Where the Boys Are, page 6
And then there’s Aiden. I don’t even know what he does when I’m not around: job, hobbies, TV watching—all the seemingly banal details that make up a life. My friend Jaron says I’m in love. I believe that I could be—in the way that Jaron means it. The way love can be a temporary insanity, the kind of madness that sounds like your only defense in a courtroom. “I’m sorry your honor, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.”
Jaron says I’m stuck, frozen with ten thousand options in front of me, and therefore choosing none. I believe him. Or I want to believe him. But am I capable of that? Capable of wanting, finding and successfully sustaining a love of that warm and fuzzy universal magnitude? It’s an interesting word to use: capable. As if it were a dexterity that could be learned, practiced and executed, like a sport or a skill.
Aiden does cause strange sensations, things that I haven’t felt before. Stirring things deep in my stomach, a whirring of distant noises in my head. A room full of faces, whispering rumors that may or may not be true. The pressing of personalities against glass.
Can you pinpoint when this sort of thing happens? Can you pry through the layers of skin and blood and isolate that precious golden kernel, protect it, save it, let it glow brilliantly inside you? Can you press your finger on a moment, holding it down, and say: Here—this is where it all changed?
I still hear my mother asking that question, not in my dreams exactly, maybe it even comes from inside me—“Why don’t you want what we want?” I think she thought I might have the answer.
TAMING THE TREES
Jeff Mann
The fucking chain saw starts up just after dawn. I push my head-throb deeper into the flannel sheets for a few minutes—too many Manhattans last night. Then the snarl of a second chain saw joins the first—talk about contrapuntal cacophony—and I drag my ass out of bed. Jerking on a pair of boxer briefs, I stride to the window overlooking the street. There are six Asplundh workers today, one of them riding his little extendable basket into the air so as to better decapitate the maples along Seventh Street. I curse, scratch my beard, and wish I had a shotgun.
Another day of arboreal butchery in this small-town neighborhood. Heaven fucking forfend the trees would run a little wild. Our local “vegetation managers,” as they call themselves, have been bringing down maple and hemlock limbs all week. In order to protect the power lines, that’s what they’d say. I think they just enjoy making a mess. I think they like the way the trees look after they’re done, like cripples, amputees, unlucky young soldiers back from that idiotic war overseas. “Taming the trees,” that’s what my father wryly calls it. Teaching the wild and the free a lesson. Diminishing, domesticating, civilizing.
What my last boyfriend tried to do to me, the bossy bastard. Then I got another tattoo, filling up my entire left shoulder with tribal swirls. He threw a fit, I threw him out. Now I’m living alone again, what world’s left to me is budding with mid-March, hyacinths in the front beds are about to pop, and I’m watching the maples’ equivalents of biceps, triceps, fingers, and hands being sawed off.
I can’t help but commiserate. These days my hands are consigned to making love not to men but to computer keyboards.
Of course, even in the midst of my anger, part of me’s checking out the chain saw wielders to see if any are hot. Most of today’s workers are middle-aged guys like me, ones I’d just as soon shoot in the knees, considering how deftly and brutally they’re ruining the streetscape. Only one member of the tree-butchers looks fuckable—a brawny country boy with a thick black goatee, baseball cap, big shoulders, flannel shirt, down vest, grimy jeans, and muddy work boots.
Bear cub. The way I used to look twenty-five years ago. The kind of man I want the most—younger, hotter versions of myself—and, now that I’m fifty, the kind of man I haven’t had for years and am not liable to land again.
Here in the mountains, men who look like that are almost always straight. Hell, even if the boy out the window were gay, how likely is it that he’d want a silver-bearded daddy bear like me to tie him up? He’d most likely want a man his own age, and he’d most likely want vanilla sex. The laws of averages have always lopped off my limbs. Pretty soon, if this dry spell keeps up, I’m going to have to start patronizing online escorts…if any of them service the mountains of Southwest Virginia, which is unlikely.
He looks familiar, the fuckable one, dragging downed limbs through the pale scatter of sawdust. He looks like Bob, the sexy, scruffy way Bob used to look when he still lived in Appalachia. This realization makes my head hurt harder. I snarl another curse at the men I don’t want and the cub I can’t have. I spit at the windowpane, watch a few bubbles of saliva slide down the glass. Violent but harmless gestures like that make me feel good, help me believe I have a little piss and vinegar left.
