Best Gay Erotica 2006, page 18
One time, I went in the kudzu by myself and I took off my shirt and my pants too and put some new pieces of glass in the dirt. Laid down on my back because that wasn’t as dirty as if I laid down on my stomach. I started to think about if he was there too but when I tried my breath stopped at the very edge like somebody punched me in the stomach. I couldn’t get past. The glass poked and the dirt squished a little under me. It could never get warm but my skin got cool enough that I didn’t feel it being cool. I had to think about something so I thought I could tell what colors glass was just by touch, not the sharp or the slick exactly but something going alongside of that. I guess a piece of my mind got hooked in the glass then just like a spirit would and I was looking up into the mottled leaves all layering each other with coolness. As long as they didn’t touch. But I knew up at the top layer the sun was hot on them.
I could feel it all of a sudden like I was in the vines. How they lifted their leaf skin up to the sun and how they wanted it as bad as they wanted shade and they wanted to twine up and they wanted to pull down and all of them wanted to be surface all over to be twined up the highest till they felt like they were drowning. I felt it harder and harder inside my skin how it was to be the vines hard in my throat and shoulders and between my legs just skin-knowledge like water on me to where I forgot I didn’t like the way I was down there. Then something broke and my mind came back at me out of the glass pieces but I had already peed all over the ground and I took some sticks and dug at it till you couldn’t tell. Even if you couldn’t have told anyway. I was crying but I had it figured out, the way I would say, look, you can tell a dog did this, look where you can see the claw marks.
He goes to roll over on top of me and I am rolling under. Where our breath hits together it is salty because the sweat flings off him as we are shoving at each other. Some spit falls out of his mouth to hit my bottom lip. The lizard is the softest thing between us and hard at the same time. Tiny and alive,
hotter than my hand when I caught it from sleeping in the sun but not now. I fight and twist so we go over again and again, knocking our chests and hip bones together and grinding the lizard between our bellies. All over my skin a screaming like the pulse of cicadas. So loud it must always be there in the background to tune in to by surprise. I know and he knows when it is time to start yelling.
It is a mess of dirt and slime on me and sticky in my pants but I know it worked. I look at the poor lizard dead and bent all wrong with some of itself coming out its mouth and there is a deep quiet beating even deeper all the time in my ears. It sounds more like something that is gone than anything else I ever heard. The lizard in the dirt is what I see until he grabs it and crawls out between the vines.
Out there in the sun. An old black snake will smell just like a cucumber. There is shade but no shadows in the middle of the day. Bunch grass tall and wavy, the ticks that climb in it, robin’s plantain, Sweet William. Queen Anne’s lace with a chigger in the middle of every flower.
He says, I ain’t coming here again, and I say, uh-uh, and look at my foot where I am fooling with a clod of dirt but I don’t mean anything.
TOO FAR
Kevin Killian and Thom Wolf
Keeekeeekeeekeeekpittarumbapittarumbakkeeekeekeeek here the bassline keeps popping and drilling into Alan’s feet through the club’s concrete floor, it hurts to keep still, a positive force for evil, he’s thinking, or would be thinking if any room remained in his brain for thought but not while the DJ, a dark dervish ensconced in a booth high above the thrashing crowd, is waving his muscular arms and dropping needles, remixing, sweat pouring off him in waves. The light’s focused on the DJ’s hands, one after another on a row of spinning turntables, a ring on one finger flashes a turquoise glint, Alan can’t see what he’s wearing, just the bare sleek arms and the fingers, nimbler than eyesight, and the spine-pounding repetitive dancebeat keeekeeekeeekeeek, like Bernard Herrmann ripping the shower curtain down on Janet Leigh in Psycho. The boys on the dance floor go wild, mouths twisting in quasisexual pain, eyes rolling back in their heads under beam after beam of white light that plays on their faces for a moment only, then darts elsewhere. It hurts to stand still but Alan doesn’t trust himself to let go, to dance. He lowers his eyelids and feels that Psycho screech rip right through the sturdy soles of his shoes, plowing at Concorde speed through the muscles and veins in his legs right into the base of his spine. And that means danger, don’t it, Alan, base of spine is not a safe place for you.
