Where the Boys Are, page 5
Tavo leapt up off the floor and took a quick hit up one nostril, then dipped a fingertip into the powder and rubbed it into his gums. Lian waved his fork and said, “Later,” which Jonathan felt grateful for because it allowed him to say the same thing.
Philip stood at the counter and took a few bites of Moo Shu directly from the container, then asked if anyone wanted a drink. Again Tavo leapt up off the floor and said, “Let’s try that flavored vodka.”
Jonathan watched Philip pull down glasses from the cabinet—aware and amazed at how he had overlooked them earlier in his quest for a glass—and set about mixing a pepper-flavored vodka with cranberry juice and ice for everyone. The finished product was strangely tart and spicy when Jonathan tasted it (and seemed to hover in a clog of phlegm at the back of his throat). Tavo had finished his Mei Fun and had bagged it up and tossed it into a plastic trash bag (at Philip’s insistence; they had seen a mouse in the apartment the previous week). Jonathan bagged up his and Lian’s containers while Tavo danced and showed off his rhythm, telling the guys that there was a special “dog tag” night at a club in the East Village. Jonathan had no idea what a “dog tag” night was, and wasn’t about to ask. The beer and the joint and the cocktail had worked their magic and he was feeling giddy and bloated and he went into the bathroom at the side of the kitchen and took a long piss. At the sink he rinsed his hands and face and wiped them dry on a towel, breathing in as much odor as he could detect, trying to determine if it belonged to Lian or Philip. Jonathan now felt not only happy, but safe and lucky and indestructible. He felt like they would all be friends forever. Back in the kitchen, Philip had fixed Jonathan another drink and when he handed it to Jonathan, he said, “You’ve got great lips.”
The compliment made Jonathan smile—no one had ever said that to him—and before he knew it (and before he could take the drink from Philip) Philip had pressed his mouth against Jonathan’s face, swallowing his lips into a wide, wet and sloppy, tongue-twisting kiss. Jonathan’s reaction was a tension that flared up his spine and branched out across his shoulders, a tension that he could not release.
Philip pulled away and said, “Relax, baby. I bet I’ve got something you want to try.” Jonathan thought Philip was referring to his cock. Or a dildo or a sex toy. And that he could easily dismiss—or accept—whatever sexual game was afoot, though he had no desire to be a “rotten sport” about any of it.
Philip arched his eyebrows, as if he were a game show host about to reveal the correct answer, and disappeared into the second bedroom. When he returned he held up for Jonathan to see a tiny white pill between his thumb and finger and said, “This will make you feel mighty fine.”
Jonathan was all set to ask what it was—or what it would do—when Philip grandly placed the pill on the tip of his own tongue. Philip waved his tongue suggestively back and forth at Jonathan—which made Jonathan smile uneasily. Philip pulled Jonathan back into another big, wide, sloppy kiss and the pill was suddenly in Jonathan’s mouth. By the time Jonathan had realized what had happened and was trying to prevent himself from swallowing it, the pill had dissolved in his mouth.
“What was that?” Jonathan asked nervously.
“Just a little fun,” Philip said. “You probably won’t feel a thing.”
Tavo had danced back into the room and was saying, “Gimme, gimme,” to Philip. Philip performed the same grand ritual with Tavo, placing another pill on the tip of his tongue and pulling Tavo into a deep, mouthy kiss. Jonathan relaxed a bit, watching Tavo accept the drug. Again he thought that if Tavo was doing it, then he could handle whatever effects the drug might have.
“Now you do it,” Philip said to Jonathan, holding up another pill between his fingers. “For Lian.”
How could he resist? Jonathan had been eyeing Lian’s behavior since they had left the office, trying to interpret his body language to see if he had any interest in him. If Jonathan had to make a decision between Tavo and Lian—one or the other—he would be reluctant to give up Tavo, but Lian was closer to being the man of his dreams—tall, handsome, mysterious, full of potential and possibilities. Tavo was really a boy with a man’s muscles. Now there was an opportunity to kiss Lian—when might that ever happen again?—and it would only bring them closer, make Jonathan feel like he was part of a special, private boys’ club.
