Boy Crazy, page 4
Stand on one leg outside the shower stall while I jerk off and don’t touch your dick, that’s final.
Stand outside the shower and wait until I stick my ass out then clean my hole with your tongue.
Suck my cock so you gag, that’s nice.
Eat my come off the linoleum floor.
Hold my cock while I piss.
Clean my toilet.
Wash the dishes with a plug in your ass.
Put the dishes away and then pop the plug out and wash your dirty ass smears off with hot water.
Okay, so the list went on. I imagined Sundelin telling me to crawl across the floor on my hands and knees, remote control in my mouth. Probably, Sundelin Ross, Cute Boy of the Universe, would watch something like The Wire, Omar and Dante making out, Omar killing someone, and I’d squat next to the couch with the remote in my mouth. Sometimes, he’d say something like Lick the lint off the carpet, because he was a neat freak, or Go get the plug. Then Sundelin would tell me to stand in front of the TV blocking his view and facing him while I stuck the plug in my ass and then squatted while clenching my hole like a kid trying to hold in a fart in church.
By the way, I’ve never been to church.
And I’ve never been with a dude before.
Also, I don’t know where I got my ideas.
Video games? Marilyn Manson? Gay porn?
I’ve actually only watched straight porn. That’s what my mom and stepdad had when I still lived at home: porns with dicks and cunts, dicks and tits, dicks and bungholes, just dicks all over, dicks doing anything, dicks, dicks, dicks.
By the time I was twelve I knew I liked dicks. I liked the dudes who had them. I liked chicks too, of course, in a nice way, you know, like friends, but dudes, man, they made me nervous. Dudes made me sweat. With dudes, it was a test. I wanted certain dudes to like me.
I wanted them to like me a whole lot: know what I mean? Thus my fantasy life began, in which, due to video games, Marilyn Manson, and probably violence on television I began to imagine dudes having sex with me, dudes loving me, dudes telling what to do, dudes touching me on the cheek, dudes humiliating me by pissing in my mouth or something.
Oh. My childhood was normal. I wasn’t abused as a child. My childhood was a fairly quiet one on the outside, you know, everything sweet and typical, unless you stared through one of my pupils like a telescope and viewed my fantasy life close up. No, maybe not. I’d feel pretty weird about that. I guess I would, unless Sundelin told me to tell you. Okay, so then I’d do it, I’d spill the beans, bend over, and show you my asscrack.
Right now, I’m eighteen and in college and taking this writing class, and the teacher said we’re supposed to keep a journal, and it isn’t anything we have to share.
Well, I fucking hope not.
What would the damn teacher say? Hey, what if the dude was a flamer? In fact, he looks like that gay writer, Stephen Elliott. Except wait. That guy isn’t gay. At least I don’t think he is, but man his book Happy Baby just about killed me. One time he wrote something like, I’ve eroticized my childhood abuse. But since I wasn’t ever abused I don’t know why I’m so obsessed with it. I should be a case study, especially lately. I’m definitely obsessive-compulsive.
For a while, the most I did was show up at the coffee shop where Sundelin worked. I’d stand at the counter and order black coffee, as in straight up. He had a nice way about him, Sundelin, polite and attentive, and he remembered people’s names too, except mine.
“You again,” he said this last time I stood at the counter like a dork thinking, The guy already knows I’m a dirty-minded virgin. Well, not exactly a virgin. There was one time in a backseat with a trumpet player (me, I had a clarinet mouth, said the band instructor, curl your lips and blow) but the entire incident isn’t worth mentioning.
“What’s the problem?” I said. “Plenty of people come here all the time.”
And then I didn’t look at him at all. I pretended to study the menu although I’d obviously order black coffee straight up.
“Yeah,” Sundelin said. “But not all of them are here every day secretly wishing I’d fuck them.”
“What?” I pretended complete and total ignorance. Obviously I blushed. Obviously I looked over my shoulder in case anyone stood behind me to whom I could say, This guy is nuts.
Sundelin smirked, and really, the guy had a smirk about him that was sexy. “C’mon,” he said. “You’re inexperienced, not stupid.”
I shrugged. And then I said, “Well, right, I’m not stupid.”
