Flanked by gorgeous brick row houses in the heart of Boston’s South End, the Club Café is a bar where everybody knows your name—and who you slept with last. Every night men like Tommy Perez, Rico DiMio, and Kyle Andrews take their place among the glistening crowd sporting chest-defining shirts and lots of smooth, tanned skin, sizing up the regulars and the new blood while TV monitors blare Beyoncé and Missy Elliott.
For Tommy, Thursdays at the Club Café in the company of his wingman Rico and a Skinny Black Bitch (vodka and Diet Coke) are unmissable. Recently relocated from Miami to Boston to take a reporting job at The Boston Daily, Tommy is finding it hard to break away from his tight-knit Cuban family, but his homesickness goes into rapid remission when he meets Mikey, a blue-eyed, boyish guidance counselor from Cape Cod. Smart, funny, and wicked cute, Mikey is perfect boyfriend material…until his drinking leads Tommy to suspect that he’s got some issues of his own. Rico—a tough-talking, Italian-American accountant with a gamma ray smile and mournful green eyes that hint at a past he’ll admit to no one—is sure Mikey is bad news, but to Rico any relationship that lasts longer than three hours sounds like bad news. Then there’s Kyle, the lean, preening model and former reality show star who makes a red-carpet entrance into the CC every Thursday as if a swarm of cameras still follows his every move, but whose real life is about to take a dramatic turn he never anticipated.
Over the course of one unforgettable year, Tommy is forced to rethink everything he’s ever believed about life, lust, and love. And in the Club Café, a place filled with endless possibilities—of stumbling upon the perfect partner, the perfect story idea, or just a play buddy for the night—Tommy might finally discover the person he was meant to be.
Review
With his first novel Johnny Diaz has created an entertaining but not altogether substantial summer read. We are introduced to three modern gay Bostonians who seem to interact primarily when they converge on the local gay watering hole, Club Café.
Tommy is a Cuban transplant from Miami working as a staff journalist at The Boston Daily. Rico is Tommy’s wingman and perpetually broke “Italian Stallion” who often resorts to internet hook-ups. Rounding out the trio is Kyle, the former "Real World" star, trying to milk every possible second from his fifteen minutes of fame and his embarrassing KY Jelly incident caught on camera.
The writing is light and insincere as Tommy meets and falls in love with an alcoholic and Kyle deals with what should have been a very intense STD scare. Most of the story is weighed down with an over usage of pop culture references that feel dated even though the intent is to make the story feel current.
If you can get past the topical feeling and take it at face value you will find a book perfect for the beach or anywhere that doesn’t force you to give these one-dimensional Boston Boys your full attention.
