Best Gay Erotica 2001, page 12
The same mischief that threw passion, an oil slick, in our path.
Before Clarence promised me a ticket, before he ever spoke a word and so, before I knew he had a name—when he was just the perfect stranger—he taught me all about his insides behind the same gas station where I was that week employed.
And once I knew his interior, I was fooled into believing that getting near to a heart was the same as entering one. Some dark tissue, like a fist around liquids, it sent its dull music to my fingertips. Now that I know the truth, that one’s heart is not a vault but a throughway, I’ll spare the hurt feelings, and get right to what everyone wants to hear: the sex.
It’s a cheap seventies blue movie, moving too frequently out of focus. One actor has a grease smudge on his neck just behind his ear, the other is obviously a model looking for extra work. Action is dull and predictable: one position, an unvaried rhythm until the money shot, which is not a money shot, since the actor—a lug—never pulls out.
I was working at this gas station for the same reason sad-faced girls worked in pet stores; I just looked like I belonged there. I didn’t know much beyond the basics under the hood, but my acne-scarred face and dumb stare were exactly what you wanted to find through that film of soapy water on your windshield. It was a comfort: the drawl, the good service filtered through a glaze of cheap pot, my wiry frame that one could easily picture in the act of screwing a cousin, male or female, and not even having the sense to clean up after or feel the least ashamed. Anyway, that’s what Clarence’s eyes told me, even before he took off his glasses.
His eyes told me what I should be, and I followed instructions because, as you’ve probably figured out by now, there was nothing better to do. I called him Sir, scratched my prick as if it were just some dumb habit my dirty hands got up to of their own accord. He drove away but wouldn’t get far; sometimes the knots work in your favor. At closing I saw him pull up to the pumps. He’d gotten a full tank an hour before so I just made it easy on him, stuck my head through the open passenger window, flashed dumb eyes (maybe he knew it was an act, in which case he overestimated me—it was half an act; either way, the ends were all the same), and said, “We’re closed now, but if you wanna pull round to the back, I’ll have a look at it.”
Of course I’m acting smug in hindsight, but the truth is my heart was going a million miles an hour. I was ninety percent sure he was queer, but at the last minute the remaining ten percent started voicing its opinion. What was the worst that could happen? He could whack me over the head with a tire iron and clean out the till, all on my invitation. After all, that would be another reason to come back to a business at closing time.
Doesn’t matter, didn’t happen. The breeze moved the black silhouettes of trees around. He cleaned out all the fast food wrappers from the back seat.
I washed my hands with a gritty pink soap. If there were any noises, which there must have been—cars on the highway, the two of us breathing—in my mind they all went dead for a long time. Sensation pushed all sound out, or the ability to recognize it as sound. Same difference.
His eyes quivered out a little Morse code as I stood there watching him watch me: “Be dumb as shit, dot, dot, dash…be an unthinking blanket that nearly smothers me….” It wasn’t really my style, but maybe for a short time I could pretend enough to keep him worried and happy. I kept silent; words would ruin any illusion. Instead, all the language went into holding my shoulders slack, and furrowing my brow when he finally got up the nerve to touch me: a worried look followed by a half-hearted smile. Eventually all our gestures, his and mine, were pointing to the same thing. It was as if we were both just marionettes, and the puppeteer was somewhere up his ass. He kept accommodating the act: lying back on the vinyl seat, spreading his legs in the door frame, dressing my prick in spit, coaxing me inside…and I just went there; bent over him for a while, the soft fabric on the ceiling of his car brushing my neck, and then suddenly aware that the weight of everything I sensed and thought was radiating from the gut of another human being. There was a dim consciousness, like a camera inside my skull, watching the whole thing take place. But the greater awareness was liberating him of focus, reaching into a colorful darkness. His eyes were rolled back and his breathing was dictated by my thrusts. The cabin of the vehicle held us in a space where otherwise gravity was slipping. We were ourselves tissue in a chamber, mechanisms exchanging energy and oxygen.
