Boy Crazy, page 19
Warden looked over but saw no one. “Where?”
“There,” he said. “My motorcycle is called Paolo.” He looked slyly at Warden. “If you are free, Paolo and I will take you for a ride.”
Warden liked his humor and his presumptuousness. He felt drawn to the boy’s dusky presence. “All right,” he said. The soft night air and the beer had dulled his thinking, and he agreed without considering where this might be heading.
Valentino slipped on his jacket as they crossed the darkened street. They passed a fence topped by dangerous-looking spikes constraining a garden. Valentino took a penknife from his pocket, reached through, and freed a blossom.
“What’s the rose for?” Warden asked.
Valentino looked at the blood-red flower as though he’d just discovered it in his hands. “I think it is for you,” he said, handing it to Warden.
Warden took the rose and considered it for a moment.
“You have a problem?” Valentino asked.
“No,” Warden said, inserting it through a buttonhole in his vest, over his heart. “It’s just that in my country boys don’t give other boys flowers,” he said.
“This is not your country. It is mine.” Valentino stood over the motorbike and gunned the starter with his foot. It roared and shook with life. “Climb on!” he yelled.
Warden slid a leg over the seat and sat unsteadily behind. Valentino turned to give him a sarcastic stare.
“If you sit this way you will fall off. You must put your arms around me. Are you afraid?”
“I’m not afraid.”
He gripped Valentino’s torso, feeling the boy’s flanged ribs beneath his jacket. The bike rolled onto the pavement, picking up speed. Warm wind lifted his hair as they sped through the city, passing under stone archways and along winding streets. The façades of ancient granite buildings flew by until they seemed to have left the twenty-first century behind, vanishing into the cool face of antiquity.
Warden held on tightly, leaning in with the curves. Smooth leather grazed his cheek as they wove in and out of traffic. The bike veered onto a narrow roadway following a shadowy canal.
“There is the naviglio,” Valentino shouted over the noise of the engine.
The bike glided to a halt and they dismounted.
“I will take you to my favorite bar,” Valentino said, leading them along a dark cobbled street pursued by the echo of their footsteps.
The water rippled to the right, reflecting the pale streetlamps that lined its edges. They came to a building with a flashing sign—SCIMMIA JAZZ—that lit up the block.
“What’s it say?” Warden asked, looking up.
“Shee-me-yah,” Valentino pronounced. “It means the animal that lives in the trees and likes bananas. How do you call it?”
“A monkey?”
“That’s it—Jazz Monkey.”
The bar bristled with music as they entered. A saxophone made clipped squawking sounds like coins tossed across a tabletop. A singer poised in a pin-spot of light broke into melody as though she’d been waiting for them.
“I will buy the beer,” Valentino said, taking out his wallet as a waitress came up balancing a tray.
Valentino held up his fingers in a V-formation and she pushed two glasses across the water-beaded surface of the table. He fanned a collection of bills at her, allowing her to pull several from between his fingers. She said something in rapid Italian. Valentino turned to Warden.
“She says you are a very handsome American boy.”
“Grazie,” Warden said. He removed the rose. “May I?” he asked Valentino.
“Of course.”
He laid it across her tray.
“Per me? Grazie,” she said, laughing as she went on to the next table.
Valentino relaxed beside Warden, their bodies gently nudging one another. Whatever was happening between them felt slow and easy.
“I did not think you would come with me,” Valentino said. “Most American boys do not talk to the Italians.”
“I’m not American—I’m Canadian.”
Valentino shrugged. “Is it not the same thing?”
“Not to a Canadian.”
“You are quiet and more polite.”
Warden laughed, thinking of his well-mannered and order-loving compatriots back home. How happily they queued up for anything, how politely they behaved even when they went on strike or protested the government.
“But you have the same country,” Valentino persisted. “The American president is your president, no?”
Warden shook his head and laughed again. “We share the same continent, but we’re a separate nation with our own government. We definitely don’t want theirs!”
Valentino regarded him curiously. “What is it like to be a Canadian?”
