Hot Gay Erotica, page 10
Richard meets you there at your request. He stares suspiciously at your bloodied tattoo, then at the gun as you lay it on the table between you. He tells you to put the gun away, but you pick it up and point it at him, staring down the barrel at his wounded brown eyes. I want you to understand, you say.
You order him to get behind the bar. The bald bartender tells you to calm down, though you’re not nervous. You control the two men with the gun in your hand and think, This is what he felt like. You’ve never been harder in your life.
Give me your cash. Nothing happens. Now.
Richard moves toward you with an assurance that humbles and demeans you. You turn the gun on him alone. Don’t you fucking move, you say. He keeps coming. Stop, faggot, you cry.
Two muted bangs overlap; the gun in your hand jerks as a bullet speeds past Richard, a spike burns into your forearm and the .38 goes flying. Richard runs to your side as you stumble forward, staring at the black pucker that mars your new tattoo. The bartender holds his gun on you and orders you both out of the bar.
Richard helps you to a chair and demands that the bartender call 911. His composure in the face of your downfall is humiliating. You want to hurt him as much as you want to be him.
Richard holds you as you cry into his shoulder, his body shifts to accept yours in the old familiar way. He tells you everything will be all right in soothing tones. You want to believe him, but the blue eyes of the tattooed man stare at you from the bloody wound in your arm; he is the knife; you, the rose.
YOU’VE HEARD OF IT
Vincent Kovar
So I’m in New York. I’m in New York and I am staying in a penthouse apartment overlooking a famous square. Everyone I know in New York lives in a penthouse, or at least a top-floor loft. That’s not normal or at least it’s not normal for other people. It’s normal for me.
We are coming back from the dance club, the one below mid-town, in Chelsea. You’ve heard of it. You’ve seen the T-shirts. You’ve watched the advertisements flash across the banners of the online gay sites. It’s eight in the morning. We shut down the club because my friend, the one I am with, is a DJ, and we flew in just so he could play that night. Play that late night. Play that morning. My friend, the DJ, is very good. You’ve heard of him. If you haven’t, you aren’t somebody that hears about things. He flies to Amsterdam, Brussels, Tokyo, and all over the United States. He promises to take me with him. He won’t. I already know he’s lying. He doesn’t.
We are both kind of high, me not as much; I spent the last few hours of the night making out with a young black man from Long Island. You haven’t heard of him. I spent the last few hours making out with him on the dance floor where he begged me to have sex in Central Park. I didn’t. Instead, we, my DJ friend and I, are walking down the sidewalk on a sunny Saturday morning in New York. It is beautiful. It is quiet. The street vendors haven’t uncovered their tables. They haven’t uncovered the old Stephen King novels, the battered LP records, the tattered pornographic magazines that smell of mildew and stale cigarette smoke. They haven’t yet; they still sit, napping.
We walk back to the penthouse and go up in the elevator. As we ride, the doorman tells us there are guests upstairs. Everyone talks in the elevators. They say things that register in the doorman’s eyes. It would make me laugh but I don’t. He would laugh but he doesn’t.
The foyer is quiet and I walk through the living room to the guest bedroom, the room where the DJ and I are staying, sleeping in the same bed. He snores and hogs the blankets and can’t sleep without a fan blowing. We bought the fan the night before, downstairs in the drugstore. He pretends he doesn’t think he’s in love with me. I pretend not to notice because I already know he isn’t. I know but he doesn’t.
The owner of the penthouse is naked in the guestroom when I walk in. There is another man there I don’t recognize. He is a porn star. You’ve heard of him. Almost everyone who hears about gay porn stars has heard of him. Everyone but me.
I can’t tell if they were fucking or sucking or just rolling around. I stand stupidly at the door and stare at the tangle of muscled arms, muscled legs, shaved torsos, and bobbing dicks. I say, “Excuse me,” and leave, walking back across the living room to the wood-paneled library where I slide the pocket doors shut.
I turn to the DJ. His eyes are shining bright with cocaine. So are mine. We bought it the night before from a man on the street and it isn’t bad, considering. The DJ took most of it, in the back room behind the booth in the club. I had some too, not as much. I was off kissing the man from Long Island. I was hard against his thigh on the dance floor.
