Best Gay Romance 2011, page 15
“But you like Handel?”
“I love Handel.”
He jumped up and bolted from the room, returning with a guitar and sheet music.
“You’re lucky. I’ve got a score, but it’s arranged for a guitar quartet. A bunch of us whore ourselves out, doing crap like Sunday brunches at the Ritz. We don’t even have to practice since no one really listens. They’d rather eat waffles and get shit-faced on mimosas. Hang on. It’s gonna take me a minute to work this out.”
He screwed his face into a pantomime of concentration as he studied the notes on the page, muttering instructions to himself. He ran his long, tapered fingers through his thick hair and announced he’d figured out how to play this solo. No promises, he said, but he was sure he could do a pretty decent job.
“Close your eyes and think of a full orchestra,” he said, his voice brimming with quiet confidence. He tweaked the tuners and, finally satisfied, began to play.
The intensity of his focus, the power of his concentration, was astonishing and unexpected. Only a moment ago he’d been a boy, awkward and eager to impress. His poise and command of his instrument was intimidating. His mastery of the neck was total and complete as his fingers coaxed a chorus of voices from the six strings.
“So? What do you think?” he asked, as the final note faded, seeking a sign of approval.
The question left me mystified and feeling inadequate since any words of praise would seem facile, patronizing.
“But can you play ‘Blue Christmas’?” I asked, retreating to the comfort zone where sarcasm is a brittle shield and a wry retort the best defense.
He smiled and strummed a few open chords as he sang the familiar lyrics. He didn’t try any humorous attempts at Elvislike vocal pyrotechnics, no campy gulps and throbs. His simple, sincere voice, direct and unaffected, was steeped in the all-too-familiar soul-crushing loneliness of a boy who feared he’d never be loved.
He played until long after midnight and, when it was finally time for bed, he sprawled on the sofa beside me, tucked into the long crevice of my body, gripping my hand through the night. I slept in fits, never yielding to an aching arm or twisted knee, not wanting to disturb him, begrudging the face of my watch as the hours crawled toward the inevitable daybreak. In the not-too-distant future, this Christmas would become the stuff of legend, enhanced with each recitation for my jaded New York audience, a made-for-television holiday movie about two mismatched strangers, fate throwing them together for a single night and a memory that would last a lifetime.
Two days (and a seven-hundred-dollar Visa charge to a certain Breezewood mechanic) later, I finally arrived in West Virginia to celebrate the birth of Our Lord with my mother and the carcass of a country ham. I resisted the temptation to call Pennsylvania under the pretense of thanking the Prevics for their hospitality, but my mind kept wandering back to the lumpy sofa in a remote farmhouse where a gentle, needy boy clung to me through the night. I checked my emails before bed and found a short note from Jason, wishing me a Happy New Year and saying he hoped he could call me when he arrived in New York next summer. Three photos were attached: one was of his sweet, boyish face, grinning at the digital camera he held an arm’s length away; the second was of his thick, erect cock; and the third was an awkward shot, one-handed, of his bare ass.
I really, really like you, he signed off.
I cut my West Virginia visit short, pleading an emergency editorial conference with a newly signed author who was about to announce his presidential ambitions. Aunt Wendy was the first to spot me when I walked through the door of the Kozy Korner. She whispered something to Kay, who tried to suppress a cautious smile as I approached her son’s broad back. There’s going to be a lot of heartache before this is all over, I thought as I tapped him on the shoulder, remembering a different man’s sad, resigned face, his eyes wet with tears as I announced I needed to be around people my own age, too much of a coward to admit I was already involved with another editorial assistant in my office whose ass didn’t sag and who didn’t need forty minutes to get an erection.