“That’s what I said.” Sundelin put a black coffee straight up on the counter in front of him, between us, and then he looked at me. “There you go.”
“Oh, right,” I said. “Thank you.” And then I dug in my backpack for change and Sundelin said, “I’ve got a bright idea,” while I still sort of dug in my backpack and kind of avoided eye contact with him while really wanting to look at him, and damn, I felt the change right there in my fingers but then lost it because damn, Sundelin was so Fucking Damn Beautiful. I grabbed hold of the change and then dropped it on the counter. What a fucking relief. I felt how red I was in the face, how I sweat, how terrified and turned on I was.
Sundelin said, “Skip class.”
Oh, Jesus. I hadn’t tipped him. I felt one of those delirious waves of dizziness come over me and almost grabbed the counter. “What?” I began to dig in my backpack again.
“You’re on your way to class, right?”
“Oh. Uh huh.” Where was the goddamn change? Had he just asked me to skip class?
“Skip class,” Sundelin said again.
Okay. He’d asked me to skip class. I’d heard him. Another delirious wave of dizziness. And then I laughed. “Okay.” Nervous laughter. “I’ll skip class.” I found the change, dropped it into the tip jar and then almost dropped my backpack. “So…you want to hang out?” I grabbed the counter, at least leaned into it. I cupped my hand around my coffee. Damn! Hot!
“I want you to sit at a table by the window all day,” Sundelin said.
“Yeah, okay.” And then I was immediately confused. “So… I’ll sit by a window and what?”
“Christ,” Sundelin said. “I’ve got customers. Can you get out of the way, please?” Sundelin looked over my shoulder at the next person in line. He showed her a radiant smile. “Mrs. Miller. Hey there. Nonfat Peppermint Patty today?”
“Yes,” the woman behind me said, and she sounded pleased, sicklike, you know?
I took my coffee and stepped out of line and went to a table by a window and sat.
Well. My ass started to hurt, even my tailbone, the bones of my ass, my ass bones, they all hurt. Sitting there I had enough time to think about it. My ass hurt. But what I wanted to know was how it would hurt when a guy fucked me in the ass. Right? I’d finished my homework. I’d emailed my writing teacher from my laptop to apologize for missing class and then to ask what the assignment was. I texted my roommate who was also taking Native American Studies with me to see what I’d missed there too. She sent a text back.
Where are you?
Oh. Coffee shop.
Doing what?
Nothing.
Want me to meet you?
No.
Fine then.
Just. See, I’m waiting on a guy, kinda.
Like waiting for the sky to fall?
Whatever.
Uh huh.
Can I borrow your notes?
When will you be home?
After four?
Yeah, can’t wait to hear this.
It got hot by the window by noon: sun shining, no clouds. I felt my bangs sticking to my forehead. I felt sweat in my asscrack. Was that sexy? Anytime I looked across the coffee shop at Sundelin behind the counter he didn’t look at me. I stared out the window and saw a mom spank her kid. I saw a man drop his cell phone. I saw a garbage truck, someone driving a convertible Corvette, top down. I saw two people kiss. I put my head down on the table and sort of fell asleep. At two fifteen I scratched random thoughts on a napkin. Why is it the sun shines when you sit by a window? At two thirty, I remembered Jack. He had the sweetest face possible. Mom’s friends had teased her. You have two sons? Jack hadn’t been that much younger than her but he’d had the face, you know, a sweet face, and one afternoon I’d acted like a twerp at an ice-cream shop; my ice-cream cone had melted faster than I could lick it, and so I’d gotten frustrated about the ice cream, about the heat, about Jack and Mom, and so I’d said, “I hate this ice cream, it’s stupid.”
And then Jack had said, “You’re the one who asked for a large.”
So I’d said, “I didn’t ask for strawberry, Mom got me strawberry,” just because I’d wanted to test boundaries or something, and then Jack had taken me by the arm and pulled me out of the ice-cream shop before shoving me over the hood of the nearest car, in broad daylight, and hitting me on my ass. Smack.
“So,” he said. Sundelin stood at the table.
I blinked my eyes. Yeah, it was him. Maybe I even flinched. “Huh?” I said. Then, “Hi,” I said. My computer was still on, file open. I closed the lid on the laptop.