I was not alone in this observation. Later he told me that he could feel himself disappear into the rhythm of the fuck, and how the smell of grease, which was all over me, filled his lungs until he believed he’d merged with machine. My tinkering about had transported him, made him automotive (his fantasy was that I was an auto mechanic, and I took care never to burst this illusion).
Once I came (won’t try to lasso that moment with words) he wouldn’t let me leave him: physically tightened around me and held me inside. We lay there, gravity reclaiming its position beneath us, sounds turned on again—a television at full volume from the house next door, something like a tractor engine in the distance (though we were not near the country) —his breathing and mine synched up into a slow pulse. The stars tilted. Gangs of boys and packs of dogs passed by. Morning slipped around us unnoticed. The day passed and our bodies lay undiscovered. More days passed and spiders covered us in a sticky lace, rats ate our feet, birds made nests in the crooks of our arms. The gas station went out of business and was eventually torn down. An arcade was built in its place that did well for a few years but, when the center of town moved north, it folded. The lot was deserted for a long while, until one day they built another gas station exactly like the one that had been there years before. All this time I was inside him.
I fell asleep in there, woke up in there: another hard-on, another grin on his face—or maybe it was the first. Yes, I think so, because it was the grin that made me really see his whole face, and not just certain features.
A smooth but busy face: the eyes thinking, nostrils flared, then relaxed, you could see his pulse at his temples, brown freckles on a Dijon-mustard skin, a clean, soft skin that looked as if it were pampered with products, perfect teeth, and good haircut. No one who lived here looked like that.
“Take me the hell away from this place.”
It wasn’t a request, nor a command. I’m not even sure if I put it into so many words, or if the phrase just burned white at the bottom of the screen, translating my actions: Get two Cokes from the office, sit in the passenger seat of his car, wish that he would hurry up whatever he’s doing in the restroom.
2.
On Tuesday nights the basement at the 4-H club is a place where queers gather to listen to some rock and schlock and to desecrate icons. They pin up a sign dusted in glitter, Licky Favors, and serve dollar beers in big plastic cups.
Old super-8 porn on the walls in slow motion, bumps of crystal in the one tiny toilet. Some girls, but guys mostly, go there and recognize good and bad fractions of themselves all over the place. They see themselves a few years ago, or a few years from now, in the eyes of other patrons, in sad and grand gestures, in the doped-up spectacle. It’s a hall of mirrors.
Motion goes into a sort of one-point perspective here, starting with something still, say an old beat-up easy chair, and radiating out. Objects closest to the chair (or whatever center you choose) are the slowest, and they pick up speed the farther away you go. The world just outside, which is as far as anyone ever gets, is moving so fast its speed is invisible, and so walking out there is an illusion of walking into stillness.
The light show is the story of a guy—we’ll call him Guy—who is trying to get somewhere or do something, but other men keep interrupting him. Guy never complains. He’s so easily distracted, he doesn’t even seem to notice that he’s repeating himself, that he’s locked into the routine of trying to break free of his routine. He leaves his job in one scene, but before long is employed again at a similar or the same job. Mindless work selling objects that don’t make sense to him, or caressing the architecture in other people’s apartments, a giant sack of never-used tools by his side. Some days he stares at you through dirty windows, some days he forgets who he is in the crawl spaces of suburbia, and every day he gets it in his head to leave. Then he tries to fix his broken bike or sticks a thumb out on the highway, but it’s no use. All the men who stop to help him are only after one thing.
Sometimes, if you are the object that is still, you can project your self out into the motion of others, the trick being not to cast yourself out too far. Braced into a corner, you can follow the trajectory of lights and enter the story loop at various points. You can meet Guy and be one more predictable but pleasant sequence in his ancient life.
In the blue shade of a circle of trees, Guy points to all the scars on his body and tells you the story behind each of them. In a hotel, you can get up on the bed on all fours, and Guy will point up into you. Fingers of light entering through a slippery portal.