Jason arrived in June, taking me up on my offer of a crash pad until he saved enough for a deposit on a hovel in Willamsburg or Jersey City. He stayed for seven years, until the vast differences in our ages led to the inevitable fissures and tension that threatened to harden into intractable anger and resentment, and I knew it was time to set him free. He never strays too far, though, always needing a safe place to retreat when his still-young heart suffers yet another disappointment. And every year, on Christmas Eve, he throws his bag in the trunk and tucks his guitar in the backseat and we head west through New Jersey, and dip south through Pennsylvania, where we spend the night together in a farmhouse outside the Town of Motels before I push on for West Virginia in the morning.
PORCU MEU
Derrick Della Giorgia
When I smoke a cigarette on my balcony in via Collazia, I am precisely 1.9 kilometers away from the Coliseum, 3.6 kilometers south of the Trevi Fountain and 6.2 kilometers outside of the Vatican. I am surrounded by the historical center of Rome. I am immersed in what people travel the world to see. Notwithstanding, in no way is that cigarette comparable to the one I smoke in the garden of my family house in Muro Leccese. And the elation that the five thousand inhabitants of the village cause in my globe-trotter’s head is even more exceptional during the village festival, a real localized holiday: Porcu Meu.
Porcu Meu, the shameless dialectal translation of My Pork, takes place every year in October, usually the second or third weekend of the month. In the south, almost every village has its special holiday dedicated to the most pagan celebration of community life; mine, so far south in the heel of the boot that it is closer to North Africa than to the rest of Europe, had chosen pigs to reunite once a year five thousand hearts under a few electric bulbs, the moonlight and the loud folkloric music emanating from speakers tied to people’s balconies in the main square. At the age of twenty-seven, I can count on one hand the times I have missed Porcu Meu. Certainly, I was not going to miss it this year…
My crush on the village butcher’s son has haunted me since August, when for the first time in my life I ventured into the butcher shop and bought steaks for dinner. Separated as we were by the chilled flesh between us, our first conversation infected my brain with the virulence of a computer bug. His husky words, neatly separated by the banging of his knife on the wooden counter, planted into my head the unquenchable desire to have sex with the young man wearing a blood-spattered white vest.
My summer vacation passed quickly as my family increased, without realizing why, its intake of beef, sausage and other meats dispensed in the busy shop on via Corsica. Despite inflating my levels of cholesterol and torturing myself at night trying to realize from my fantasies what my body sought from the young butcher’s hands and lips, I was not scoring much. Jacopo—his father had spoken his name once—was as cordial with me as he was reserved, an inflammatory combination that followed me when I returned by train to Rome at the beginning of September.
“When are you coming back, now?” asked my mum, her voice already nostalgic when she called my Rome apartment, as usual, the day after I left Muro Leccese.
“Porcu Meu, I can’t wait!” I said, guilty because the excitement in my response was uniquely dictated by my hunger for seeing Jacopo and had nothing to do with my mum’s love.
On my balcony, behind the Coliseum and south of the Vatican, my only thoughts were dedicated to him, and as summer faded into the mild chill that anticipates the winter holidays, I completely fell in love with the memory of Jacopo, fantasizing day after day about his short corvine hair, longer on the top and almost shaved on the sides; about his provocative lips; about the tribal tattoo that climbed from his left elbow and up his muscled arm all the way to his solid deltoid. I calculated that it had taken me about five hundred euros worth of meat to glimpse all of that tattoo: the lower part he revealed to me when in the heat of a busy moment he pulled the sleeves of his white coat up and the upper part when he was wearing a tank top the only time I was in the shop as he was changing to leave.
Lithe, tall, without a trace of a beard despite his twenty-three years, taciturn, with the look of a bored naughty angel, Jacopo was the newest obsession of my life; my friends were getting tired of hearing about him. But Muro Leccese was a small village, and I couldn’t simply ask him out to see if he was interested in getting to know me. Deciphering his inclinations from his behavior wasn’t an option either; he was too cryptic to be interpreted. We had no friends in common; I had no time to create a bridge between us during the hardly twenty days I had spent in August away from my beloved computers. Only Porcu Meu could offer the opportunity. For the festival, the eight butchers of the village prepared tons of pork and sold it all night long to happy people relaxed by red wine and familiar music. Yes, Porcu Meu could provide me with a chance to explore his feelings for me: a long night in proximity to him, bathed by the perfumed boiled pork that sprayed warm smoke in the streets and above the houses around the square.