Sundelin smiled. “Let’s go,” he said.
“Where?” I’d already stood and turned off the laptop and put it into my bag and then gathered everything else and put my phone in my pocket even though it was vibrating, probably my roommate. I scooped up my empty coffee cup and felt how full my bladder was.
Sundelin put his hand on my cheek. Under his nails he smelled like coffee. “Tell me your name,” he said.
I told him. He liked it. I followed him to the bathroom. At the urinal, I felt myself smile. My piss was bright yellow before it disappeared down the bowl.
“I need a roommate,” Sundelin said.
“Oh, really?”
“You’ll do the dishes,” he said.
“Oh, right.” And then I stood at the urinal, unsure what to do with my dick.
AUGUST
Michael Rowe
One August evening just before sunset when I was twelve and he was fifteen, I came upon Angus Treleaven making love to a girl in the dunes. Or fucking a girl on the dunes. Fucking sounded manlier, more like Angus. It wasn’t a word I used then, and my twelve-year-old’s mind reached for making love, a phrase I’d heard my mother use to describe how she and my father made me and my sister. It sounded reverent, which is how I felt, watching. Fucking sounded dirty, and what I was seeing from my hiding place on the bluff above the dunes wasn’t dirty, it was a miracle.
I didn’t know who the girl was, nor did I care. What I cared about was the way Angus looked as he lay on top of her, between her legs, holding her extended wrists in his chapped hands as he kissed her neck and her breasts, the way his white Adidas shorts with the red stripes gathered at his thighs. The way I could see the striated muscular indentations on each mound of his pale ass as he pumped, flexing with every thrust. The way the girl cried out in tandem with every gyration of his hips, every flex. Her every moan pierced my brain. Her slender tanned legs were wrapped around his bucking hips, drawing him in, urging him to push harder, deeper. I couldn’t see his face, but I’d seen him before, in town, and I recognized him from the shape of his head and the thick shock of red hair.
Angus was a fisherman’s son, the eldest of the family who ran the fish and chips shop on Selkirk Street, near the wharf in Prothro, where my grandmother had her summer house. He had the hard muscles of a townie boy who played hockey in the winter and football in the fall, and fished with his father and uncles in the waters off Mahone Bay.
He must have sensed me watching, because he looked up and turned his head toward where I was hiding. Our eyes met. I froze. He looked mildly surprised, but nonplused, like a lion in a nature film that allows the cinematographer to watch him eat. He smiled and winked. His teeth were very white. His eyes were the color of the sea. Then he turned his head back to the girl. I watched for a few more minutes, then crept away. When I got to the beach road, I ran as fast as I could back to my grandmother’s house.
Over the next few summers of watching him, always from a distance and never under the same circumstances, I would come to know that his face and arms were the only part of him that ever seemed to tan. The summer I was fourteen, I saw Angus with his shirt off behind the shop unloading crates of red Prince Edward Island potatoes that his mother would turn into the most legendary chips on the north shore. Although his neck was burnished, he wore the white ghost of T-shirt that day, and I would wonder why anyone so beautiful would ever cover up any part of his body when the summer sun was so hot. But even then I knew that my desire for him to be shirtless had nothing to do with the heat of the sun.
Every August, my parents brought my sister Eliza and me from our house in the city to stay at Gran’s in Nova Scotia. The house, a rambling, weathered-white clapboard Cape Cod called Flyte Point, dated from the nineteenth century and had belonged to my great-grandparents. After my parents’ divorce when I was eleven, my mother brought us alone. Her family had summered there for the entirety of every member’s living memory. The house was set on a bluff overlooking Shaw Inlet and the green-gray waters of Mahone Bay. The windows and balconies commanded a magnificent view of the sloped, smoke-colored islands in the distance, the closer ones tinted dark green by pine and the shadows cast by ancient rock, punctuated here and there with imperial purple carpets of wild lupine.