Behind me, the doors slide back into the walls and the owner comes in wearing a pair of tiny white underwear. I wonder why he put them on. The porn star, you’ve heard of him, is still naked and has a British accent. He’s beginning to look familiar.
The DJ keeps asking, “Do you know who this is? Do you know who this is?” as if I am someone that doesn’t know anyone. As if everyone I know in New York doesn’t live in a penthouse. As if he is not going to take me with him to London and Miami and San Diego. He still thinks he is. He still thinks he is in love with me. I know the truth and we pour out more cocaine, including the stash I put aside in the guest room, the room where they were fucking. It is almost eight-thirty now and I can see the sun outside the stained-glass window.
I say, “Of course, I’ve appreciated your work,” with an extra layer of innuendo on “appreciated.” Maybe I sound sarcastic or maybe I sound witty. They don’t care. Our eyes are shining with cocaine. No one has a straw. No one has a dollar bill. The maid won’t be coming in today to make the coffee or restock the kitchen that no one uses. The owner takes a book off the shelf. It’s Hannibal, the one about Hannibal Lector. The one after The Silence of the Lambs. Or is it before? He tears out pages and we use them to snort up the lines of white powder that we all take out from nowhere in particular.
The porn star is already on an alphabet of drugs. You’ve heard of them. The owner too, though his boyfriend asleep in the master bedroom pretends not to like them. This place, this penthouse, is where the previous boyfriend died. You’ve heard of him. You’ve read about it. The furniture is still the same. I sat in the room the day before and watched their eyes as they showed me the drawer where they keep the arsenal of dildos.
From behind other books comes a crystal vase filled with psychedelic mushrooms. I have never tried them. The porn star is playing his CD for us. You haven’t heard it. He is trying to convince the DJ he should remix it, should make a club version of it. You haven’t heard of it. You won’t. The CD is terrible. Even stoned. Even with my eyes shining and covered in the liquid, imaginary mercury of cocaine.
I will try to convince the DJ to remix it anyway; try to convince him that it will be a triumph of irony. Later we laugh about this until people in Manhattan look at us funny on the sidewalk. They don’t know who we’re talking about.
But that night, that night the owner goes to bed, back to bed and his boyfriend, with the narcotic sweat of the porn star still on him. I wonder what it would be like for them, what it would be like a dozen floors down. What it would be like if no one had heard of them and if the sheets had a lower thread count.
The other man, the one who used to live here, died of a GHB overdose. Our host is the dead man’s boyfriend. The late man’s boyfriend gives me glasses of juice and tells me to give them to the DJ and the porn star. “Be careful,” he tells me, “these have G in them.” I remember the man who died but I carry the glasses anyway; carry them to people you’ve heard of. No one has heard of me.
The porn star bores me. His eyes are shining but dully, like a puddle on the sidewalk, a leaden gleaming rainbow of oil and dirt. He talks incessantly about his album, about performing it naked onstage while holding hands with a woman. He talks about the rich men who brought him to New York, the men who pay. He talks like a man still charming, like someone people have heard of, someone people pray to in temples lit by video. I go to bed.
The DJ acts like he wants me to stay. Maybe he is afraid that if I go the porn star will leave too. Maybe he hopes the porn star will make me horny enough to fuck them both. I go to bed and fall asleep in my jeans with my belt cinched tight around my waist. I go to bed acres above the street, windows open onto the square and the angelic horns of the cabs far below.
I wake some march of minutes later. I wake with the porn star’s limp penis pressed against the side of my face. It is cold and heavy. He is trying to press it into my mouth. I am awake and asleep. I am scared like an animal caught napping and I am angry enough to throw these pounds of man, this worn object of despairing worship, off the balcony into the cement pandemonium of fallen angels below. “You’re so beautiful,” he whispers, and then repeats it. Then he tells me, “Everyone wants me to fuck them because I have such a big dick,” you’ve seen it, you’ve seen his dick, “but I really want to bottom for you. I want you to fuck me.”
