was demonstrably against it on moral grounds—"Do you know what they do to those geese?" he asked, miming gavage, the process of force-feeding them—ask anyone about foie gras and they will end up violently stuffing an invisible goose, I guarantee it—which is great fun to watch, and cruelty-free to boot.)

For the record, I'm not a goose-lover—they're not very polite animals—but that doesn't mean I'm pro-gavage. I'm certainly not someone who thinks impolite creatures should necessarily be gavaged and have their livers harvested and eaten on account of it. I mean, it's not a very polite way to deal with impoliteness, first of all. What kind of an example are you setting there?

I have no idea whose livers we ended up gorging ourselves on, anyway, but they were lovely. Respect.

That's not what I wanted to talk about, really, though. I wanted to talk about a drink called a "Lemon Drop." In the cocktail phase of the proceedings Batch was wondering aloud if he should order one, and I chortled a manly chortle, and said I would get a Shirley Temple with two straws and we could share.

Well, Ol' Batch didn't find that funny. He wasn't having it. He told me flat-out he was secure enough in his masculinity to order a Lemon Drop—Oh smack!—and order one he did. Put me in my place, that's for sure.

I like it. Keep it coming.

Oh, and here's the freakish coincidence of the night. You know the guy I had that first date with at the Red Fez? The one before Batch—long before—like a couple years before. The one with the Loony Toons tats? I look over, and he's sitting, like, three tables away, I shit you not.

Strange.

This morning's catastrophic dream had to do with the truck again—this time Batch ended up stuck in a snow bank.

I must say that despite the persistence of his mechanical failure dreams (and it has nothing to do with any other mechanical failures in bed, I can assure you) there are things about this thing we've got going that run like a top. For example, we discovered we both carry little bottles of Purell with us everywhere, though neither of us considers himself seriously germphobic. When I saw his little bottle and he saw mine, I knew it was destiny.

Then, at one point, no prompting from me, I swear, he starts talking about the worst thing about riding the T is when it's cold and rainy out and there's condensation on the windows. It was like that old Roberta Flack tune, "Killing me Softly With His Song"—the part where she says, "Strumming my pain with his fingers—singing my life with his words." Because I'd said the same thing myself:

But by far the worst thing was when the train came and the windows were all fogged up. Not only can you not see which car is most crowded (a minor thing, since at rush hour they're all pretty much disgustingly packed)—no, the worst part is you can't pretend, as you can when the windows aren't fogged up, that people aren't breathing on you. You're walking into a hothouse of disease, and you can't deny it. All that condensation? It comes from human exhalations! Makes me shiver just thinking about it.

Then there's this tirade about germs I now knew only Batch could truly, madly, deeply understand, and that over a year before meeting him I had written for him:

People can be many, many things: good things like bus drivers, policemen, nurses and presidents, like mommies and daddies and big sisses and little bros, but they are also big, gory bags of disease just waiting to blow their deadly wads all over you on the T. Don't kill the messenger, though. Hate the sin, not the sinner.

It's hard, though, I'll admit. Because when people you don't know are really sick, all you see when you look at them is the potential to spread the sickness they have come to personify. And with the sickness, comes a whole host of inconveniences they represent. So when they enter the car and stumble toward us, it's hard not to glare at them hatefully, but what we're really glaring at is their micro-organisms, right?

It goes on and on and on from there.

The funny thing is, I'm not at all put off by my lovers' germs. Once mine commingle with yours and reach some kind of accord, it seems like hostilities cease. Seems like my germs like his germs anyway, and vice-versa. What more could you ask for?