After a long day of swimming and sunning at Queensland Beach, Mum, Eliza, and I would load our beach paraphernalia into the back of her Saab and drive back to Prothro along the Lighthouse Route with the windows rolled down. When I was a child, I would often fall asleep in the backseat. In later years, when my father was absent, my mother sat behind the wheel of the car, and Eliza sat in her vacated consort’s seat. My legs grew long enough to warrant Eliza putting her seat forward, and I enjoyed the late-afternoon ride back to town almost as much as the day at the beach. I would lean my head back on the crook of my arm and close my eyes and let the rushing wind cool the sunburn on my face as the wheels of the car kicked up dust and gravel along the ocean road that led back to Prothro.
I was sixteen in the summer of 1978. Eliza was nineteen and about to enter her second year at Brown. To her own mind, she’d become impossibly sophisticated over the course of her freshman year. If it wasn’t for the fact that the trip to Nova Scotia and the comforts of Flyte were a welcome—and free—relief from her summer job as a waitress back in the city, she might have given this holiday with Mum and me a wide berth. She had begun to find my presence tiresome, not that she and I had ever been very close.
“I don’t know why I have to work at all this summer,” Eliza had complained to my mother in June after our father had issued his edict that Eliza would have to work a summer job and save her money, even if he was paying her tuition. “Janet and Tommy are going to Europe,” Eliza added, invoking the names of our cousins on my mother’s side. It was a cruel, calculated move on her part. My mother had been jealous of her sister Evangeline for most of their life. Aunt Vangie had always been the more conventionally pretty of the two sisters, and there was reason to believe that she’d also been my grandfather’s favorite. The aggravating fact that Aunt Vangie had married someone richer than our father was compounded by the fact that she was still married to him.
A shadow of pain passed swiftly over our mother’s face, and I hated Eliza for it.
My sister leaned back histrionically on the sofa in the living room and stretched her long legs. Already in June they were tanned, and the nails were painted pale pink. Eliza rubbed her eyes like a spoiled child and twirled her thick blonde hair between her fingers.
It didn’t seem odd to Eliza that I was also expected to have a summer job, even though I’d spent three years away from home at boarding school, except for holidays. It seemed to me that if anyone had the right to complain about working all summer, it was me. And I liked working.
“I don’t know why I can’t just spend the whole summer at Gran’s and see you and Jem in August,” Eliza said, pouting. “I’m sure Gran could use my help around the house. And it would give me a chance to work on my poetry.” Eliza had discovered the works of Anne Sexton in the past year at Brown, and had decided that she would become a great poet. I’d grown accustomed to the metallic clack of her pale blue Selectric as she sat in her bedroom in the early afternoons, after she woke up. Occasionally a heavy sigh, meant to be heard, issued from behind the half-closed door of her bedroom. After an hour’s work, she would step outside of her ruffled inner sanctum and read her poems aloud to my mother and me. The poems were all about boys she knew, and what she called the pain of being a woman. Even at sixteen, I knew they were dreadful, and made the mistake, once, of telling her so. Her fury had been quick and annihilating.
My mother sighed. “You can write here just as well as at Gran’s, Eliza. You know what your father said about you working. If you had taken time to look a little harder, you wouldn’t still be waitressing this summer. Gran doesn’t need any help, as you well know. She never has. She’ll be running that house when the rest of us are in our graves.”
“Poetry,” I said, leaning forward, muffling my laughter in a pillow from the sofa that Eliza had flung to the floor. “Eliza, you don’t want to go to Flyte to write poetry, you want to go there to lie in the sun and pick up guys. You’re not a writer. Your poems suck.”
“Jem!” my mother snapped.
“Shut up, you little piece of shit,” Eliza said reflexively. She barely glanced at me when she said it, and it made me laugh harder.
“Eliza, please. I will not have that language in this house.”
“He is a little piece of shit, Mother. He started it. He’s making fun of my poetry. I don’t know why you coddle him.”
“Eliza,” my mother repeated, and this time there was an edge. “This isn’t about your brother, or your poetry, it’s about the fact the you are behaving like a spoiled child. You’re nineteen years old, and it’s unbecoming. Your father is happy to pay your tuition, as am I, but your side of the bargain is that you work. Your brother works, too. Someday you can marry someone rich who can keep you in the style to which you would like to become accustomed. Until then, you can either come to Prothro in August with the family or you can remain here in the city throughout the month of August. I’m sure the restaurant could use the help.”