Warden had to think about it. “It’s very clean back home,” he said. “Canadians believe in fairness and respect for the individual, and protecting the environment, and we’re…” But he couldn’t think what they were exactly, unable to define his fellow citizens or the place he came from. “It’s a big country, so it’s a lot of things,” he said with a shrug. “What’s it like to be Italian?”
“The best—of course!” Valentino said, laughing. “Italians have passion and we love beauty and our country. But you are a lucky country, I think. It was never a big war in Canada.”
Warden recalled the train station he’d emerged from on his first afternoon in the city, a long cryptlike monument fronted by prancing stone horses, erected to the glory of Mussolini and his Fascisti.
“No,” he agreed. “Not a big war.”
The music flowed, shifting moods with the crowd. Each time the singer appeared her costume changed, becoming more and more extravagant. It was well past the oasis of midnight when the band stopped playing, disregarding the stamping and cheering of the patrons hoping to extend the night for just one more number that might possibly stretch on to eternity.
Outside, it had cooled slightly from the day’s oppressive heat. The evening was deflating like a balloon, in small degrees. They mounted a footbridge over the naviglio and stopped midway. The moon, exactly half light and half shade, reflected soggily on the water, rippling with the slight breeze that had arisen.
They leaned on the railing, staring out over the water. The silence was comfortable. Occasionally their eyes met.
“It’s nice here,” Warden said, his gaze following the river winding through the city.
“Yes, I thought you will like this place.”
Streetlamps traced an ephemeral path along the canal. Warden pondered Valentino’s face framed by its dark ringlets. They watched one another in silence. Valentino reached out and touched Warden’s cheek. A smile flickered, faded. His face moved closer. Breath held, lips open slightly. Warden shivered as their lips touched—moist, warm—then parted.
He stood there, unmoving, as though becoming aware of certain things—a taste of salt in his mouth, the smell of flowers in the air, the infinitesimal distance between stars. Things that had been there all along and which he’d never noticed before. It was like looking over the wall into an unknown country.
He’d never been kissed by another man. In the world he’d inhabited until that moment it would have been impassable, like Gulliver’s distance. Taboo. But now there was a boy in a black leather jacket wearing a white T-shirt with curls fawning around his neck…
Valentino’s lips pressed forward again, retracing their eager route. Warden felt a sense of trepidation, as though he’d broken some inviolable rule. He pulled back.
Valentino’s face wore a look of bemused intoxication. “I think this is another thing the boys in your country do not do with each other,” he said.
All at once, the feeling of trepidation vanished. “No—none that I know,” Warden said.
“I had to kiss you—you were so beautiful.” Then, almost apologetically, “I do not kiss other boys very often.”
“You could’ve fooled me,” Warden said.
Valentino grinned impetuously. “You have a problem?”
“No,” Warden shook his head. “Not anymore, I guess.”
They laughed at the same time. Warden felt Valentino’s hand steal into his own, their fingers intertwining.
THE PASTA CLOSET
Davem Verne
When I was growing up, all I wanted from Gino was a moment: to sit across from him with a cloth between my legs, jerk off in unison to his stroke, wipe off the winged seed that had flown from my cock. I imagined Gino’s legs folded in his bed, shorts crumpled at his feet, greased cock pumping hot Italian cum onto his sheets. After a few minutes, when my courage stirred, I would take the long trip to his crotch, stuttering all the way, and with my hand confirm the rush of masculine desires anchoring the maleness beneath his waist. He’d clamp his thighs together, just as afraid as I was to stroke another straight guy.
In my fantasy, my bare knuckles pummeled Gino’s balls softly, informing him that I was one of the safer straights in the neighborhood, the kind you could walk away from in half an hour, back to your superficial macho life without ever hearing a word about forbidden lovemaking. That was the duration of a good hand job between straight friends: a half hour, followed by cooperative silence. I wanted to tell Gino this, to hunker down beside him, grasp and jerk his rock-hard cock, and take his breeder load into my palm. Why Gino? Because I was certain he was thinking the same.