In the bathroom, I pop an ibuprofen and splash cold water on my face. The man in the mirror isn’t bad for fifty, got to admit. He and I rub some anti-aging lotion into our face. “I’d fuck you,” I say. “Now here’s one hot man left to love,” I say, grinning at the glass. He grins back, of course. Shaved head, bushy gray beard. Tattoos. Solid chest and arms from weightlifting in the basement, when my slowly failing joints allow it. The booze belly found on most mature mountain men. Lots of chest hair, still black along the edges. But right between my pecs, the hair’s turned white, a patch of snow slowly spreading, never melting. Each month’s a blizzard adding its inches of silver, every day without requited desire’s an ice storm bleaching the world to a glisten clean and simple as bone. The white birch in the backyard—February’s last ice storm splintered its every bough. Weak wood. I can relate. What’re weightlifting and tattoos if not attempts to harden what’s congenitally sensitive and soft? You have to be pretty tough to live around here.
I pull on flannel lounge pants, socks and moccasins, a wife-beater. My nipples, after years of on-again, off-again rough play, are pretty prominent, nubbing up the ribbed white fabric. I play with them a little—they’re super sensitive, they get hard fast, and my dick immediately joins them in solidarity—but I still have too much of a headache to jack off. Instead, I pull on a P-Town sweatshirt and head downstairs, followed by cats who sense the possibility of fresh food. I feed them, make a pot of coffee, light up a fire on the hearth, put on the soundtrack to Braveheart, and pick up The Homeric Hymns. The damned chain saws have stopped for the moment; I want to use the silence while it lasts.
A middle-aged, single, gay professor living in a small mountain town, addicted to the gods of literature and the heroes of cinema, his walls decorated with mounted swords. Pathetic contrast, I’m well aware, that awful gap between fantasy and reality. I can’t wait to admire Gerard Butler’s black beard and bare chest as the sword-swinging Spartan Leonidas in 300—no doubt a DVD I’ll be obliged eventually to own. Gerard can join the other members of my harem: Tim McGraw in his Greatest Video Hits, Russell Crowe in Gladiator, Eric Bana in Troy, Viggo Mortensen in The Lord of the Rings. Bless the technology that allows me to spend evenings with handsome, bearded men…even if I can’t touch them, strip them, bind them, gag them, and ride them hard, except in Kleenex-filling fantasy.
Bearded men. Gerard, Tim, Russell, Eric, Viggo. Today’s tree butcher. Bob. I’ve always been attracted to men with beards, but now that mine is all gray, it’s the unadulterated darkness of younger men’s beards that turns me on. Brown of forest animals’ fur, black of storm cloud, of country nights far from office building and street lamp. Dark fur on a handsome face means youth, possibility, virility, the things I had once and have pretty much run out of.
The chain saw’s resuscitated roar jolts me out of my longing and my regret. I put down The Homeric Hymns—beautiful black-haired Dionysos has just been kidnapped by pirates—and stand at the window, admiring the fuckable Asplundh cub’s dark goatee. It’s a cool, gray morning—supposed to rain later, then snow—but the effort he’s putting into handling the maples’ amputated limbs must have already worked up a sweat, because, to my transfixed delight, he’s pulled off his down vest and opened his flannel shirt a few buttons. His chest is so black with hair there’s no winter-pale flesh evident, just that midnight mat, no doubt musking up with scent. I wonder if he’s ever been offered money for sex. I seriously doubt it, but still, I wonder what he’d charge. I’d pay a good bit to run my fingers and my tongue through that vigorous darkness on his chin and torso.
Bob was that hairy. Chest hair, belly hair, black goatee, receding hairline. Big pecs, beer belly, wide and sunny grin. What a beautiful bear he was. I wish I had something—a jockstrap, a pair of underwear, a T-shirt—that still retained his scent. All I have is a few photos: Bob in a mountain meadow with his shirt open, Bob sprawled by the pool at Roseland, and, best of all, Bob in our room at the Beekeeper Inn, naked, bound, and gagged on that big bed beneath the eaves.