Can he see you? Magisterial DJ high in his wooden booth, to him you must be a blip down here on the dance floor, one dot in a sea of writhing bodies. Can he see you standing frozen here like a ninny, afraid to dance? I’ve got jet lag, Alan remembers, soothed by this plausible excuse. The balm of the alibi. It had been a long thirty-six hours since alighting at Heathrow and I’m not used to driving on the wrong side of the road and all the new people and their clipped accents and the different market conditions. England is so different from the States and yet it isn’t, he is finding, exactly like the Austin Powers pictures, either. Apparently there are only maybe three or four full-size pools, swimming pools, in all of County Durham. So where’s the glamour? Nor is England like the sweet dusky glen he’s conjured up after years of listening to UK pop music at home on his stereo. Boyband music for the most part crossed with massive doses of Kylie Minogue. Where did they film Nick Cave’s video for “Where the Wild Roses Grow” in which Kylie appears, drenched, in water ten inches deep, looking like a corpse, Nick Cave leaving roses on her face like Ophelia? Probably in Australia and yet that glade, that eerie green darkness, is how he has always pictured England. Here in this club Alan’s supremely unconfident, older and younger at the same time than the rest of the patrons. He’s wearing a shirt, for one thing. Subdued black T-shirt, fitted jeans. Where are the women? He’s straight, for another thing. Well, sort of.
Alan’s thirty-one years old and lives in Greenbelt, Maryland, a suburb of D.C., in a small house he owns on a busy street near downtown, or what passes for downtown nowadays. It’s near a Starbucks, which is the same thing. These guys all look high and it ain’t coffee fueling their acrobatics. It’s something stronger, in fact you can smell it, a thin, high smell like kerosene or the plastic his suits come back wrapped in from the laundry. Ecstasy? Is this what Ecstasy smells like?
At the office he keeps a photo of Kylie in a lurid pink swimsuit on his desk, his ideal girl, he jokes, and the reason his fiancée left him finally after a futile courtship of several years. She still lives in Greenbelt and their paths cross, over and over. Vengeful bitch who’s told everyone at the gym he never slept with her, not that it matters, who’d listen to a demented harpy who’s presently, or so it appears, dating a black dude whose ass is bigger than hers? Since the breakup Alan’s decided to make some changes in his life, get out of the rut all that dating had thrust him into. With his new, chic haircut he looks pretty good to himself in the mirror. Thought of installing a full-length type mirror in his room so he could admire his body more, but then thought it was too gay. As it is, he must sidle up very close to the mirror and look way down, craning backward, to check on his ass’s perfection, in a jockstrap, in gym shorts, rolled down perhaps so he can see the crack in his butt, its very beginnings where the hair trails between his cheeks, he can see his mole, like a tiny brown button of desire. When he does this a hot flash colors his skin, from his brow and temples right down to his groin. He steps away from the mirror with the guilt of one who has seen something forbidden.
That’s why he doesn’t keep any pets, they might spy him at the mirror and think he was pretty weird.
A shirtless man moves in, takes his hand out of his belt. “A drink, mate?” he hears the man bellowing at him. He shakes his head ruefully, no thanks. Doesn’t drink much, afraid of drinking, afraid of blackouts, father a drunk, mother a heavy drinker. The guy moves away, Alan dismisses him, another queer probably. What time is it? At home he’d be running, or down at the local gym. His hobbies include reenacting Civil War battles with former university mates—the good ol’ days. Alan’s a white man of 6 feet 1, 180 lbs, dark brown eyes that look black at night, with broad shoulders and a somewhat heavy neck. He has a mole below his belt line, pretty much right at the small of his back. When he’s worried he presses it, as though for good luck. His hair is thick and black, almost Latin, were the mole on his face he’d look like Enrique Iglesias, and his body is lightly hairy, his pubic hair the color of Coca-Cola. His hands and feet are large as well, so he feels constantly clumsy, but this endears him to people, that he’s not coordinated, that he’s awkward. He likes things neat and tidy, a reaction to the sloppy housekeeping of his tipsy mother, and the chaotic conditions of former roommates.
Same man’s back again, his shirt on this time. “You didn’t say what you wanted,” he yells. “So—here, cheers.” Alan nods, takes the warm glass, smiles politely, as though they were two strangers on a bus queue, then looks up again at the DJ booth. DJ’s pale hand fluttering like an exotic bird across the spinning vinyl. The man’s foot is next to his, planted squarely up against his boot. Same smell slides off Englishman— thin, greasy smell of brain cells all dizzy with Ecstasy. “New to town?”