It is the voice of God to men alone in the dark. To young men cowering in video booths; to old men alone in their apartments. But this man, this porn star you’ve heard of, is the answer to their prayers, not mine, or at least not mine remembered. Have I seen him? Have I stroked myself fiercely to his image? Remote control in left hand, cock in my right? Have I wished for him to come to me in the barn? In the prison? In the locker room?
My friend, the DJ, comes into the room and pulls the porn star away, the porn star with rug burns on his elbows and knees. The DJ shines his eyes into me and says, “This is a once in a lifetime chance. I have to. This is a once in a lifetime chance.” And I feel pity for them both. I feel pity because they talk like people no one has heard of, like each is unworthy of the other and it is only I, in my disdain, who can touch them.
I caress the edge of sleep again, fist knotted around belt buckle; sex defended by denim armor, rivets, and leather. I caress the edge of sleep with my tongue counting my teeth. He slices into the tender flesh of sleep with the tip of a pen, the porn star. I think he is crying now but am not sure, am not sure I want to shine through the dark to care.
He shows me my own arm, what he has written there, and asks me to read out what I see. It is hieroglyphs. It is cuneiform. It is numbers. I say some of them out correctly but get others wrong. He writes his sevens with a cross through them, martyred in the European style. He writes them again, and again. On both arms, on my shoulder, on my back, and as I half roll over, on my clavicle. “You are so beautiful,” he says again and again. “Call me. Call me.”
His eyes no longer shine and I feel something for him. I feel the urge to lift him higher than where we are but there is no place higher than the penthouse, nowhere he has heard of. Can a lie be a gift? I lie. I say I’ll call. I say I will to make the hurt in him a little less. Not because he expects me to call, not because he would actually answer, but because he wants me to want to call. The desire for desire. The dog chasing its tail. The Ouroboros devouring itself. The porn star so hung he can fuck himself into oblivion, where no one has heard of him.
He has consumed so many drugs he is foaming at the mouth, a foam of saliva and words. A foam of his father and his childhood. A foam of the rich men who call him across oceans to fuck but he goes down in the elevator anyway. He goes out into the morning below where the sun has only just touched and he carries some of the night down with him.
“It was a once in a lifetime chance,” the DJ says to me again as he goes through his ritual before bed. We both know now that we will never love each other. We will never be that couple. That couple that flies from city to city. That couple of electronic beats and typed word. We will never be that couple you’ve heard of.
When he is asleep, I get up and shower. I wash away the sweat of the club, the press of transatlantic flesh, and I wash away the phone numbers men have prayed for. Even when I’m done, a few remain on the back of my left shoulder. Two or three digits surviving dimly, you’d know them if you saw them. A nine. A one, and a seven crucified by the line through its middle. The rest are just markings without meaning, broken, faded things no one will hear of.
I take a pillow and blanket out of the guest room, where the owner and the porn star greeted us with their fucking. I take the pillow and blanket across the living room where the carpets are scuffed with the marks of knees and hands and elbows. I go into the library where the porn star’s CD has gone away with him and pages of Hannibal lie curled into tubes on the ottoman. The dark wood gleams like a polished coffin as the morning shines brightly through the stained glass, a funeral for no one we know.
I’m in New York. I’m in New York, eyes closing and the sun shining bright. None of it’s normal. It’s not normal for other people, though some of you might have heard about it, even if you haven’t heard of me.
I’m in New York.
ARGENTINA
Richard Reitsma
When it rains, I think of you. Today, I’m obsessed enough to be out rowing in this not-quite-rain, not-yet-snow weather of late November in Michigan, the land of my exile. The misty breath rising from the river on a cold, rainy day like this reminds me of the unspeakable sweet nothings you once whispered in my ear.
My heart beats quicker at the thought of you, and I start to pull the oars through the water faster, past the Indian burial mounds, and on under the freeway. The early snow that only two days ago blanketed fall’s decay is melting away, exposing the rotting corpse of a deer, mangled by a car. From the river I see a billboard asking me if I’ve Got Milk? Funny, that. Two days ago I had a good row in the falling snow. The billboard was blank then, the snow thick on the ground, the deer carcass and the Indian mounds merely silent bumps in the white landscape.
