Where the Boys Are, page 8
DRUG COLORS
Erastes
London is black and white in 1978. It’s a violent hurrah—a feeling that the world is going to hell, but that’s all right, because you can get there with Johnny and Sid and it won’t take that long. Just three chords, blue pills and we’ll all die trying.
A Bolshie freedom slides through the city with a brash over-confidence. Clubs proliferate and the straight and the not-so-straight and wish-they-weren’t-straight all congregate where the queers are.
Mike passes out his Sobranies. They impress as they were meant to do. Mike buys them cheap, packetless and slightly dented, from a man in a turban down Brick Lane. They add a tawdry glamour, which would be the name of the band Mike would start if he could be arsed. He exhales, stubs out his black fag on the leather-boy on his left, and kisses the flattop blond boy on his right. The boy is pretty, his vacant eyes glow like tonic water under ultraviolet. The boy’s hands fumble beneath the table; a promise for later or just a cock-tease? Hard—hard to tell. Mike demands payment. Their lipsticks stick like glue, just for a second. Mike contemplates whether he should taste him again but before he finishes the thought he’s forgotten it. The table is crammed with young men, cute as puppies in baskets and desperate to be debauched so they can write home and tell their friends how wicked they are. And Mike’s glad of it.
Such a few short years, Mike thinks, watching the blow-ins from Oxford and Falmouth as they shrug off the jeans of their respectability and smear themselves with the eyeliner of the city. From underground we come, and step blinking into the light, still negative, still neutral. These boys come, never ending waves of slender, Doc Martin–wearing nymphs, not for the work, but for the dole. For the music. For the cock. For the freedom. For a place that isn’t the village hall on a Friday night where you’d be grateful for a fumble from anyone. For a city that swallows them all to the root, swallows them whole, then spits them out onto the Meat Rack so they can facilitate their own destruction.
The music throbs in time with the boy’s grating teeth: amphetamine-fueled. Mike puts an arm around his thin shoulders and devours his mouth; there’s a tang of chalk and a taste of open spaces. The puppies watch and learn, their eyes jealous, and Mike winks at one with bright white hair and a nose-ring, a copy of Mike’s own. Bright-White’s mouth is large and suddenly, obscenely, he sticks out his tongue and touches his shadowed chin with it. Mike decides he’ll leave with him if Aston doesn’t come. He likes the feel of stubble between his legs, and a long tongue can be trained in all sorts of ways.
When Aston isn’t around, Mike’s grateful for his age. Grateful that he still looks twenty-five in the club lights, thirty outside; grateful that Iggy Pop is no spring chicken. He affects an Iggy-skin, all battered leather, too-tight jeans and a world-weary pose that he hopes is magnetic. Grateful for his sparse frame, his abs, his South London accent, his history and his contacts—or his promise of them. They gravitate to Mike, these blow-job blowins, like hummingbirds losing their colors in the struggle to be noticed.
“I know a bloke at Time Out—could be something for you there,” he says to the boy with the hand on his crotch. The gratitude shimmers in his face, and Mike takes something from the young man’s mouth he’ll never give back, then pushes some pills into the boy’s free hand as he feels his own zip lowering. Quid pro quo. Sometimes it’s the possibility of a job at Rough Trade, a casting call with Jarman, the chance of gophering at the Palais. It doesn’t matter. The boy smiles prettily, says something over the music, but whatever he says doesn’t matter and is lost in the beat, anyway. Mike pushes the pretty smile down into his lap.
There’s a wave of excitement from the litter of boys and Mike tenses. He stops his studied pose when Aston walks in. For all the frenetic thrusting of the place, the up and down of the dancers, the rhythm of the mouth on his cock, everything seems to still when Aston, real name Martin—a joke that has gone beyond cliché and has entered into legend—pulls respect to himself as easily as he does the hyena-eyes of the new boys. Then they cluck like chickens, the floor show of Mike forgotten.