So I own photos from many years ago. So I can stare at that beautiful, distant man sweating across the street. What good’s the maddening sight of him when I’m denied his touch, his taste, his scent? I don’t want to want the inaccessible Asplundh cub anymore. I don’t want to hurt over those photos of Bob in my desk. Cui bono—What good does it do? Besides, Bob doesn’t look that way any longer.
Instead, I return to “The Hymn to Dionysos.” The pirates try to tie Dionysos up—a compulsion I recognize—but his godlike power frees him. The ropes fall from his hands and feet. He’s not to be bound, not to be kept. His are a madness and a sweetness that come and go when they will. The wild god was in me, was in Bob. No longer. Dionysos has moved on. He and Bob left my life a long time ago.
Bob and I had a few good years. I met him at Charleston’s bear and leather bar, the Tap Room, back when we both were young, still in our thirties, still living in West Virginia. There I was, my usual shy self, drinking alone in a corner of the bar, the night he won the Mountain State Bear Contest. There he was on the tiny stage, like a bare-chested god, in boots and jeans, grinning as drag queens draped the black-leather-and-silver-studs sash over his shoulder. The hairy chest, thick pecs, and beer belly had my libido, sure, but it was that black-goateed grin that snagged my heart. When I feel sadism and tenderness at the same time, I know I’m in trouble. Somehow I got the courage to buy him a bourbon after he left the stage in triumph. Amazingly, he seemed as interested in me as I was in him. My gut was smaller then, my muscles harder, my beard as black as his. He bought the second round, then, emboldened by booze, I invited him home. Pretty soon, we were groping one another in my truck on the way back to my place on Gauley Mountain, and then he was naked on my bed, playing with his own nipples, and I was uncoiling rope.
Porn producers would have had one hell of a movie if they’d managed to film our fucking that first night, or, for that matter, any of the nights after. He was the hottest man, the best bottom, I ever had. Three months later, he gave up his little apartment in Parkersburg and moved in with me. We were together for five years. I guess my heart was only strong enough to contain passion like that once, because I’ve never felt such ardor before or since. It’s like my chest was a ceramic censer that held fire and incense for a time, then cracked with the heat and has been useless ever after. What good’s a pile of potsherds? Might as well bury them, let them melt back into the earth, do some tree- or flower-roots some good.
Well, Bob left me for the city, really. Ken was only a convenient stepping-stone. As soon as Bob and I broke up, he started dating Ken. Six months later, they moved to DC.
I’d lived in DC right after graduate school, back in my twenties. Thought I’d collect a string of sexy city men, wow the world with my talent, learn how to be cosmopolitan. Hell. Teaching college English didn’t make me enough money to afford to rent a Dumpster in DC, much less the handsome downtown bachelor pad I wanted. I don’t know what those folks do for a living, those people living in turreted townhouses in Georgetown and Dupont Circle, but it isn’t liberal arts. I endured the several-hour daily commute, the snagged traffic, the constant rush, the urban brusqueness, the comments about my accent and rusty pickup truck for exactly one year before I hightailed it back to my mountains, where folks talked like me, liked the same down-home foods, used the same Southern manners, listened to the same country music. Sure, I was queer, and I was pretty open about it, but I was also butch enough for most hill folk to accept me, if sometimes a mite grudgingly. I was queer, but I was their queer, if you know what I mean. If you’re slender and effeminate in the country, you’re fair and squarely fucked, but if you come across like just another good ole boy, albeit one who beds men, you’re tolerated, especially if you’re big enough to defend yourself.
So I was doing just fine living on Gauley Mountain when I met Bob. I’d had my city experience. He hadn’t. It was the only spot where we might fracture. And we ever so slowly did. He was always wanting to make the long drive up to DC for three-day weekends, eager to hit art galleries, museums, restaurants and boutiques. That was all nice, two or three times a year, in my opinion, but I’d rather go camping at Dolly Sods, or hike the Cranberry Glades, or dig into heaps of fried potatoes and wild onions at Richwood’s Ramp Festival, or watch beefy forestry students compete at Elkins’ Forest Festival, or eat too many pancakes at Kingwood’s Buckwheat Festival, or spend a few days in the isolated little hamlet of Helvetia, enjoying the quiet, wooded countryside and the hearty Swiss food. The Mountain State was enough for me.
