The morning after is always louder than the night before.

 

The desert has a way of amplifying bad decisions. By nine in the morning the sun already feels judgmental. My dog didn’t care that I’d stayed out later than I should have. He still wanted his walk. So there I was, sunglasses on, nursing the sort of headache earned through alcohol and unnecessary introspection.

 

The headache wasn’t entirely from the drinks.

 

A few weeks earlier, I’d met a guy while ushering one of my shows. Technically, I was producing the show, but my most visible contribution to the American theater that evening was standing near the door and telling people where to sit. He was a friend of one of the performers. I’d seen him around town before and always thought he was handsome, so when we finally met, I did something increasingly considered reckless among single adults.

 

I asked him out.

 

“Would you like to grab coffee sometime?”

 

He said yes.

 

This is Palm Springs. There are gay men everywhere. Single gay men are another matter entirely. Finding two who are both unattached, attracted to each other, available on the same afternoon and willing to leave the house for something that doesn’t involve a happy hour begins to feel less like dating and more like a municipal permitting process.

 

Somehow, we’d cleared zoning.

 

Coffee lasted three hours.

 

It was good coffee, by which I mean the conversation was good. I have no recollection of the coffee. We talked about work and life and Palm Springs and whatever else two single men talk about while quietly determining whether the person across the table might become something. At the end, he said he’d had a great time. We should do it again.

 

Then he went on a trip.

 

Then he came home.

 

Then he left me on read.

 

There are few indignities more specific to modern romance than watching two little words confirm that another human being has received your thoughts and elected not to participate in them.

 

Eventually I saw him again at a bar.

 

This time I wasn’t ushering.

 

I’d just finished a couple of shows and was dressed accordingly: slutty slacks, Armani shoes, freshly released from whatever backstage responsibilities had occupied the previous several hours. Post-show is probably when I look my best. There’s a strange little window after you’ve spent an evening being useful when you emerge into public looking considerably more important than you actually are.

 

I was getting attention.

 

Naturally, the one person whose attention I wanted wasn’t giving it to me.

 

That’s not vanity so much as a particularly stupid feature of human nature. Ten people can notice you and somehow your brain convenes an emergency meeting about the eleventh.

 

He eventually came over and said hello.

 

“You left me on read,” I said. “But it’s okay. Have a good night.”

 

This apparently concluded our reunion.

 

He walked away. I returned to the important business of pretending I hadn’t noticed.

 

I had a drink.

 

Then, in the interest of thorough research, I had some more.

 

Which is how I ended up walking my dog the following morning with a pounding head, wondering how two perfectly nice, apparently compatible and—against all Palm Springs odds—actually single gay men could spend three hours together, enjoy themselves, agree to do it again and then somehow arrive at absolutely nothing.

 

That’s when the pool guy stopped me.

 

I’d known him for years without really knowing him.

 

He’s Mexican, in his forties, with the thick Mexican drawl I’ve heard every morning for years without ever hearing him say much more than hello. He’d serviced the pools around my little HOA republic for as long as I could remember. I used to see him almost every morning while walking my dog. We’d wave. Good morning. How’s it going? That sort of thing.

 

Then, for nearly a year, I disappeared from his mornings.

 

I’d started getting up early to go be the help somewhere else.

 

He hadn’t seen me in a long time, and instead of the usual wave, he came over.

 

“How have you been?”

 

We started talking.

 

I’d expected the standard sidewalk exchange. Instead, he started telling me about his wife and their four children. Two were getting older. Two were still young. We talked about families, getting older and the strange mathematical fact that most of us will probably be forgotten within three generations.

 

He didn’t find this depressing.

 

He found it liberating.

 

Life is beautiful, he told me. You have to appreciate what you have while you have it.

 

He said something changes around forty. You stop caring about things that once seemed terribly important. Road rage becomes ridiculous. Fighting with your wife over something stupid becomes a waste of an afternoon. Anger starts charging more rent than it’s worth.

 

There was something about hearing all of this in that thick drawl, delivered beside a pool before I’d properly recovered from the night before, that made it even better. No podcast. No life coach. No inspirational quote superimposed over a sunset.

 

Just a Mexican guy with a skimmer telling me to get over myself.

 

I stood there sweating and thought: this is an unexpectedly philosophical pool service.

 

His family reminded me of an old friend.

 

For most of my longest job, I worked as an executive assistant and essentially second-in-command to my boss. Somewhere along the way I became thick as thieves with another assistant in our orbit. He’s Mexican too, with that same unmistakably thick drawl, and we haven’t worked together in years. Yet he’s still one of those people who exists permanently in my life.

 

He also has eight children.

 

Eight.

 

At that point you’re no longer planning a family. You’re staffing one.

 

His life has periodically existed approximately fifteen minutes from catastrophe. Money gets tight. Rent becomes questionable. Something breaks. Something else is due. There have been times when I’ve listened to what’s happening in his life and thought I should be considerably more concerned about it than he seems to be.

 

Yet he is one of the most grateful people I know.

 

Not grateful because everything worked out.

 

Grateful before it did.

 

He’ll remind me, in that same heavy drawl, that he has his wife. His children. A roof. Another day. Whatever is still standing when everything else seems to be wobbling is apparently enough reason to appreciate being alive.

 

And despite all of that, my phone still lights up about once a week.