“He’s slept with Jordan…”
“He’s fucked Adam…”
“He’s forming a band…”
“His cock is pierced…”
“I’m going to try…”
Mike doesn’t need to hear the gossip; he knows it all—started a lot of it. He waits, waits in the dark, more excited by Aston’s prowl toward the bar than he is with the boy who is now kneeling under the table. He leans back again, his heart thudding in his chest, and waits for Aston to stop fucking around, which he does, eventually, turning toward the darkened booth with a heart-stopping smile. He towers over them all, looking like Goliath in his platform motorcycle boots, his tartan kilt, his impossibly high hair.
The band stops, and the lead singer starts spouting poetry as bad as anything Mike has ever heard. Aston sits; the chains around his legs clackity-clack against the metal chairs. He fixes Mike with a stare, pupils as huge as the moon, and pouts.
“New?”
Mike wonders how he does this, how he always manages to make his entrance when there’s space and quiet enough to speak. Does he wait outside? Does he bribe someone? He’s never seen him do it, although he’s wealthy enough, Daddy’s shame in tartan and tattoos. Drummed out, all the way from Pimlico.
“Mostly,” Mike answers. The boy on the floor has given up; he’s flat on the sticky carpet, his mouth open, staring up at the remnant glitterball high in the club ceiling. Mike zips himself up with a smirk. He can’t remember the litter’s names so he doesn’t bother with them. Aston wouldn’t care who they were, and they know it, they cast around for lesser prey.
“Seen George?”
“Yesterday,” Aston says. “Sends his love. I thought I’d bring it.” He spouts bullshit about his absence, been filming, he says.
Mike listens and tries not to show how pleased he is to see him. He knows Aston’s lying; he knows Aston went home for the monthly lecture and payout. He doesn’t care. He stands up and takes Aston’s hand. “Come on,” he says. “I’m not staying here.” He grabs his beer, takes the blow-job boy’s beer for Aston, and they split.
They stagger out onto the narrow pavement and take control of the night. Tourists stop and stare; they point at the madness of Aston’s hair and when they try and take pictures Aston gets aggressive, ends up kicking a waste bin over, the papers spilling out to join the crap already littering the streets. They jump the barrier at Oxford Circus, and run down the escalator laughing like drains.
All the way home they play for the train. They behave like they are expected to. Aston spits on the floor, Mike swears like he’s got Tourette’s. They sing “Hurry up Harry,” their boots crashing in time against the slatted wooden floors, and make obscene gestures the way they’ve seen Rotten do. They glower at the travelers from under kohl-rimmed lashes. When they kiss, Aston devours Mike’s face like some kind of maniac and a man and his wife get up and move into the next carriage. Aston gives him the finger, and gropes Mike’s crotch, just for fun. “It’s fucking legal!” shouts Aston. He stands and swings around on the pole. He yells over and over again. “It’s fucking legal! Live with it!”
Mike’s reminded of a wildlife program, the stags bellowing in rut, and he giggles uncontrollably, falling against the woman next to him, who moves away. “You’re my stag, man. You’re my stag.”
Back in Mike’s squat they share a line before fucking—broken mirror, McDonald’s straw. They hardly undress, first time. Boots and bondage too hard to cope with in the speed of the lust.
Aston takes control, all jealous need. He pushes Mike over the back of the settee. His trousers hit the floor with a clank. “Baby-bird suck you off?” he says as he pulls Mike’s cock out with a possessive air.
“Couldn’t manage it.”
“Gettin’ old, old man.”
“Was thinking of you.” He gasps as Aston pushes in, straightens up so he’s closer. “They like it. You like it.”
“I do,” Aston says. “Would have watched if he hadn’t passed out. What’s in those pills you give them?”
“Who gives a fuck?”
The coke takes the edge off, strings them out, and slowly everything focuses into details. Mike can feel every muscle in Aston’s palm as it slides up and down his cock, almost too gently. Aston’s hair is hard against the side of his face, his face harsh with stubble. Mike can nearly count every hair, tries to, fails.
“Fuck this,” Aston says, pulling away. “Why should I do all the work?” They undress. It takes time.
Mike falls back on the bed, grabs a spike of Aston’s hair and pulls him down. Aston’s body is a pale wonder, slender and long, his cock the same with a subtle curve Mike knows Aston hates. Aston had wanted to dye his pubes the same pillar-box red as his head and they’d tried it, once, but Aston had ended up screaming in pain, and he’d punched Mike in the head as he rinsed off the dye, almost helpless with laughter.