Swimming pool chiefs have sent him to England to a big convention here in Durham, hands across the water, get it? Meet his Euro counterparts. The guys who get out there and deal and make it happen. You’ve got a half-acre of ground, dig it. New passport—his first—new David Beckham haircut, new luggage even. Convention brochures promise a visit to swimming pools of top UK pop stars. Maybe, he hopes, Kylie’s will be among them. She must live somewhere, England’s a small island, right? So far they haven’t seen shit, just endless meetings and horrid breakfast food and finally a night out. And now a guy a bit older than he is apparently making some kind of pass down among their insteps, nudging his foot, which hurts anyhow with the incessant beat, over which Kylie’s angelic voice keeps chirping, “I’m burning up, I’m burning up….” Flattering if you weren’t straight but he’s straight. No really, despite the accusations flung at him by that bitch Charlotte whom he’d once thought, finally a woman I can trust. But Alan, if you’ve actually fantasized about men, you must really want them, deep down, face the facts, Alan…. Her voice, understanding initially, and him so grateful, so pathetically grateful he could open up, then her voice becoming a slash, a shriek keeekeeekeeekeeekpittarum-bapittarumba. Ever since that terrible night of confidences, the night of their breakup, he’s only seen her in traffic. Let it stay that way. Over the years, he’s rebuffed a few passes made at him by men encountered during business trips, on planes, or back in his college days. He keeps these memories in a special place in his mind and trots them out when things get dull. His boss always sends Alan to visit with the gay customers, as a kind of bait, because he has the kind of body some men really dig, no sense being modest about it, but Alan acts oblivious, just treats the gay guys like he would every other customer. Polite, professional. Let’s dig this hole! He has one memory of waking up in a hotel room somewhere in the West, a room not his own, his clothes torn, his body a bit bruised, his balls aching with an indefinable pain, and the bedclothes showing unmistakable signs of—what?—of something having happened to him. So maybe he did have sex, he thinks, but he doesn’t know with whom or how….
“Man up in the booth is having a party after at his place,” announces the foot guy, cupping Alan’s ear. “Come to it, okay? It’s quite nearby, we’ll drive you. I’m Fitz,” he continues, holding out a beefy hand. Alan looks him in the face and he’s overtaken by a weird déjà vu, for the man beside him, once studied up close, bears a strange resemblance to a singer from a long-gone pop band he’d followed in high school. All right, now a lot older, and chunky all around, red in the face, but still recognizable.
“I’m Alan,” he says, then goes for it. “Are you Fitz from Making Waves?”
“Oh Christ,” says Fitz, his face a big embarrassed grin. “They still remember!” He introduces Alan to his girlfriend, Phoebe, a tall, willowy, bored blonde. “But you’re an American, how would you know of Making Waves?”
“Are you boys coming along?” intones Phoebe, her hand dangling a charm bracelet of car keys. “Or are we off on a stroll down memory lane to Top of the Pops?”
“Want to come up?” Fitz asks. “You see, our DJ, our host—he’s Chris, also from Making Waves. He was the cute one.”
Alan is amazed. First free night in the UK and he’s met a has-been popstar! “Can we stop back at my hotel for just a minute?” he begs. Phoebe shrugs, her eyes rolling. She’s a stone fox, even a blind man could see that. Alan feels weak, all his expectations jostled and dumped topsy-turvy. “Hey Fitz, want a laugh? I thought you were a gay guy.”
“He’s not far from it, if you ask me,” Phoebe says. “And if you were to ask his wife she’d tell you the same.”
“Women,” Fitz sighs. “Can’t live with ’em, or maybe not with just one of them.” Out in the high street, the air so chill around their mouths, Phoebe and Fitz between them try to explain to their new American pal the strange vagaries of DJ Chris. “It’s taken Chris a long time to distance himself from Making Waves,” Phoebe says, generously. “He’s not a boy anymore, he’s a man.” “Spent years in the gym, he did, always looking for what he calls solid definition.” “And credibility.” So, Alan gathered, Chris’s membership in Making Waves was a subject not to be alluded to. Fitz laughs and downs a tequila. “His credibility as a DJ will crumble into shit if people make the connection between DJ Chris and his cheesy pop past.”
“Everyone knows, of course,” yawns Phoebe. “He just acts as though, oh well, being a teen idol happened to somebody else.”
