Best Random Dialogue: “I fuckin’ know that guy! He works at the Chipotle by the mall.” “You think everyone works at that Chipotle!” — Richie’s unnamed friends, in reference to Agustín passed out on the street.
Already Out-of-Date Footage Alert: Patrick gets an HIV test at the Out of the Closet on Duboce, but that place has since closed IRL.
Spoiler alert: Although episode 2 of Looking deals primarily with Patrick’s irrational health scares, it begins in the best possible way: with Kevin’s naked bum. The couple is making pillow talk in the Tenderloin's Red Coach Motor Lodge, and Kevin confesses that he made up a dance routine to a song by an obscure '90s UK boy band. He doesn’t dance, but he does jiggle that tush.
Heading back to the office on the F-Market, Patrick wheedles Kevin into developing a gay male version of Top Trumps, eventually admitting that Dom and Agustín know he and Kevin are secretly seeing one another. (Ever the uptight Brit, Kevin is not pleased.)
To placate his nervous co-worker Owen about his extended lunch break, Patrick lies about seeing a drag queen revival of Showgirls at the (fictitious) McClintock Theater, only to have Owen kill his buzz with bedbug paranoia. Having had bedbugs once (in Brooklyn), I can attest that they are something to be very paranoid about, and all San Franciscans should fear them second only to an owner move-in eviction.
Unfortunately, Patrick seems not to know how the test works, or that you can’t get anything from a guy coming on your body. For a 30-year-old gay man in SF, this is the functional equivalent of not knowing how babies are made.
That night, Patrick, Dom, and Agustín do a site visit to a comically bad (and difficult to identify) neighborhood to see Dom’s future peri peri chicken window, which will cost him $80,000. Then it’s margarita power hour with Doris at La Rondalla, where Patrick, suddenly fearing both bedbugs and AIDS (and scabies, bubonic plague, and Dutch Elm disease), shows Dom a new rash.
Doris gets precious little screen time in this episode, but when an African American bear who’d seemingly been eye-fucking the boys from across the room begins flirting with her, it sets up a potential future subplot for her. (Yea, more Doris!)
Agustín departs for Beatbox “to dance with some bears” while Patrick goes on the downward Google-search spiral of STD images —something everyone’s been guilty of at one time or another — and badgers his no-nonsense doctor for a diagnosis over the phone.
Meanwhile, Dom goes to his investor-lover Lynn’s house, where the ever-relaxed Lynn dismisses Dom’s irritation with Patrick’s insensitivity about AIDS. He’s more worried about whether Dom had sex with anyone at his house in Guerneville: “Did you fuck anyone on the bedspread? The one from Santa Fe? Cause it’s so hard to clean.” If that’s the biggest test this open relationship faces, I am convinced they’re going to make it in the end.
At Beatbox, Agustín catches up with an acquaintance who gives him some GHB (which you should never, ever do after margaritas and tequila shots, because you will inevitably roofie yourself!). From the exaggerated shot of Agustín‘s intense dancing, you just know it’s not going to end well. It doesn’t end well. Eventually Richie, Patrick’s ex from season one, discovers Agustín slumped outside of Panchita’s Pupusería, but can’t coax him off the sidewalk.
Apparently guilt-ridden, Richie goes back for Agustín and deposits him on Patrick’s doorstep. More melodramatic than any middle school PSA about the risks of drug use, this scenario leads to an awkward hello with Patrick (made more awkward by Agustín’s ramblings in Spanish about the two exes). Over tea, an appreciative Patrick nonetheless lies that he isn’t seeing anyone.
Confronting Kevin in his glass-walled office about their pseudo-relationship leads to a bonding moment where Kevin finally shows Patrick his adorkable teenage dance routine, but not before Patrick does what he should have done earlier and gets an HIV test.
Unfortunately, Patrick seems not to know how the test works, or that you can’t get anything from a guy coming on your body. For a 30-year-old gay man in SF, this is the functional equivalent of not knowing how babies are made. As ever, the problem with this episode is Patrick. Indeed, it feels increasingly plausible to like more or less everything about Looking except for its protagonist, whose anxiety and general cluelessness range from the stupefying to the utterly infuriating.
Peter recaps Looking every Monday morning for The Bold Italic. Check out last week's recap here.
Images via HBO