Boy Crazy, page 15
The aluminum wing of a fighter plane hung on a wall, spotted with bullet holes. “Must’ve got shot down in Vietnam,” Don said.
I tried to figure why they would send it all the way back here. I looked at the holes closer and saw circular scroll marks where a drill bit had chewed through the aluminum. “It’s fake,” I said, pointing out the drill marks to Don.
Don gave a loud, scoffing laugh. “Wouldn’t you know it!”
“What’s so funny?” The angry voice came from behind.
“Huh?” Don said, startled. We turned to see a heavyset guy with an almost shaved head and a hard, round face glaring at us.
“You heard me. You think it’s funny a plane gets shot down, airmen die—that your idea of funny?”
Don couldn’t talk; he shrugged and looked away.
“This plane didn’t get shot down,” I said. “Look, somebody drilled it.”
The guy stared at me and Don, sizing us up. He stepped closer and his voice grew angrier. “That wing there’s a monument… it’s a memorial…to all the planes that did get shot down…are getting shot down right now. Our buddies over in Vietnam are dying so shitbirds like you can stand around and make fun of ’em.”
Drawn by the hostility, several other GIs gathered around. “Fuckin’ draft dodgers,” one of them called out, but it was a half-joking taunt.
The big guy was in earnest, though; he had found a target and pressed the attack. He moved so close that I could smell beer and cigarettes on his breath. “Military’s better off without pussies like you. Chickenshit bastards get your buddies killed in combat.”
They’re going to beat us up, I thought. A bar fight…gouge us with broken beer bottles. My breath cut to a wisp as if a wire were crimping my throat. My stomach contracted to a hard lump and my chest clenched. My upper arms were rigid but my hands shook.
A tall rangy guy with a jutting Adam’s apple, dark stubbly hair, and anthracite eyes gestured at me. “Look, his hands are shaking. You scared, punk? No wonder you’re dodging the draft.” He turned to his comrades with a predatory smile. “This guy is scared shitless.”
Our first tormentor reached out and undid the top button of Don’s shirt. Don flinched but was too frightened to block him. The guy sensed that instantly, and his small gray eyes almost disappeared in his grinning cheeks. He smirked at the others and pointed to Don’s immobility. I folded my arms across my chest, hoping I wouldn’t be next, knowing I would be, dreading it. Pork Chop returned to unbuttoning Don’s shirt. With each button Don cringed with deeper humiliation. When he reached the belt, the guy stopped, breathing hard, his face red. “Fuckin’ cherries…wouldn’t fight if you killed ’em. Let’s give ’em the bum’s rush.” He turned to his buddies, eyes glistening. “Should we give ’em the bum’s rush?”
“Yeah,” the tall guy said with a cackle.
They lunged at us in a crouch and thrust one hand between each of our legs to grab our belts from behind, then seized our shirt collars in their other hands and stood straight, lifting us off the ground until we were hanging parallel to the floor. I screamed helplessly as the onlookers cheered. They ran with us toward the back door, which they opened using Don’s head as a battering ram.
Out in the parking lot, two guys who came with them opened the back of a van. One of them stood in front of the license plate so we couldn’t read it. They tossed us in like sacks of potatoes and got in after us.
“We’re gonna give you two cherries a lesson in military justice,” said Pork Chop as the van pulled away. “Scream for help and you’re dead.” He pulled a knife from a sheath on the side of his high-top boots and pressed the cold blade against my throat. “You’re both prisoners of war. You’re gonna see what that’s like. First we shake you down for weapons. Spread-eagle!” He prodded my arms and legs with the knife point until I spread them.
The tall guy was sitting on Don. He reached down with his hand like a claw and grabbed my friend’s crotch. Don screamed but stifled it. “Found a suspicious object, sergeant!” the guy crowed.
“Strip search ’em then, both of ’em,” the fat guy said. He stuck his knife into the end of my jeans and with a grunting effort slit the denim up the leg. The blade scratched my skin all the way up until it jabbed my rear end. As I jerked and squealed with pain, he pressed a heavy hand against my back to hold me down. He cut across the bottom to the other leg, slicing me in the process, then slit that leg too down to the cuff. He groped my jockey shorts off. I thought he was going to castrate me with the knife.