Exactly a month and a half after my reflections on how to conquer my prey, punctual as a burp after a Coke, music started filling the streets of Muro Leccese at 8:00 P.M., and the people of the village knew that that succulent pork only needed lemon and black pepper to be savored. Families showed up first, especially if the kids were very young, then elders followed, and finally everyone else made his appearance, and the consumption of wine and the volume of music hit the roof. I accompanied my father when he bought a sufficient amount of pork for our dinner, and I quickly ate at the house—my family preferred to transport the party home instead of eating in the street—before returning to the open air. Even at 11:00 P.M. my beautiful butcher boy was besieged by hungry hundreds eager for meat. He kept bouncing back and forth like the shuttle of a loom from the garage where the meat was cooked to his stand on the sidewalk, where he handed juicy cuts of pig to customers. I leaned against the wall a few feet away and sipped wine from a white plastic cup, wondering how at last to approach him—even to seduce him—without creating a scandal.
It was then, between a first cigarette and a second cup of wine, that I discovered I wasn’t the only fan of the sexy butcher. A fifteen-year-old girl kept jumping up and down when she finally was in front of him, urging her friend to take a picture of him when he wasn’t looking. Jacopo spotted his young female admirer and ventured a subtle, hormone-raising smile. The night’s wine must have loosened up his prudish reticence. His come-on to her, however, was a green flag for my indecisive state of mind: I checked my outfit, making sure my white shirt was unbuttoned to the point where the butcher boy could get a nice view of my smooth, fit chest—and with some extra luck my pierced right nipple—and I moved toward him with the intention of asking him whether he would like to have a cup of wine with me when he was done.
There were only two rows of people between us; I circled the counter and stopped behind the register, the only patch where people were not standing. But before I was able to enact the script I had carefully written in my mind during the weeks before my return to the village for this fateful night, he turned to me and twisted everything.
“Hi, there. I am dying for a cigarette. I’m done in five, would you offer me one?” he asked shamelessly, to my happy surprise.
“Sure,” I managed to reply. “I’m going to get another cup of wine, catch me over there.” The alcohol I had imbibed rendered me uninhibited enough to answer.
“Got it.” He winked and went back to serving the crowds.
Two sips of my new cup of wine later, I was standing in front of him, commenting on the joyful night and the success of the festival, while quietly admiring his body, for the first time not veiled by a butcher’s smock.
“I’ll get you another one of those and we can walk to the park. I really need to sit down and smoke a cigarette. What do you say?” He walked past me and extracted his wallet from the back pocket of his jeans, awarding me with the sweet vision of his tight ass. I also noticed for the first time his right ear was pierced and that he had changed his haircut since the summer.
“Sounds awesome. I need to sit too. I’m kind of buzzed,” I lied, hoping my claim of inebriation might justify whatever crazy gesture my desire for him would push me to commit. As it was, I was barely able to keep my hands from searching his baggy clothes for the muscles underneath. I still couldn’t believe that I was going to get him—and I hadn’t even had to ply my seductive wiles. He has already offered himself, I exulted. I wanted to fast forward to where we kissed and touched each other in the dark of the Porcu Meu.
“Let’s go!” he commanded, clutching three cups of wine. He fended off the crowds with veteran mastery, guiding us through streets that became gradually more quiet to the most tranquil and isolated bench in the park, halfway between my house and the festivities.
“Ahh… I can’t believe I can finally rest my ass!” He sprawled on the bench and leaned back, gulping down almost half of the first cup of wine. “Can I have that cigarette now?”
“Here is your deserved cigarette…” No matter how much wine he might have had, I was struck by how his summer shyness had vanished, how his ability to interact with me had gone from limited to limitless.