Philip grandly put the pill on the end of Jonathan’s tongue. Lian clasped his hand at the back of Jonathan’s neck. Jonathan leaned his head up and stood on his tiptoes as Lian swooped in to kiss him. Jonathan let his mouth remain open as long as Lian wanted to be there. Lian’s hand tightened around the back of Jonathan’s neck and sent the blood rushing dizzily around Jonathan’s body. Then Lian’s free hand cupped Jonathan’s back and he slid it down and underneath his belt and underwear, cupping the flesh of Jonathan’s buttock. Jonathan could not prevent his erection and Lian’s hand dug further down his pants, curving further and further till his fingers reached the warm sack of Jonathan’s balls. Jonathan felt himself falling, felt Lian catching him, or holding him up, or lifting him up in the air. He was both thrilled and alarmed by his fear and desire.
Everything seemed to decompose from that moment—disconnect and deconstruct and disengage. He was aware of Lian’s aggressiveness continuing as they continued to kiss—his other hand struggling to touch the flesh of Jonathan’s chest, then moving down to cup his straining crotch. Lian unzipped Jonathan’s fly and reached inside, stroking his cock and kneading his balls from this angle, then fell to his knees and took Jonathan’s cock into his throat.
Jonathan’s tension evaporated—he felt a balloon of pleasure behind his eyes—the navy blue sofa turning shades lighter, the dolphin on the wall leaping higher, the wood of the kitchen cabinets bleaching into the white wall. Tavo moved in and began kissing Jonathan—yes, kissing him, Jonathan—who in the office would ever believe this moment?—Tavo and Lian—while Lian was now forcefully sliding his lips and fingers across Jonathan’s cock. Jonathan’s orgasm came in a swift oh-my-gosh moment—he found a Herculean strength to push Lian slightly away as he shot over his shoulder and Tavo turned his head and watched the spectacle with a light laugh.
“Told you he’d be a quick one,” Lian said to Tavo, as if there had been a bet in place between the two about how quickly Jonathan would come. Jonathan could not remember his reaction; it seemed to fall away, or fall into Philip’s mouth. Now it was Philip who was moving in front of him, groping him. Then they were on the couch, then elsewhere, laughing on the floor, removing their socks—they felt as heavy as dictionaries or encyclopedias or almanacs or Bibles or phone books. Heavy. Burdens. They made Jonathan feel better when they were off.
Then they were in another place—against the wall—then together, on a bed. All of them. All four of them. On the bed. In bed. Together.
Jonathan returned to consciousness after a dream about trying to swim out of a whirlpool, keeping his head above water. The lights in the bedroom were on and he blinked them into awareness as if his eyes had been full of water. The music was still playing on the stereo in the other room, the heavy beat now traveling through the floorboards and up the wooden frame of the bed. Philip was asleep beside him, his black pebbly chin stretched out against the mattress as if he were a dog searching for air. Jonathan closed his eyes, felt himself rising off the bed as if pulled by a magician’s showy gesture, and he fluttered his eyes open again. The orbiting and swirling continued and Jonathan tried to shake away the nausea from his stomach. His throat was dry. His lips were gummy. He sat up and placed a foot against the floor, wrapped his hands around his forehead to stop the spinning. Upright, he propped himself against a closet door, the music now louder and softer, the spinning continuing like he was inside a blender. He felt the chill of the floor at the heel of his foot and the cold traveled up his bare body and settled into his shoulders. Philip was cocooned in a sheet. Jonathan reached across the bed and lifted the olive green T-shirt off the blanket where it was curled up like an odd-colored cat and put it on.
As he passed the door of Lian’s bedroom, he saw Tavo sleeping facedown on the mattress, his hairy ass perched in the air as if he was awaiting penetration. Lian was curled on his side in a fetal position with a pillow between his legs. Jonathan made his way to the bathroom and turned on the faucets and waited for the warm water to wash into the sink. He rinsed and dried his face, ran his mouth beneath the faucet and a cooler flow of water. He did not leave the bathroom. The spinning continued. He tried to steady himself by looking at a clock on the bathroom wall and calculating if he might still have a chance to catch a train back to Long Island. He could sleep on the commute. He’d feel better elsewhere. At home. Not here.
