It'll happen to YOU!

When I was twenty one, I frequented a gay coffee shop in Houston. It was the perfect place to meet new people, hang out with a lot of your friends, grab a nice big cafe mocha, and look at porn magazines while you watch all the cute guys pass by. I hadn't gone out much before I turned twenty one, so I was considered to be the 'fresh meat' for quite a while.

I would burst in and wave to everyone and make some obnoxious, whorish gesture while making people notice how well my ass fit into a size 29/30 pair of jeans. The cute coffee boy behind the counter knew that I liked my cafe mocha with extra syrup and extra whipped cream and we'd laugh as I'd regale him with stories of how I made out with so many guys at the club the night before. I was able to find a man from across the room and study his every move without him seeing me so I would be prepared to chat him up when I accidentally bumped into him later. The world was my oyster and life was a bowl of chocolate-covered cherries.

Sometimes I'd notice a couple of the older guys staring at me and whispering to each other as I sat at the table with my friends. I'd see them making fun of me and shaking their heads and would just assume that they were bitter old queens who were jealous of someone who looked so fabulous and young. They sipped their plain black coffee and read boring books and wore these ugly spectacles that kept falling off of their faces. I remember them adjusting their specs every so often as they found another way to mock me. But I didn't care, because my life was KICKASS!

The coffee shop eventually closed down and I ended up moving to Chicago once I realized that I'd slept with half of the men in Houston. I was finding it increasingly difficult to work my charm on some of the guys there and I just figured that I needed a new shtick. Suddenly, it dawned on me that the cruel ravages of time have had surreptitiously stolen my youthful glow.

I woke up one day and realized that I would be turning twenty eight in a few months. I stagger to my drawers and decide which pair of size 32/30 pants make me look the least dumpiest and I proceed to make my morning coffee. It's dark roast coffee with two packets of Splenda because the years of downing giant glasses of cafe mocha left me with a ton of back fat and nasty case of the sugar shakes.

I can't have a lot of spicy foods now because I get heartburn. I'm twenty seven and I fucking get heartburn. Can you believe it? If you like that, you'll love the fact that whenever I sit down or get up from a seat, I groan like someone who just had hip replacement.

Now whenever I go to the coffee shops, I'm the bitter old queen who is making fun of the young twinkie boys who waltz in there with their size 28 waists and frosted spiky hair. I'm the one sipping my plain black coffee, reading a book with my glasses because my eyesight has deteriorated in the past few years. I'm the one who the young boys pity because I go to bed at 9:30 and I've never seen an episode of Laguna Beach.

I just want to tell all the young boys who think that their lives are so perfect that one day it will all come to an end. I'll go to Roscoe's on a Saturday night and I'd go up to random people, clutching my Manhattan and drunkenly point to them as I say: LOOK AT THIS! LOOK AT ME! THIS IS YOUR FUTURE, BOY! YOU CAN'T BE YOUNG FOREVER!! Then the security guys will drag me away and throw me in the alley. Sometimes I get really dramatic and imagine that I'm the ugly old clairvoyant lady who appears at the wedding of some prince and princess in a fairy tale, the one everyone laughs at but later are shocked to find out that her prophesy came true.

My advice is to be as well-informed as you can. Read books, watch TV, get caught up on current events, and enrich your creative side. That's the kind of stuff that time can't touch. Looks fade, waists expand, and your dance card begins to gather dust.