Not for Bob. After a few years, restless, he started going to DC without me. He slept around some, guys he met at DC bars. I didn’t mind that, since I had a boy named Larry who came up from Marmet sometimes to get roped and plowed. My relationship with Bob was pretty open sexually from the get-go. It wasn’t other men I feared. It was the city, or, rather, what wonderful life Bob thought he was missing in the city. When he started getting the Washington Post and looking at job ads, the fights began. When he applied for a security clearance, I knew we were sunk. I was experienced enough to know that if you stand between a man and his longing, any love he feels for you will sour. If he’d stayed with me in West Virginia, he would’ve learned to hate me. If I’d moved with him to DC, I would’ve learned to hate him.
So that’s how the great love of my life ended. The fights became silences, silences interrupted by fewer and fewer civil words. I felt like I was in a rowboat on black water at night, without oars, without any indications of where land might be. When Bob brought home a case of the crabs from his most recent fuck-fest in DC, I went into a rage. The next weekend, I went camping without him at Seneca Rocks. When I got home, he and his things were gone.
So, Ken, Bob’s next husbear? Ken was a top-notch fuck, that’s for sure. Redneck boy from Montgomery Bob and I had picked up at the Tap Room during our third year together. Ken had a funny little tight-assed stride, super-smooth skin, a sparse patch of chest hair, a brown beard, and a big dick. That first time with Ken was the last time I barebacked. Ken roped Bob to a chair in the corner, then cuffed my hands behind my back, tied my own wife-beater between my teeth, shoved me onto the bed, and fucked me using only spit—no condom, no lube. It hurt like hell for a while, but soon enough I was grunting with gratitude. So hot to be all roped up and helpless, getting my ass pounded while Bob watched. Nice change of pace, since with Bob I was always Top. The three of us played like that several times over a couple of years, with the addition of condoms I insisted on for future scenes. Ken really knew how to hammer a hole.
Sometimes we’d trade places: Bob on his belly on the bed, me tied to the chair. I loved how Bob’s butt would rise to meet Ken’s thrusts; I loved the happy, muted noises Bob would make with Ken’s briefs stuffed in his mouth and Ken’s cock stuffed up his ass. Afterward, Ken would spend the night, sleeping so sturdy and warm between us. Bob would make us all biscuits and gravy the morning after, or buckwheat cakes with sausage.
As butch as Bob was, as wild as his erotic appetites were, he sure knew how to keep a nice home and whip up fine meals. I used to tease him about his subscription to Martha Stewart Living, but secretly I was very thankful to have a man who was so good at making a cozy life for us. Soon after he moved into my unkempt Gauley Mountain farmhouse, he was buying new curtains and bath towels, planting hyacinth bulbs and unpacking his slew of cookbooks. Add his beautiful face and hairy body, his scruffy-redneck look, his always-hungry hole, and his love for ropes and gags to that sweet domestic streak, and you have the perfect husband. He was perfect for me. Except for that yearning for urban delights, something we soon realized he shared with Ken.
I guess Bob must have started meeting Ken behind my back about the time our marital fights began to slide into bitter silence. I know the sex was good between them, which is to say Ken could top Bob just as well as I could…better, I suppose, since his dick was bigger by a bit. Plus I know they both talked a lot about how much more exciting it would be to be gay in the city. I also know that Bob moved in with Ken right after he left me. Soon enough they’d found jobs in DC, had a farewell party at the Tap Room, loaded up the U-Haul, and were gone.
What I don’t know is how long they were savoring the glamorous urban life they’d dreamed of before Bob began to face the fact that his new husband was fast becoming an alcoholic. Mutual friends told me all about it. Ken called in sick to work or showed up in the office hungover. He lost one job after another, spilled a martini on Bob’s laptop, got slur-speeched and staggery every night. He missed the mountains, missed his family and the slow, familiar ways of West Virginia living. And so the big bear attached to that big dick that felt so good up my ass, and, no doubt, up Bob’s, became, to use mountain-speak, “no account,” “do-less,” i.e., not worth a damn, because of his misery and drunken homesickness. The city he’d so badly hankered after wrecked him. After a year, Bob and Ken had broken up. Ken returned to West Virginia to move in with his parents and drink up his welfare checks.