He found his clothes on the floor in front of the navy sofa. He slipped on his pants and dress shirt, tucked his socks in his pockets and slowly laced up his shoes, as if he were already an old man with arthritis. His head continued its pounding and he tried not to exert himself, hoping to keep the pain manageable.
He left the apartment, moving slowly and gently closing the door behind him. He waited a few minutes for the elevator with his hand pressed against the wall and his head lowered, and then he gave up, descending five flights of stairs that seemed more like fifty. It was dark outside but the air was cool and fresh.
An ambulance picked him up an hour later. He was lying on the pavement outside a restaurant on Eighth Avenue. A policeman had arrived, believing Jonathan was dead. “I took something,” Jonathan whispered as he was lifted onto a stretcher.
The next morning he found himself in the hallway of a hospital on the East Side with an IV hooked to his arm. He slept until a policeman arrived to question him about what drugs he had taken and where he had gotten them. Jonathan mentioned nothing about Philip or Tavo or Lian, only that he had gone to a party at an apartment and had taken a pill. He told the officer that he could not remember where the apartment was located. His wallet and watch were missing and he reported them stolen. He felt pains in his stomach, his head, and oddly, in the heel of his left foot.
A few hours later, when his body fluids were stable, Jonathan was released because of overcrowding in the emergency room. He walked across town to his office building and took the elevator to his floor. He nodded at Nina as he passed her desk and went directly down the hall to the men’s restroom. He stood in front of the mirror and rinsed his face and patted down his hair. He took some warm water and gargled and used a fingertip as a toothbrush and scraped some of the grime from his teeth.
As he was tucking his shirt into his pants—and noticing the olive green T-shirt he was wearing underneath—Tavo walked into the men’s room. He looked showered and clean and refreshed. He had even shaved. “Fun night,” he said to Jonathan. “Enjoy yourself?”
“Sure did,” Jonathan answered. “Let’s do it again soon.”
TINY GOLDEN KERNEL
Lee Houck
When I was little, my mother told me that inside everyone, at the absolute center of us, there is a tiny golden kernel, our essence distilled down to something pure, elemental, something very close to a soul. She told me that radiating from this small kernel are thousands of vaporous strings, impossibly thin, like the rippling pink licks that float inside a plasma globe. And those strings hold us all intact like a magic anchor; tied with miniscule square knots to our organs, our bones, our skin, they pull our bodies back toward that absolute center, toward that precious kernel, like our own unique gravity.
I used to stand in the middle of my bedroom, arms splayed out, looking at my naked body in the mirror, wearing the cheap X-ray glasses I’d mail-ordered out of the back of a comic book, trying to see through my flesh, trying to locate that shining golden center. I would squeeze my eyes closed for a minute and open them quickly, as if to sneak up on the real me. I would curl into a ball under the sheets, the bedroom dark, the curtains closed and the lamp turned off, expecting the light from that kernel to shine out from my insides, a flickering orange glow, like a faraway candle.
But as I got older, passing involuntarily through the summers as a horny, lanky teenager, somehow those pink strings began to stretch and break. Imagine your body growing larger, inflated, ballooning out—imagine time as physical distance—your edges moving ever further away from the core that holds you together.
It had never occurred to me that I could make money doing what I did. Sleeping with men wasn’t a pastime, it wasn’t a hobby. It was who I was. Or it was the way I figured out who I was. Sex was how I learned to read myself. It was where I learned to disappear into the other side of the known world, sink into that flat place. It allowed me access to my hidden self, that unknown person that comes scratching its way to the surface, unexpectedly. It unlocks a space, a landscape, a perpetual wind.