Instead he pulled his own pants down to the tops of his boots.
The other guy said to Don, “You take ’em off or I cut ’em off.” With trembling fingers Don unbuttoned his jeans and pulled them down to his knees. “You can’t spread ’em that way,” the guy said. “All the way off.” Don took off his shoes and pulled the jeans all the way off. The guy slapped him across the face. “Drawers too.” Don took off his underpants, then rolled onto his stomach to hide his genitals. “You got it, bare-ass.”
By now the van had stopped. I couldn’t see any streetlights or cars out the windshield. The two guys in front had turned around to watch us.
Pork Chop leaned over me. “On your hands and knees, bitch. You’re gonna get fucked doggy-style.” His grin showed cigarette stains on his teeth.
What was left of my pants was hanging down like a skirt in front of me with the back open, so as I crouched down, my rump was fully exposed. Pork Chop’s privates hung limp below his belly. Maybe he wouldn’t be able to do it to me. But what would he do instead?
He took the point of his knife and poked my rump, and kept doing it, just breaking the skin, watching my winces of pain. He slid the knife over my testicles, smiling at the terror on my face. “You want to keep these, you do what I say. Got it?”
I nodded.
He poked one ball with the blade. “Got it?” he asked louder.
“Yes!”
“Yes, what?”
“Yes, sir!”
“You learn fast, college boy.” He was panting and his organ was getting harder. “Kiss me, bitch.” I kissed him. He tasted like a beer bottle full of cigarette butts. He put his tongue in my mouth, then hefted his body up. “Now kiss this.” He shoved his cock in my face. “You bite it, you die.” I kissed it. “Now suck it.” I sucked it. It tasted like sour sweat. It was hard now.
The other guy was bent over Don’s rear end, thrusting his cock into him, twisting and grunting while Don bit his lip to keep from screaming.
Pork Chop pulled his cock out of my mouth and got behind me. He spread my cheeks and started ramming it against me. He grabbed my hips in his fat hands and pulled me back. He bent and grunted as he rammed, and finally with a sharp pain it slid into me. “Ha!” he moaned with pleasure and pushed all the way in. I could feel my skin tearing. He loomed over me, grabbed my chest, and bit my shoulder. “Fuckin’ cherries…fuckin’ cherries,” he chanted with each thrust. It hurt. I was bleeding. Tears streamed down my face. He brushed them away almost tenderly and pinched my cheek. “You’re cute when you cry, you know?”
The two guys in front climbed in the back with us and pulled their pants down. One of them knelt in front of me and stuck his penis in my face. “Suck it, sucker. Suck it good. Or else!” He clinched both hands around my throat. “Is that clear?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, what?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now do it to it.” He shoved it into my mouth.
I knew they’d kill us when they were done, but I thought if we obeyed and didn’t make them too mad, they’d just shoot us or stab us and not torture us to death. Knowing I was soon going to die, I clung to every moment of life. The sensation of hard throbbing flesh filling my face and my butt were the last things I’d ever feel, so I clung to them. They were all I had left. My own cock snaked out of the tatters of my jeans.
Pork Chop was thrusting faster now, groaning and pumping me hard, his thighs banging against my butt; then he went frantic, bellowing and pistoning as his load spurted into me.
I looked over at Don, who was also on his hands and knees being worked over by two guys, one at his ass and another at his face. His eyes were shut and he was crying and his cock was now hard, like mine.
With a blend of humiliation and pleasure I came, semen jetting out of my cock. I was ashamed but couldn’t help it. Maybe Don sensed it—he opened his eyes right then to look at me. Our eyes met, and a beam of love and helpless compassion poured between us, stronger than the terror. Then Don orgasmed, spouting cum in long arcs while he moaned. He was beautiful, and I wanted to hold his image as I died.
The guy at my face grabbed my hair and pronged his prick down my throat as he came in surges. Finally he pulled it out. “You better swallow, dickhead.”
I swallowed.
How would they kill us?