“You must come to Chris’s house,” Fitz begs, “It’s my birthday.”
“Will Kylie Minogue be there?”
Fitz and Phoebe look at each other briefly, a European kind of look. “She’s sure to bob up,” Phoebe allows. “Durham is her home away from home and Fitz is one of her dearest amigos, aren’t you, Fitz?” Alan feels his face swelling up into the shape of a plastic pumpkin, he’s so excited and impressed. But he has to keep his cool.
Though confused and virginal, Alan has huge sex appetites. A compulsive masturbator, he likes to do it while driving, finds a special thrill in going by toll-takers during rush hour commute with one hand on his dick. Almost got caught several times. Has a special G-spot excitement area right under his balls, the narrow channel between balls and asshole, the perineum, which he keeps shaved, lotioned, always smooth. He’d keep a dildo or vibrator or butt plug at home, hidden in a closet or somewhere, but he’s afraid his house might burn down while he’s at work and some fireman or other rescue worker would find sex devices while he’s absent. (No porn for the same reason.) So he’s forced to resort to not-so-obvious household objects like cucumbers, et cetera. At the gym he’s dangerously attracted, not to any man, but to their body parts, their funky clothes. A few months ago he lifted a pair of boxer shorts instilled with a particular fragrance, sweat, piss, the whole drill. Bizarre.
He’s decided he has the Christian Bale, American Psycho look. Now he wants the personality to go with it.
“You’ll love the architecture, at any rate,” Phoebe says in the car on the way to Alan’s hotel. “It’s a Victorian building, once a police station, now converted to residential flats. When Chris bought the place it was nothing more than an empty shell, with cells. It took nearly a year of work before he could move in.”
“Don’t worry, Alan,” Fitz snorts. “Chris took the cells out.”
“And regretted that later,” adds Phoebe. “Now tell me again why we’re having to stop at the hotel?”
“So I can get changed,” Alan says. “Won’t take me a minute. And also I have some photos and I hope Fitz can sign them.”
“You came here to England hoping to meet the pop stars?” Phoebe marvels, pulling in sharply under the hotel’s beige marquee.
“I know,” Alan says, hopping out. “How gay.”
Up in the booth, enjoying the lordly height and the sweep of the floor, I just nod at Fitz, as if to say, He’ll do. Pathetic that Fitz thinks he knows the kind of guy I like. Comical seeing this straight man cruise a club for tight asses, he’s practically incapable of actually seeing a boy’s ass. And all because in a moment of insanity I agreed to let him have his birthday bash at my place, seeing that Fitz’s wife doesn’t understand his need to scarf down cocaine, and his kids don’t like him screwing other women, et cetera. You figure it out, I gave up long ago.
“You haven’t told him about me,” I caution.
“He knows nothing, nothing,” Fitz says.
Fitz and I met long ago, in the 1980s, when we each answered an ad in the Sunday paper, “Make Top Money Now, Become a Pop Star,” and attended auditions, mine in Hammersmith, his up in Glasgow. Behind the velvet curtain lurked pop impresario Simon Seymour, a devil in a polyester suit. Out of hundreds of applicants, he picked me, and then Fitz. We didn’t have to be able to sing or play any instruments, just had to, I don’t know, “be.” Whatever was in Simon Seymour’s mind, which at that flicker of time was—“A new ABBA would really clean up.” “And we’ll call them Making Waves.” I didn’t actually meet Fitz until Making Waves shot its first video (“Sunshine Girl”) in Aruba.
Two boys, two girls. The girls did most of the singing. I was the cute one, the one all the fans were supposed to fancy. Skinny and inoffensive. On the surface, anyway. My hair, naturally very dark and thick.
I can’t even say the name of the band now without freezing up. I’ve changed my name, colored my hair, bleaching it blond for the last two years. I look nothing like the wide-eyed fuck-puppy who used to dance around a stage, miming the words to terrible pop songs. A year after our debut we were dropped by the record company. A handful of minor hits, one flop album, and that was it. We were making waves no more, Simon Seymour told us flatly in his voice like an ice cube. Sometimes I’ll see a program on TV that asks, “Where Have the ’80s Stars Gone?” and sometimes they mention Making Waves. Fitz appears on those broadcasts, but I’ve instructed him to tell them, “Chris? Went AWOL long ago, man. Haven’t seen him since 1989.”