The first time I got paid for sex, it was an accident. I had picked someone up, or maybe he had picked me up—however that mutual glancing is decided. He was rich (so he said) and happily married (so he also said,) and he poised his pen over his checkbook after I had finished. “One hundred dollars,” he mumbled, as if he were speaking to nobody in particular—and at the time, I didn’t know what kind of money I was worth. I was still breathing hard, my temples moist with sweat. He wrote it out, tearing along the perforated line, a clean, satisfying sound. And I took it, foolishly I know now—who takes checks? But he stuck a twenty in my pocket and asked if I’d come back in two weeks. So for almost a year there were one or two appointments a month. One time we fucked on the sofa, and I accidentally knocked a lamp off the end table. I didn’t stop—he loved it—and he said he’d blame it on the maid.
I got better at it. People traded my number around.
Men called with hushed voices, confused when one of my parents answered the phone, and I became wary and anxious—afraid of being caught, I suppose—each time it rang. There were so many hang-ups that they considered removing the line entirely. But more than anything else, more than the phone calls, the wads of cash lying suspiciously around my bedroom, my coming and going at all hours, what really became the central issue—or, I know now, what had always been the central issue—were the growing differences in what we wanted from the world. It was the surfacing of a fundamental alienation that had been there all along—the reality of our lives suddenly made visible.
“Why don’t you want what we want?” my mother actually asked.
My parents were full of disappointments. With me, of course, but with their own lives, too. And my desire for something more meaningful (at least meaningful to me) in this life than fifty-minute church services and potluck dinners with chitchatting strangers, was somehow taken personally.
We tried to “make it easier on everyone.” Their words, not mine. We had gone through the usual steps. First, a promise to be where I said I would be (never mind that they didn’t really want to know where I was, and so I lied to save them from it) and to be home at “a reasonable hour,” though it was unclear what exactly that meant. Second, my own separate, side entrance to the house—that sort of controlled freedom. They were slowly kicking me out, pointing out along the way that “you’re only doing this to yourself.”
They stopped speaking to me unless it was absolutely necessary, preferring instead to communicate through small notes stuck to the kitchen counter, appearing from nowhere, as if left by hotel housekeeping. Even the notes were stilted and shallow, cryptic, as if language was strange to them, as if they simply lacked the words. Your father has gone for a few days. (Gone to where, I thought.) Turn off the pot roast when you wake up. And sometimes, as if it were her punishment: We love you.
All my mother wanted was for me to be happy—whatever that means—and all my father wanted was to think about his queer son as little as possible.
All I ever wanted was someone who would stay.
I bought a train ticket to New York City, and the trip felt like a new beginning—the inauguration of an altered, unaccustomed life. I wondered what the other people on the train were trying to get away from. Because that’s what trains were to me then—escape—and that’s how everything looked to me, speeding across the land. Nameless places, small Virginia and North Carolina towns that exist for what purpose? As we got closer, people got more excited. Even at three and four in the morning, reading lamps were on, people were whispering to each other, quietly laughing.
That memory is very clear to me, those moments locked inside the train with strangers. My head documents those anonymous moments in more detail, in an easily retrievable, up-front kind of way. So many private moments in the company of men who want, among other things, to get off.
When I arrived in New York it was just past dawn, a quiet Sunday morning. I grabbed my bags and climbed up the stairs stained with decades of city muck, emerging. There was a specific quiet, an uncomplicated city sound. And I was alive, nauseous with sleep deprivation, but buzzing with presence, newness. Sometimes, if you’re lucky enough to be up at that hour, that early Sunday sunrise, you get to see everything frozen in a loose opaque haze, like everything is coated in a lustrous numbing powder. The buildings here are huge, leaping out of the ground. Billboards as tall as buildings. Radio towers on top of buildings. Everything wants to rocket-launch itself into the sky. Escape the concrete. Fire off, soar away.
I asked around, found out where people like me hung out. Which bars, which corners, where we could stand without being chased off. There are plenty of places. Of course, I never need to do that now; I’m busy enough with repeats. In fact, the messages I got today—three calls from people who want to get fucked—mean potentially six hundred easy dollars (assuming I can get hard enough to fuck three people in one afternoon).