Because he’s a creature of habit, every interaction with him will wind up sexual. Because you’re a creature of habit, you will always search him out, in spite of the disappointment he leaves you with. Because he is you, he is always absent, even when he is a flashlight inside you.
A car pulled over to the side of the side of the road and the driver asked where I was headed. “Away from this place,” I said, knowing he couldn’t really go anywhere. His truck was a prop, the landscape projected in motion behind us, while we remained stationary.
Driver: You’ve got dirt in your hair.
Me: Yeah.
Driver: And there’s blood on your hand. Are you hurt?
Me: Nah…I was in a fight.
I said it, figuring we were close enough to city limits to sound a little dangerous. For the next year I worked two jobs, always wearing my pull-tab ring till I noticed the rust was staining my finger. While I long professed to be against violence, the notion that I was capable of it never occurred to me. My thoughts of Clarence took on an erotic cloak as I imagined our fight as an entrance to some fraternal arena I had previously discredited as anti-intellectual. Taste of sweat, beer, and blood lingering on my gums. The foot’s shuffling tattoo winds a punch, anticipating that smack and the slight give of flesh over bone—a knuckle cushion—pushing flights of fancy while pushing a broom: thoughts meant to quicken the passing of time at work.
Passing time was a challenge, as these jobs actually seemed to collect time that wasn’t being used elsewhere. As I swept the sugary grime from under a vat used to knead sacks full of flour into dough, the sound of the minute hand scraping its way from 3:45 a.m. to 3:46 a.m. was a nail on a chalkboard.
Driver: (pulling over) We should clean that up. I have a first aid kit under your seat, there.
He leaned across me, his hand brushing inside my thigh, testing to see if I would pull away. “Here it is,” he said. But I was so gone by then, I had no idea what “it” he was referring to, I’d lost faith in “here,” and “is” was just a sort of distraction we all used to grope about from one limb to another.
The Future of the Future
Marshall Moore
Scott tightened his connection with his port, logged on, and accessed the site. If he had to work from home while the broken bone in his leg knit itself whole, he meant to make the most of his time. He had projects enough to keep him busy for at least three times that long. Travel arrangements to coordinate. A couple of articles to edit. Why not do all this from the comfort of his sofa? Doctor’s orders: Walk around as little as possible in the coming week. The skin is intact but the bone will not be really solid for at least a week. Let the treatment run its course. Don’t fuck it up, barked the cute bald doctor with the nineteen-syllable last name. (Russian? Ukrainian? Scott had no idea.) It’ll take longer to heal if we have to set it again, and you won’t be able to move around at all.
Thank God I wasn’t born twenty or thirty years earlier, Scott thought. God forefend I should be forced to spend days in the hospital, then have to limp around on crutches for weeks or months.
The contact points of the port—the new one from Sony, designer-hip, gleamingly silver—worked much like headphones, only shaped like a curved letter T. Two points at his temples, one at the top of his skull, and one around back where his neck met his head. The entire Internet hadn’t gone plugged-in yet, but it was on its way.
His friend (his ex, actually) Tobias, in Belgium, had sent the link via an out-of-the-blue e-mail: Click here, and when you’re done, start looking for thoughtful and clever ways to express your appreciation. Smut was the obvious—if rarely discussed—realm to benefit from Internet-based virtual reality applications, but there were still relatively few sites in existence. With the Republicans controlling both the White House and Congress ever since the prolonged debacle of the Clinton years had ended in a whimper (the bang having taken place somewhat earlier), the common assumption on the Net was that the FCC simply zapped porn sites that went interactive, Constitution be damned. Nobody outside Fortress Washington could prove it.
Scott had found one the same day the taxi had run over him. No time to explore, not until now.
He hoped it wasn’t solely for heterosexuals.
First, in flat-time:
A black screen. The word Welcome blinking in tiny red script. A link.
Scott entered.
Two choices: Proceed in traditional Web mode with traditional Web choices (chat, pictures, message boards, personal ads, blah blah blah), or Plug In Now.