Gino was a firecracker Italian jock, well mannered but with a short fuse. He was the stud of Hanover Street in the North End of Boston where we grew up. Handsome and hotheaded, he was always at war with his father about the family pasta business. When father and son got into a verbal match, massive veins would pop out on Gino’s neck and his biceps would flex, alarming his father.
It was his parents’ fault, really; monster thighs and massive arms had been filled to magnificence by an aggressive diet of pasta and meatballs, and a body solid from hours in the gym and on the mats. A family friend, I desired Gino because he had an iron man’s restraint, a stoic manner befitting a modern warrior, which at any moment could drill inside you and find your fear. Like other Italian American youths, he had a genius for bravado and scared the lesser stallions in the neighborhood into submission, myself included. But that didn’t prevent me from approaching him in my dreams.
Everything about Gino became mythic as I fell in love with him: his male thoughts, his straight ways, his hairy chest, his prodigious ass. The business of being Gino was obscured as the romance of my feelings for him hardened into the clay of longing. I crafted an immortal cast of him: ill-tempered, strongly built, well hung. No manner of humiliation from his heterosexual hands could provoke me into removing him from the lofty tower where I’d placed him, on a par in my fantasies with the likes of Lou Ferrigno and the inimitable Arnold, enduring.
Gino remained my obsession past adolescence and into early adulthood, when my own homoerotic feelings finally took root. I felt the rush of craving at the doorway to our neighborhood gym, where Italian men abounded, lining the benches and walls like living statuary in a Roman garden. Rocco, Cristofano, Fabbrino, Vilfrido, pumping iron, curling cool steel, and flexing. They were militant in their manliness, lifting to exhaustion, panting. I imagined them straining through clenched teeth as they banged girlfriends behind the bathroom door, staring past an easy fuck into the mirror to admire their own hammered beauty. Gino and his friends were contemporary gladiators. As I passed them, I smelled their well-oiled shells and the sweat soaking their shorts. They made no effort to hide their packages, male cannoli aroused and lined up before me, sensing a cocksucker in their midst.
I crossed the wrestling mat toward my childhood friend. A Sicilian iron man was spotting Gino, hovering over him enviously. Gino’s legs were open as he bench-pressed. His manhood dipped out of his nylon shorts, slightly tanned and bulging. A hairy ball urged his cock forward, gasping for room. I was there to ask Gino between sets when was he ever coming over to enjoy my mother’s cooking, like in the old days when we shared an Italian bench in an all-Irish school. But the adolescent ploy of good food no longer worked. Gino was too busy. He was training all day with his wrestling coach, pitting his strength against a Sicilian bodybuilder in black spandex. He had no time to be my god.
I watched him complete a difficult set, my eyes drawn to his dick atop hairy nuts. He reeked of young manhood, dangerous and pulsing. I grieved, sensing someone else, definitely a girl, had already claimed his meat. When I left, he was squatting in front of the mirror, a thirty-pound weight on his right shoulder. His shorts stretched across his buttocks. It scooped up his meatballs and sausage-cock, keeping them safe between his legs. His crotch mocked me with its straight hunger. I determined never to pursue Gino again.
In those early years, Gino, thought to be the prosperous heir to a pasta kingdom, was also the North End’s wrestling champion. He had reaped a shelf of trophies, accumulated mat burns on his forehead, his nose, his ears, his back. There were other wounds: a broken shoulder, a fractured vertebra, sometimes a swagger he said followed all-night fuckfests with three bosomy blondes.
One day not too long ago, Gino’s father had approached me near tears. He begged me to bring Gino home. In his thirtieth year, Gino’s reckless pride defied his father, and he had abandoned the family business to a thuggish cousin. Generations moaned as Gino went to work for Lucio’s Pizzeria. I had heard rumors that Gino was married but getting a divorce. Ugo, Gino’s father, was afraid that Lucio was making a New World Italian out of his son in a sordid pizzeria. I laughed and agreed to reacquaint myself with my childhood friend. Gino was the only straight man before whom I’d humble myself to gain a peek at his sweaty groin and primo prick. Perhaps this good deed would bring Gino and me together again.