“Much better.” He moaned after the first drag. I was standing in front of him, in doubt about how to act. Something told me that his new imperiousness could only be a sign of his heterosexuality. “Sit!” he commanded: imperious, even pompous, but hot, sexy, mouthwatering, crotch inflating. What did I have to lose?
The chill of the night was more bitter in the park, and the white of the moon looked colder and farther away than it had in the music-wrapped festival square half an hour earlier. Jacopo didn’t say anything for a while, and I accepted the silence as a test of how far we might really go, of how much more of each other we were willing to discover.
“So…” I turned to him, but before I could question his intentions, he slowly moved his head toward mine, five, four, three inches away, his square head obstructing the moon, and I smelt his skin, pungent like early morning summer sex. My heart skipped a beat and my chest tightened. I tasted the red wine and the tobacco on his lips as he pressed them against mine. I trapped his upper lip into mine and dove in for more…but he rapidly withdrew and left me midair, with my mouth parted and my eyes closed.
“I am so sorry…I am not gay…” He stood and started gesticulating, as if preparing to contain the eruption of rage surging within me.
“What the fuck is your problem?” I was so confused that I didn’t really know what was going through my mind; probably a mix of desire and excitement and rage and embarrassment.
“I can explain, wait!” He picked up his cell phone and scrolled through numbers, still flailing one arm.
“Yes! Explain!” No, I was not embarrassed, I was pissed. What was the asshole trying to prove?
“I am not gay, but my brother is…” he stammered.
“Are you insane? Did you cook your brain with the pork? Let me see if I understand what just happened. Just because I am gay and your brother is too, he and I were going to hook up? I have never seen him!”
“Fabrizio, calm down. I have a twin brother. And you do know him. His name is Jacopo. I am Daniele.” He waited for a reaction.
I was struck speechless. I stared at him, hoping he would continue.
“He likes you, from the shop. He spends hours talking about you. He thinks you’re sexy. He asked around to learn your name. But he’s shy. No matter how many times I told him to talk to you, he was afraid to. He is home sick tonight. When I saw you, I recognized you, and I knew you thought I was him…so...do you understand now?”
“You are still an asshole. Maybe less of an asshole than before, but still an asshole…did you have to kiss me?”
“I’m not good with words. But I had to know if you were really attracted to him, and if I had rebuffed you, I would have pushed you away from him, and I would have never forgiven myself.”
The screen of his phone lit the distance between us. I snatched it from him and heard a voice answer, a voice subtly different from the one I had just been speaking with, a voice I heard in my heart.
“Happy Porcu Meu! Your brother just kissed me…and I thought I was kissing you!”
I spend much more time back in the village of my birth now, many kilometers from the Coliseum and the Trevi Fountain and the Vatican, and with my darling Jacopo I have all the meat I want to eat.
YOU’RE A DOG
Edward Moreno
The Big Fella
They say a man’s heart is as big as his fist. I have no reason to dispute that, but in Ben’s case it begs the question. His heart must be the size of a bucket; I accept that.
I met him on the almost-leafy banks of the Yarra, on that almost-green promenade in Melbourne’s liquid heart. There’s something about Melbourne I’ve never liked—something hard. I feel most times like I’ve been bent by the wind, hung out to dry by the drought, leveled by the tough, flat surface of the city. Every leaf on every tree is edged in brown, every footpath a display of dust. It’s not pretty, but it’s home.
I’ve never been one for pretty anyway.
“You’re a dog,” he said—the first thing he said to me. “You’re an ugly motherfucker.”
He came right up to me—his enormous feet practically trod on mine—and his eyes widened. He brought his face close, getting an eyeful, then pulled back to look me up and down, head to toe, and cracked a smile.
“I can’t even stand to look at you,” he said and turned away, looked up the river to Prince’s Bridge, then twisted his torso back toward me and said it again. You’re a dog.