Scott clicked on the universal Interact icon, square above circle, connected by arrows on either side. When he clicked, the face briefly turned into that ’60s happy face icon he’d always hated, then turned red, the mouth widening for a split-second into a big O of shock or surprise.
Scott was entered.
Seamless, the transition into cyber-reality. The change came with none of the darkness shot through with red, none of the headache, dizziness, or disorientation users experienced when the technology was launched five years ago. No cheesy sound effects, no cerebral fireworks to announce You Are Here! And, best of all, no advertisements. The webmasters here knew what the hell they were doing.
Looked just like his apartment…was his apartment. Scott looked around, and corrected himself. Looked like, but the resemblance ended there. The site must have done a scan, accessed stress points, and removed them. In real-time, his apartment was not tidy at all. He had books strewn everywhere, dirty dishes on the coffee table, and hadn’t dusted in at least a month. This simulacrum had been cleaned, but not so exactingly as to feel sterile. Books were on their shelves. He could see the surface of the coffee table, although there were still things on it, including a couple of candles he knew wouldn’t exist when he signed off. The place looked the way it would if he were having someone over and had actually taken time to straighten up a bit. Good, very good.
Someone knocked at the door.
Scott felt a moment of trepidation about rising to cross the room and answer, then remembered these legs had not been broken. He felt amazingly light on his feet, solid, real. No post-op unsteadiness. No rush of blood out of the head from standing up too fast. An idea popped into his mind: He lifted his shirt and took a look at a stomach that had become beautifully flat, defined…pierced. A tiny gold ring glinted in his navel. He caressed the ring, loving the way it felt under his fingertip, already getting aroused. Again, just a few shades better than reality. Scott wasn’t overweight—but he certainly was not in shape. A little soft at the sides. Going gently to seed.
What else looks different?
Before he had the chance to look inside his jeans, the knock came again.
“Hang on!”
At the door, through the peephole, a hunk. Practically drooling, Scott opened the door and let the guy in. Not only was the guy a hunk, he was Scott’s special kind of hunk: darkly olive-tan skin, possibly Latin or Middle Eastern, maybe some appetizing combination of races. A bit shorter than Scott, 5 foot 9 or so. Wiry, slender, but with defined muscles visible where his arms disappeared under the sleeves of his shirt. A small tattoo visible on the left forearm. Wavy hair down to his shoulders. Beautiful almond eyes.
“Scott, nice to meet you.” He extended a hand to shake. “My name is Esteban. I’m your guide.”
Scott could only nod, eyes and crotch bulging.
“We should sit down.” Esteban indicated the sofa.
Scott continued to nod, his head bobbing up and down like a marionette’s. He allowed himself to be led to the sofa. He wanted to ravish this man so desperately his body ached.
“We’ll get to that,” said Esteban. “Have some wine.”
Two glasses materialized on the coffee table. Scott didn’t recognize them and didn’t care. He couldn’t take his eyes off this beautiful man. If this is what the Internet was capable of, why on earth did people ever unplug?
“Because it’s not real life,” was the reply, followed by a big grin.
Scott sipped his wine and was delighted: He tasted a fairly light Spanish table red, with the zing of a Rioja but not the weight. Refreshing, not heavy. Perfect. He took another swallow, then another, then found he’d emptied the glass.
“It’s not real life. We have the capability of making little tweaks to the baseline here and there, then bringing you up to the level where you want to be. But as long as you’re here, you have to remember your body has physical needs. You have to eat and drink. You have to use the bathroom; you have to sleep.”
“I have to pay the bills, too. Eventually I have to get some work done.” Scott finally found his voice.
“There is that, yes.” Esteban studied Scott for a second.
Is he really this attractive, or is it all software?
“That’s an impossible question to answer. I can tell that you want to cut to the chase. You didn’t enter this site to drink red wine, eat Brie on toast, and have intellectually stimulating conversations. In a second I’m going to put my hand on the back of yours, and you’ll be left with what will look like a tattoo. That will be your access point. There will be a red circle, an amber circle, and a green circle, with more or less the same functions as a stoplight: exit, pause, and proceed.”