The two butt guys wiped their dicks on our clothes and pulled up their pants. The two face guys pulled up their pants and climbed into the front of the van. They started driving. Pork Chop opened the back of the van and yelled, “Bum’s rush!” He and his companion pushed Don and me half naked out the back. We hit the road on our hands and knees, then each rolled into a ball to protect our middles as we slid across the pavement, tearing off skin. The van sped up, with Pork Chop holding the door open so we couldn’t read the license plate, and the other guy kicking our shoes and pants out.
They were gone; we were alive; I wished I were dead.
Crying and quavering, we put our filthy clothes back on. We were in a big park. We walked toward the closest streetlights. I tied my shirt around my waist and held my pants up to hide my bleeding rear end. We didn’t know where we were and were afraid to ask anyone. We saw a motel—we had to get clean, wash them off of us. I waited in the shadows while Don rented a room. The clerk didn’t care about his appearance: money was money, no questions asked. It was that kind of place.
The hot water and soap stung our cuts and scratches. We couldn’t talk but we needed each other. We huddled together in the bed, two wounded, helpless creatures, glad not to be alone in this horrible world.
In the morning we found our way back to the car, now with a parking ticket on it. The bar wasn’t open. We were glad. We drove out of Denver.
Gradually our fear and shame and pain eased enough that we could talk in strained fragments, but not about the rape. Something deep in us had been soiled beyond cleansing. We shared a terrible silent secret, but it brought us closer together.
As we lugged up into the front range of the Rockies, thick clouds blotted out the sun and started pouring snow, small dry pellets unlike the big wet flakes of Kansas, a swarm of white specks dancing in the headlights and trailing in skeins behind us. Numb almost to catatonia, we watched, glad of distraction, glad some beauty was left in the world.
To avoid thinking about what had happened, we debated the crucial issue of whether it was true that no two snowflakes were ever the same. Imagine from the very first flake until now, no two ever the same? Hard to believe. All through the Ice Ages, through all the ever-swirling polar snows since then, millions of jillions of flakes, and no two ever the same? Maybe if you counted the molecules on each branch, maybe no two had exactly the same number of molecules in exactly the same place. Other than that it seemed pretty unlikely. What if the snow kept on and covered the road? We didn’t have chains…should’ve thought of that. But for now at least, the flakes were too dry and small to stick to the road, so they were blown off by traffic whoosh. In the storm our car became a haven, and the swirling hugeness of eternal snows and endless mountains muffled our memories of the night before.
Still unable to confront our violation, we drove through the night listening to Wolfman Jack from XERF, Del Rio, Texas, the transmitter broadcasting from across the border in Mexico because its power was too strong to be legal in the United States, the Wolfman beaming all over the west—we used to listen to him in Kansas City, now he consoled us in the snows of Colorado. The Wolfman was obviously a weirdo who didn’t fit in, like us, but he’d found his groove and was good at it, megawatting his mad cackle and bizarre music; no top-forty payola picks for Wolfman; everything had a bit of a bent edge to it.
Beyond the windshield the mountains were now great humped shadows caught in the stab of headlights. The snow finally stopped, replaced by galaxies of stars in a clear sky.
Oncoming cars were sudden hurtling flashes, passing by on the way to who-knew-where secret rendezvous. Maybe they were trying to get to Denver while we were trying to get away from it. Or they were headed for KC; they might have been neighbors’ kin going for a Christmas visit, and we passed them in the night never knowing, never meeting, all of us tiny and lost.
The Wolfman knew all that, you could hear it in his voice, an ancient crazy wail part Negro, part pachuco; he had seen it all, done it all, and it had driven him over the brink into mad raps. The Wolfman might have even been raped once, and he was still here.
We drank black coffee and ate truck stop pie. Driving and sleeping in shifts, we piled up the miles, speeding out of the Rockies and through Salt Lake City, staid and quiet compared to Denver, then on to the desert with its white salt flats and wide blue lake reflecting the mountains in a windless tableau, an eerie expanse of emptiness like a Salvador Dali painting with time and gravity suspended.