When Aston tries to turn him over, he shakes his head, shuffles forward so his arse hangs off the bed. He wants to watch as Aston comes.
They’d laugh, he thinks, if they could see us now. Almost tender, almost lovers. Aston pushes back in, his eyes screwed shut, and like always, Mike wonders who he sees. It’s hard not to wonder if he sees someone younger, more Adam than Iggy. He’s too aware that Aston could—does—have anyone, and that he’s a good fifteen years younger. That Aston shapes the world around him, and Mike is only wearing camouflage. He’s scared that one day Aston will scratch the surface and find the remnants of the Isle of Wight Festival, flowers in Mike’s hair, broken tambourine.
Aston is everything Mike wants, and he keeps him only by not caring. He keeps taking what the boys give him because it keeps Aston coming back, knowing he could stop Mike dead, lead him by the nose-ring, lead him to Hell and that’s how they both like it.
The world turns.
They all turn around to a new beat, free of cardigans and the home counties; they steal straws from McDonald’s and stock up on blues, three for a quid and no questions. The world slows in a London night, stealing time from the dancers. Lyceum and the Marquee, all blurred guilt and pogo frenzy. Adam teaches them to wear khaki, Jordan has them in bondage, and the flick flick flick of the tube strobe shows Aston’s face, thin white duke painted white in the neon, black mouth, black nails, a lad a little insane. They fuck all night on pills and lager and Aston sits for hours in front of the mirror, saying how the black holes in his eyes will kill him—there’s a hole waiting to suck him in, he says. Mike listens endlessly to Kraftwerk and feels Aston deep in his throat and heart, swollen like blood.
“One day,” Aston says, “we’ll fuck right off.” He lights a joint and flings himself across Mike’s body. Mike can’t help but stroke the brittle hair, now limp and sticky around Aston’s shoulders. “We’ll go to Bali and drown some hippies. We’ll go to New York and break the scene. Dad will pay just to see the back of me.”
Mike closes his eyes as Aston sucks him in again. He feels his soul spiraling down Aston’s throat. He can see the palm trees but to him they line Oxford Street and they drop blue fruit onto the crowded pavement beach.
OTHER RESIDENCES, OTHER NEIGHBORHOODS
Douglas A. Martin
1
I put my number inside The Golden Spur, the book he was buying, along with his receipt, hoping he’d call me. There were real bookstores in the city, ones that didn’t fill their shelves with toys and candy, games and puzzles, ones not necessarily fun for the whole family. I was working in one of them. I’d picked him out, when he walked in. The boss didn’t want us reading while on the clock, and so I’d watch the boys like him and men when they’d come in, waiting for someone to respond. I was hoping he’d come back to look for me. You could tell by the way that some of them looked, the way some of them would look at me, that we were alike.
Nobody met anyone’s eyes where I was from originally, like everyone was afraid of everyone else, wanting what the other might not want. All shades over the windows kept pulled down, curtains kept closed, that’s how they lived there. No one who had any idea of what it was like would wonder what had brought me here. There weren’t a whole lot of options, and if any man had kissed me in his car, had taken a chance, putting his hand on my knee, asked me in; if any guy had showed me how he wanted me in that way, I would try my hardest to hold on to him.
He’ll come back to the bookstore, in Brooklyn, Park Slope, and I’ll watch him lock up his bike outside. Here you could go out for drinks and then home to his place, go to bed together, that very night. Something like love, that could make you stay anywhere.
Mostly, we’d go to his place, not mine.
Like me, he’d come from down South.
He’d be the third from that first year in the city, after the first boy who thought I liked sex too much, also not from the city; and the next, who’d like it when I came over to his place in Brooklyn Heights, sweaty, after having run around all day, already having been with somebody else, who liked it, he said, when I smelled all gamey. That’s what he called it. This new one, some nights he’ll fall asleep with just me stroking his hair.
One twin bed barely fit into the small room that was mine, on the top floor of a building converted into as many rentable spaces as possible, right across the street from the Wyckoff Projects, above the noisy, twenty-four-hour deli. I wasn’t going to let myself grow up to be like them, men I’d known back home, the streets all crowded with their cars, though there was little else there.