 

Hey, how’s it going? Just checking on you.

 

This is a man with a wife, eight children, a job, bills, rent and enough moving pieces to require his own municipal government, and somehow a former coworker who isn’t remotely part of his daily life still occurs to him.

 

Admittedly, I am also the friend who occasionally hooks him up with boner pills.

 

For a while I considered whether our enduring friendship was less emotional loyalty than pharmaceutical customer retention.

 

But no.

 

He genuinely checks on me.

 

And considering he already has eight children, the man arguably does not need my help in that particular department.

 

My grandfather used to say, “Never let a toilet brush scare you.”

 

It was his way of saying no work is beneath you.

 

I’ve carried that with me most of my life. My career has occasionally put me in rooms where titles matter tremendously, and I’ve also spent plenty of time carrying things, cleaning things, seating people, making coffee and performing whatever other task needed to be done before somebody more important arrived.

 

I like the juxtaposition.

 

It keeps the machinery visible.

 

At the club inside the hotel where I worked, I inevitably became friends with the housekeepers, cleaning ladies, bartenders and receptionists.

 

The help.

 

Those are the people you want to know.

 

They know which door sticks. They know who actually showed up. They know what happened before management arrived and what will happen after management leaves. They know who’s pleasant when somebody important is watching and who’s pleasant when nobody is.

 

More importantly, when your back needs to be had, they’re usually the people who have it.

 

People become accustomed to the help very quickly.

 

I’ve occasionally wondered whether that happened with the man from coffee.

 

He first encountered me standing at the door of a show, ushering people to their seats. Perhaps that’s simply where I remained in his imagination. Perhaps not. Assigning an elaborate class analysis to an unanswered text is exactly the sort of behavior that results in needing a long walk the following morning.

 

Maybe he simply wasn’t interested.

 

That’s allowed, too.

 

But the pool guy had me thinking about attention differently.

 

Here was someone I’d passed hundreds of times without ever having a real conversation with. I’d known what he did before I knew anything about who he was. Then, after not seeing me for nearly a year, he noticed I was back and stopped what he was doing to ask where I’d been.

 

My friend with eight children does essentially the same thing every week.

 

Neither man needs anything from me.

 

Well, usually.

 

The boner pills notwithstanding.

 

They simply notice.

 

Life continued, as it tends to do despite our unanswered texts.

 

Eventually, I saw the coffee guy at a bar again.

 

Again, I’d just finished a show.

 

Again, slutty slacks.

 

At this point they may be my emotional-support trousers.

 

We talked. He told me he’d been overwhelmed. He overextends himself. There are too many commitments, too many people, too many things competing for his time. Eventually, he has to choose.

 

Fair enough.

 

He didn’t owe me another date. He didn’t owe me attraction. He certainly didn’t owe me a relationship because we’d managed to survive three hours of coffee together.

 

But something about his explanation landed differently now.

 

I thought about the pool guy.

 

I thought about my friend.

 

I thought about eight children.

 

I thought about the weekly text.

 

Busy and unavailable, I realized, aren’t necessarily the same thing.

 

Some of the busiest people I’ve known have somehow made the most room for other people. Sometimes the people with the least room are the ones who make the most.

 

So I decided to be as forward ending my little crush as I’d been starting it.

 

“I thought you were cute,” I told him. “I had a little crush on you. I don’t think it’s reciprocated.”

 

This appeared to surprise him considerably.

 

He hugged me.

 

“Thank you,” he said, or something close to it.

 

And that was it.

 

I watched him walk away.

 

The funny thing was that I didn’t feel rejected. I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t even particularly relieved.

 

I just thought: interesting.

 

I’d spent more time than I’d like to admit wondering why this particular man didn’t want me. Perhaps part of it was simply the rarity of the proposition. In Palm Springs, where gay men are abundant but two single gay men wanting the same thing from each other can apparently qualify as an endangered event, I’d assigned significance to the fact that we’d found each other at all.

 

But rarity isn’t necessarily value.

 

Meanwhile, I’d been surrounded by people who made room for me without being asked.

 

A man with a wife, four children and a day’s worth of pools to clean noticed I hadn’t walked past him in a year.

 

A friend with eight children and occasionally questionable rent money still finds thirty seconds every week to ask how I’m doing.

 

Housekeepers have remembered my name.

 

Bartenders have had my back.

 

Cleaning ladies have noticed when something was wrong.

 

And there I was in Armani shoes and slutty slacks, accepting attention from an entire bar while wondering why I couldn’t get it from one man.

 

Maybe that was the mistake.

 

I wasn’t looking for attention. I was looking for his attention. Somewhere along the way, I’d confused the attention I couldn’t get with the attention that mattered most.

 

Maybe we do that more often than we’d like to admit.

 

Scarcity has a peculiar way of looking like value. The person withholding something becomes fascinating precisely because we’re trying to acquire it, while the people freely offering their time, loyalty, humor, concern or wisdom become part of the scenery.

 

The people who care about you aren’t always the people you’re trying to impress.

 

Sometimes they’re cleaning the pool.

 

Sometimes they’re raising eight children and still finding thirty seconds on a Tuesday to ask how you’re doing.

 

Sometimes they’re holding the toilet brush.

 

My grandfather was right.

 

You should never be afraid of the help.

 

You should be afraid of becoming too important to notice them.