The crowd inside Lucio’s Pizzeria hovered before the sight of a muscular Italian with a beefy neck. Gino was preparing pizza. First, he molded huge pieces of dough into flattened shapes with his meaty fingers. Then he lavished an abundance of lion-sized toppings: spinach, dried tomatoes, mozzarella, portabella mushrooms. The customers, safe on the other side of the counter, gawked at Gino’s solid shoulders and strong arms. And their mouths watered as he crouched—his hind end a brute force!—and cast the adorned pizza into the oven’s fiery mouth.
His boss stood nearby. Lucio was a hulking Italian ten years older than Gino. He used to be a wrestling coach but was now a lady-killer. His teeth gleamed between brawny cheeks. Black hair sprouted above the neck of his apron, hair that matted his chest, probably his back, balls, and ass, too. And though his stout belly was far from athletic, it was sexy and sturdy. That potent blend of muscle and durability was favored in many weekend wrestling matches at the gym and savored in numerous nights with his mistresses. In truth, though, Lucio’s fleshy anatomy was a façade. He had enough of the Old World inside him to be forever amiable.
The crowd barked orders and Lucio barked back, “You’ll eat what I give you! I’m only playing with you; now order and get out of here!”
Lucio’s success, of course, rested in the form of Gino. At two bucks a slice any pizzeria would profit. But who would draw the spectators in, if not the daunting image of gigantic Gino, sweating and puffing and unnerving the crowd with his compelling arms and legs?
In the heat of his workspace, Gino’s thick dick bulged. I recognized its size, familiar from days past at the gym. I tried to look away, to discourage the old temptation, but Gino enthralled me once again with his cum-churned charm. The sight of his straight manhood, of the brutish club he yielded between his thighs, made me want him even more. I fell in love with Gino all over again.
Gino advanced to the counter and stared into my face. He stroked his cheek and grabbed his ear as if wrestling with a muddied memory. His dark eyes scrutinized my fair hair and lean chest. He peeled back the surface of years and found me staring from some unknown place in his earliest consciousness: I was the childhood playmate he couldn’t recall—or couldn’t forget. He dug into years of macho bravado to find me, the infatuated neighborhood friend, buried like an old plaything in his crib.
“Daniello?”
The midday crowd dissipated. Lucio plumped his haunches down on a stool to watch TV. Gino and I shared a table by the window. He possessed the assurance of a man who lived every hour fully satisfied and complete. There were no mazes dividing his soul from his body, as there were inside me. After all these years, Gino remained invincible, victorious, in control of his arena. He clasped his hands together, thunderous and wondrous, and welcomed me.
“Daniello! Did you cheat and ask Ugo where I was?”
“I already knew,” I said, adding nothing of his father’s request.
“How?” he asked suspiciously.
“Gino, the North End is small. I saw you in the window.”
“Okay,” he said. “But if Ugo’s behind this, tell him to eat his own pasta. I’ve moved on to pizza!”
Gino grinned, parting red lips. The breeding bull shined conspicuously behind those lips. He watched me watching him, the consummate male upon whom all my fantasies depended, and this tipped him off about my real desires.
“Gino, why did you leave the pasta factory?” I asked.
“Lucio hired me. I owe everything to Lucio, my whole existence,” Gino began. “I’m a man because of him. Ugo didn’t teach me anything, except when to fight, which for him was always after a meal. But Lucio taught me how to fight, and why and where! Lucio used to be my coach at the gym, remember? He’s been married for twenty years, with three kids, and he’s the happiest guy you could ever meet. I used to go to the gym like an orphan with nowhere else to go, lifting weights all day, all in the name of Lucio. Everything I did was meant to impress him. I never missed training because Lucio was more important than life. And he was more than my wrestling coach. He took me into his home, introduced me to his wife and kids, and let me use his den to study and sometimes to crash at night.”