It’s just men who were connected through their talk of women, women’s bodies, sports, yard work; close to each other only if they’d gone to the same high school; happy, content, or trying to be, with the boat for the lake, freezers full of deer meat, new cars, and houses or trailers to one day own.
We won’t live in Chelsea, but we go there sometimes to housesit for one of his friends. The boy from the bookstore, it seems, likes making love in other people’s beds, more than when we are just at his or my place.
We’ll be up in a loft, early in the morning, trying not to make much noise, to be as quiet as possible; this turns him on, while his two friends sleep downstairs. Or we’ll be in another bed in an apartment in Clinton Hill, trying to make sure, consciously, or unconsciously, that when we come, finally, we come on each other’s stomachs, pressing against each other as tightly, as flat as possible, not coming all over whoever’s bed.
He’s friends with a librarian, whose sad, neurotic cat we tend to, who can’t really be left alone, can’t stand it. Thirteen, we are told he is, that’s an old man for a cat. He needs more care than that.
When he retires, the friend, the librarian, he moves from one place in Chelsea to another bigger, better place. It’s a move up in the neighborhood. Prime real estate. He tells us they call it the “Faggot Fortress,” some of the other residents, his neighbors. It’s a building that extends for blocks, that takes up a whole couple of avenues in the city, that’s how expansive it is. Behind a set of doors in the new place, the bed folds down from the wall. It’s called a Murphy bed.
In that same building in Chelsea, others like us will live. Others like us will love. Others like us will hold each other, move deeper inside each other, and deeper, deeper into each other, far into the night. Others are together, and one turns to the other, turns him onto his back, or the other turns onto his back, the other gets on top, or the other one turns onto his stomach, and the other one gets on top. Or maybe they stay side by side.
Some years later, another librarian, a big-deal one, one I know after the other has left town, great place or no great place in the F. Fortress he sold it, is getting everyone drunk, and we are talking not only of books. We are, after all, gay men. Here, have another glass of wine. On to porn. Here, there’s some more. Another bottle.
He points at me and says he just knows how I like to take it. He’s drunk.
It’s not a charge. It’s not like I need to defend myself.
Did he ask to know, really, what I was? Really?
I don’t tell him about what I loved most, when the boy I’d be with in other people’s beds would let me get on his back, would just lie down on his stomach for me. Or I don’t tell him how he liked it when I’d straddle him, get on top of him, locking my legs tightly, closely, clamped onto the sides of his lower trunk, while we’d move.
That didn’t mean I didn’t want him to fuck me, which once upon a time I could have left or taken. Are you two anal, we’d be asked, me and the one other boy like me I’m sleeping with toward my end of high school, even in our small town. One of the couples we met in the mall, one of the two we knew, in the city of Macon, thirty minutes north, they wanted to know. If you hung around long enough, you might meet others like you, in the mall.
They’d love to hear all about it, though we weren’t really doing it yet. Things moved slower there where I was from, than where I’d eventually come.
Off at college, no more waiting for parents to fall asleep, or trying to find somewhere to go during the day, to see what you could get away with, though off at college, you’d still not completely fled the nest. Another boyfriend, an older man. There was only one thing we hadn’t done yet.
There were more, but I knew what he meant. It was an easy guess.
We’d take turns with each other.
Come on, he’d say, you’re fucking me. And then I’d have to try to do it harder, slam into him, and he’d end up wincing, hurt, seizing up, staring at me, catching his breath, and we’d stop.
Other boys come here from somewhere else, too, who haven’t grown up with and in New York City, either. Boys like me who might go from place to place, before it’s all over, before they settle down, if they ever do. Boys who see how they might never have a home, if it isn’t in the bed or arms of another boy.
We are driving to Buffalo. Now that we live in the city, we like to get out of it, too, me and the boyfriend from the bookstore. We are driving with new friends. One of the men is one of those theorizers of men and boys like us. We meet people like this because my boyfriend and I both want to be writers. The older, more established writer keeps saying, while my boyfriend drives, things like, he could only imagine what the two of us got up to, what we must do together.