I opened the letter informing me of your death this morning. The note was brief, written in the unsteady hand of a poet whose fingers were smashed in payment for his supposedly seditious words. My friend, for whom every word is an agony, carefully wrote out your death sentence: He who has touched us both too profoundly, has died, but not as we may have hoped. It must have been the first time since our arrest that he’s picked up a pen and put words to paper. I know for myself I never took another picture since that day; my mind is full of vivid memories, there is nothing I want a record of anymore.
I regret your being dead. It means I can never go back. Argentina is forever forbidden. How could I possibly go back after what happened between us?
I could always feel your presence in the room with me, no matter how dark the cell or how silent your breathing. It aroused me in impatience, and I would sweat as I do now.
That always amused you: my incapacity to control my body. You tormented me with it, knowing how I’d react to your proximity. You would keep me in suspense, allowing me to exhaust myself in furious anticipation and the desire for knowledge….
When anticipation became experience, my body quivered with painful realization. I writhed at your touch when it finally graced me, my body doing things with you of which it had never known itself capable. I’ve never been able to repeat those contortions that strained me to the limits of ecstasy: there’s never been anyone else like you in my life.
So now when I think of all this, my flesh shivering with the memory of your warm caress, I manage a rueful smile, and laugh myself back into being, because I know you’re dead.
Perhaps you thought I could save you? You punished me the way you wanted to be disciplined, because you saw evil in your desires. My body became the spoils of your war, your passions the victor, but you the victim: I was merely the territory of flesh upon which the battle was waged, and the war lost.
Argentina no longer means anything to me. You’re gone, and everything I could possibly fear or love too much has vanished with you. I hated you, yet I had grown to love you: you were such a part of me that I had no choice but to learn to love you (revolting as that is to me) because I couldn’t hate myself.
But loving you does not preclude attempts at vengeance and amputation. I would have liked to extract you like a molar and put you in a box, or cut you off like a gangrenous arm, stopping the bleeding with a smear of tar, like they do when tree limbs are sawed off. Then I could throw you away, forget you, and be gone and done with it, save for momentary phantom itches that can’t be scratched. I am wrinkled and cavernous, porous like coral, attempting to fill my cavities with others. But like you, none of them stay.
Those who’ve spent long nights nestled with my body say that I talk in my sleep; that I make noises like a rutting pig. One even said he (or maybe it was she?) had seen strange markings well up on my flesh. At night, when I am not in control of forgetting, I dream of you. No one else has ever mattered so much to me. The indecipherable moans that come out muffled through the distant space of sleep are but faint echoes of the screams retched out in agony and hurled back to me from the walls of my cell, mocking my response to your fist, my blood, your boot, my blood. You cursed me for the blood, for staining your clothes and spotting your hands. My sanity grabbed, then, at some memory to escape the misery, and I remembered a portrayal of Lady Macbeth, hysterical at the sight of her stained hands….
I hated you less for the brutalizing of your hands than for my immobility. I hated you for tying my hands behind my back, to the chair. Did you know the rage and misery you caused my mind? It begged its body for protection, but the body failed, time after time, straining in fury until it surrendered to pain.
After you’d left, I would lick my wounds to gather back in as much of myself as I could. I felt then like a child, licking the trickle of blood and snot running from my broken nose. You robbed me of sight, my eyes puffed and sealed shut from too much blood, rendering me incapable of aiming my spit at you with any accuracy. But then, I could hardly spit: you saw to that the first day, giving me “lips like a nigger,” as you laughingly told me. My hearing, the only sense with which you left me, was polluted beyond belief by the drunken whispers you planted in my ears. I could have closed my eyes so as not to look at you (your mustachioed sneer; the bulging, tattooed arms), but your fists swelled them shut. I could adjust to your pungent aroma of tobacco and sweat (produced by the effort of wanton rage?), but you broke my nose. I could have grown accustomed to the point of your leather boots kicking my stomach, my groin, my mouth, but the blow you gave my back subdued the rushing of sensory messages to my brain. So you left me with the one sense over which I could exercise no control, and you made my skin crawl, sweat, and stink as you filled my ears with poison, driving me to deadly madness.
