Bromancing the Rookie Roofer Wes Hartley

Bromancing the Rookie Roofer By Wes Hartley

Generic clichés in the biased persuasion of queerdom are legion. There are likely on-line glossaries itemizing the most notorious (I haven’t checked) but these ones seem to be the most proverbial. Flawless beauties tend to consort (and do other stuff) with flawless beauties and ugly ducklings sidelined with other unlucky ducklings have to make do with the slim pickings. Boys with big ones attract boys with little ones and prettyboys with pretty butts attract all comers. Older guys chase young guys, silver spoons appreciate blue collars (“feasting with panthers” Oscar Wilde always called it), jocks work out with jocks, femmy sissies compare outfits and camp it up with sister sissies, and teens and closet cases whip it a lot. The list goes on and on same as we do.

All clichés are true, that’s why they’re clichés. Of course there are always the exceptions. Boys with big ones who like little ones, the fabled one-in-athousand teenage gerontophile, and the macho allstar looking to get boned by the skinny towel boy, and so forth. Exceptions to the usual tend to jumpstart my roving gaydar. That was what I thought was happening one morning early last summer.

Over the past twenty or thirty years nearly all the old single-family housing in the neighborhood where I live had been morphed into one-and-twobedroom apartments. The exception is the huge old Victorian four-storey mansion next to the two-storey I occupy. Last summer it was getting a new roof.

The rowdy crew of hard hat roofers (none wearing a hard hat since there was only blue sky overhead) had spent three days getting things ready, offloading equipment and supplies, and yesterday, flaying the old cedar shingles from the now bald rooftop. The old useless shakes had been trundled to the huge portable catch-all blockading the alleyway around back. Today the extended porta-crane on wheels was hoisting bundles of fresh shingles up to the job site on top.

Attentive Yours Truly was taking it all in, idly watering the rose bushes out front, and pretending to look occupied. The spell being cast by the breath of the Rugosa roses, the sunshiny morning, and the birdsong couldn’t match that of young Mister Unlikely grooming the front lawn next door, the edgy hyper-masculine obvious rookie of the crew whose roving eye kept hitting on mine.

The macho recruit was dragging this huge black vinyl sack around the big yard picking up wayward cedar shakes and scraps of old tar paper and stuffing them into the bag. It was easy to see that clean-up duty irked The Rookie, but being the gopher and the youngest there was nobody lower down the totem pole he could pass the buck to, so he was toughing it out. Since I was the only eyewitness, he had singled me out (I was thinking) as he prowled around the yard bagging the cedar trash. He was keeping his eye on me for whatever reason as I was keeping mine on him for an obvious one.

As he bent over to pick up stray scraps, his extra humpy denim-upholstered boy bulges aimed in my direction captivated the all-surveilling glad-eye of the appreciative Mr. Rosewaterer. The Rookie’s bulging power peaches were Olympic gold medal same as he was. I couldn’t stop imagining that he must be feeling my eager eyes roving all over them and that was the reason he was keeping them aimed toward the rose bushes in appreciation. How queer-cliché is that?

Interminable long story seriously shortened, after thinking that the unlikely might be possible (that there could be such a species as a macho roofer queer boy) The Hose-handler concluded that the back-and-forth checking-out and non-stop eyeballing that was going down could only be mutual gaydar. The numero uno queer cliché is “The eyes have it.”

Mister Unlikely was short and stocky, maybe five foot four or five with the build and bulk of a miniature football linebacker or rugby hunk. A compact sport model with all the extras. He looked to be maybe nineteen or so, three or four years younger than Yours Truly. He was disguised as a regulation blue collar working stiff, decked out in a red and black checkerboard macshirt tucked into tight black 501’s packed with masculine bugles up front and around back. His toes were shielded by black steel toe work boots, and on top he sported a dark blue turned-around-backwards ball cap in lieu of a hard hat, which he kept pulled down in front over his low forehead. The logo perched above the bill of his ball cap was a stark contrast to the rest of his generic roofer uniformity. It advertized the rearing stallion Ferrari logo, the fillet mignon of corporate logos, instead of a standard