Finally, both of us dizzy with fatigue, coffee not working anymore, we stopped at a motel overshadowed by a giant neon cowboy in Winnemucca, Nevada. We hit the showers and hit the bed. The room had two beds, but we got in the same one, needing comfort. In the dark our memories returned, and emotions we’d repressed for twenty-four hours flooded over us—terror, rage, disgrace. Holding each other, we cried in great gouts of grief over our defilement, cursing our attackers, then as that ebbed, we were overwhelmed by a need for love and tenderness. We hugged each other with soothing gentleness, replacing the brutality with affection. We kissed and caressed, to prove to ourselves that human contact doesn’t have to be cruel. If we hadn’t been half out of our minds, we might not have breached the boundaries of our previous friendship, but we craved solace too much to stop. Our touches blotted out the trauma, salved each other’s wounds. Hungry mouths found our cocks, and we kissed and consoled them in an oral embrace of healing. We offered to each other and accepted from each other a mutual orgasm of love, and we fell asleep in each other’s arms.
Next day we refused to be sorry. We’d endured so much that we were now beyond conventions of perceived propriety. We were glad to have and to help each other every way we could. We’d paid our dues and didn’t need to regret anything or apologize to anyone. We were human beings again. We’d proved our rapists wrong: sex can be kind rather than vicious.
Did this mean we were queers, the lowest form of life, the depths of depravity? If so, so be it. Labels had no meaning to us anymore. Our lovemaking had been the best sexual experience we’d ever had. We’d both had girls before but found it no big deal, kind of overrated. This was different.
We drove through Nevada’s vast arid emptiness and the tawdry hustle of Reno, then finally reached the Sierras. The Chevy’s in-line six cylinders slowed as we began to climb. Cheering, we crossed the border into California, the state on the salient edge of possibility. Already we felt a new charge in the air. The highway was better, and it seemed we could coast all the way to the coast.
We stopped thirty miles short of the Pacific in Orinda, a suburb of San Francisco where Lee lived. Both Orinda and Overland Park were enclaves of prosperity, but rather than the stolid conservative cubes of Kansas, people here lived in split-levels with redwood balconies, overhanging eaves, cantilevered stairways, glass walls, and kidney-shaped swimming pools. We nearly wept with relief. The trip had been worth it. Here things were different. This was living!
Lee was a senior majoring in art history and was going to move into San Francisco as soon as he graduated. I’d met him once years ago when his family was visiting Don’s. The first thing he said when we were alone together was, “So you’re gay too. Groovy!”
We didn’t know what “gay” meant, so he explained. “How could you tell?” I asked.
“Easy, silly.”
I realized we’d both probably always been that way deep down, but it had taken this trip to bring it out.
Lee taught us a lot, most of it on his water bed. Then he introduced us to his friends in the city. Don and I got sucked and fucked in about eighty different ways. By New Year’s we’d fully come out.
We were a long way from Kansas and we weren’t going back. We forgot about college for a while and got jobs—Don as a waiter, me as a florist—and an apartment in the Castro, the emerging gay neighborhood. Eventually we both got master’s degrees from San Francisco State, Don’s in accounting and mine in poetry writing. But before that there was more to be learned in the streets than from books.
In 1969—the last two digits were prophetic—San Francisco exploded with gay festivals and parades. We held outdoor orgies at night in Fort Mason, a park at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge. Guys were dropping trou at the drop of a hat. Both gays and lesbians were finally no longer afraid of showing they were queer and could openly celebrate their sexuality.
Two guys bought a Turkish bath and turned it into fairyland. Soon similar places sprang up, bathhouses offering free and open gay sex in all its varieties. People could finally live their fantasies. The baths also served as cultural centers. Writers like Allen Ginsberg and Ray Mungo would read their work, musicians like Tim Buckley and Phil Ochs would sing and play, political activists like Rennie Davis and Harvey Milk would speak on stopping the war in Vietnam and creating economic justice in the United States. And everybody was nude! It was mind blowing. It seemed to be the nucleus of a revolution. But mostly it was sex, a freaky frolic. All sorts of people came—bikers, artists, businessmen. I once saw Rudolf Nureyev and Johnny Mathis kissing. One night Don, Lee, and I were part of a sixteen-man daisy chain, a full-circle cyclotron of male energy doing the bunny hop and singing, “Hang on, Sloopy.”
