The Trouble Boy, page 5
“Where do you go?” I asked, bracing myself with a sip of wine.
“Anywhere but those places. Sports bars. Hotel bars. Anywhere.” I supposed hotel bars of the Ian Schrager type were okay, but sports bars? Ugh.
The waiter brought our entrees and we ordered another bottle of wine.
“Have you read The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture?” I asked. “It discusses a lot of what you’re talking about—the cloned look, the whole bit.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t read much.”
We finished our meal in silence, which wasn’t so bad, since he was better to look at than listen to.
I decided this would be a one-nighter, and I might as well carry it to its logical conclusion. I believed in having one-night stands if I never wanted to see the other person again. If I thought it had potential to be long term, I waited—usually.
“Do you want to get a drink somewhere around here?” I asked once we were out on the sidewalk. I was already pretty buzzed, but I was afraid it might be in bad taste to ask him back to my apartment right away.
“I want to smoke up. I’ve got some killer buds back at my place.”
Killer buds? I felt like I was back at boarding school. “We could do that,” I said. “Um, how far away is Queens?”
“Twenty dollar ride, no biggie,” he said, hailing a cab.
When we got out in Queens, I offered to pay half and was annoyed when he accepted. It was his fault we had to cross a major body of water to get to his apartment.
He led me down a few steps to the basement of a row house. Inside, the lights were blindingly bright. His walls were completely bare and both rooms were furnished solely with futons, milk crates, and stacks of old magazines. It was nothing like the living arrangement I had imagined, one that, funnily enough, looked similar to what I had seen just hours ago on TV.
He sat down at the kitchen table—one of his few nods to domesticity—and started packing his bong. He had five lighters lined up on the kitchen table, and he grabbed one and fired up the bong, sucking in slowly as the water gurgled. He offered me a hit, and I accepted, mainly because it was the polite thing to do. I hated smoking pot, but it was the only thing on offer, save for a flat bottle of tonic water in his fridge. After I exhaled, I went over to the kitchen alcove and looked for a glass. There were a few plastic cups of the football game souvenir variety, so I filled one of those. His tap water tasted like there was rust in the pipes.
After he finished the bowl, he walked over to the futon, where I was patiently waiting. Pot always made me paranoid, and I suddenly thought he was going to ask me to leave or hit me or something. Instead, he kissed me slowly, and we fell down onto the futon together. He tasted like marijuana, but I didn’t care. His body was built, with muscles a lover could hold onto.
We took a break from kissing, and the paranoia started creeping up on me again. I felt exposed, kissing him in this halogen-lit room, as if all of Queens were watching us through his front windows.
“Do you want to, uh, go in the bedroom or something?” I asked.
In the half hour it seemed to take him to answer, a feeling of profound foolishness washed over me, burning my cheeks.
What was I doing here?
I took deep breaths to keep the feeling at bay.
I reminded myself that he had asked me here. And it was his fault I had turned into a hyperventilating mess.
I was relieved when we dove into the cool of the bedroom. The sheets on the second futon smelled like they hadn’t been washed in weeks. He methodically took off his shirt and pants, and I took off mine as we both lay down on the bed. His body was practically hairless; he had a few light wisps on his chest. We kissed for a moment longer, as his erection poked out of the flap on his boxer shorts, begging for attention. I started kissing his stomach, slowly going lower, and then pulled down his shorts. This was going to be the best blow job of my life, I decided. Even if I never saw him again, Real World Guy would always remember me for this.
After about two minutes, his body started shuddering, and so I stopped.
“No,” he said, “keep going.”
I slipped off my shorts, and went back to work, splayed out on his futon, hoping he would notice me, my bare ass, anything. In less than a minute, he started to come, and I removed my mouth just in time, jerking him off onto his stomach. I wanted him to remember this, but I wasn’t about to swallow.
“Thanks,” he said. “That was really great.”
I flopped over onto my back. He just lay there, not doing anything. This was ridiculous.
“Do you think you could . . .” I started.
“Blow you? Oh, I never do that. I mean, if you want to jerk off or whatever, that’s fine, I don’t mind.”
“You never blow anyone?”
“I mean, I’ve done it before, but I just don’t like it.”
Though I was annoyed at his arrogance, it ultimately didn’t matter. I knew I wouldn’t be able to come, not with someone I had just met. The antidepressants I had been taking since age eighteen made it impossible to have a normal sex life. In order to have an orgasm, I had to be completely sober, and with someone I was comfortable with, or at least had slept with several times. And I had to find the person completely attractive. While Real World Guy satisfied the third condition, there was no way I would be able to do anything after five glasses of wine, not to mention a hit from his bong. And I knew Real World Guy wouldn’t be into giving me pleasure for pleasure’s sake; a boy like that wanted results.
Still, I wished he would pay attention to me, instead of acting like I was an inconvenience.
“That’s okay,” I said. “Never mind.”
He went into the other room to smoke another bowl. When he came back, he put his boxer shorts on and crawled into bed.
“Do you mind if I spend the night?” I asked. Though I wasn’t relishing the thought of staying over, finding a cab at this hour in Queens didn’t seem promising either.
He said it would be fine, and started arranging the sheets in some semblance of order. “You wanna know something funny?” he said when he was finished.
“Sure,” I said, though I was exhausted. The paranoia was gone, but my temples were throbbing and I wanted to forget about the night.
“Before I went on the show, I had really bad acne. They put me on Accutane six months before filming started and it sucked that shit right up. Never had a pimple again.”
“Is my acne that bad?” I asked. I knew it wasn’t. It was just one of those annoying things that never went away.
“Oh, no,” he said. “I was just saying.” He turned around, his back facing me. I tried to spoon him, my legs curled in against his, my stomach touching the warmth of his back.
“So, listen,” he said, “the only way I can sleep is back to back, you know?”
I turned on my side, my back towards him, and rocked myself to sleep. I felt like a child again, on the nights when my stomach would be growling even though I had eaten a full meal. There was an emptiness gnawing at my gut, and it had nothing to do with food.
I woke at 7 A.M. and quietly slid back into my clothes. As I walked to the subway, I thought about the evening. There was a kind of draw—a lose-lose situation—when both parties in a one-night stand didn’t want to see each other again. Real World Guy had been the first person I had slept with since moving to New York, but it was an empty victory.
I wondered if I would have felt some sense of completion, of closure, if I had been able to have an orgasm. I knew jerking off boys and forgoing my own pleasure was not what it was supposed to be about, though I rarely experienced anything else. Unlike those who had discovered a loss of libido on antidepressants, my libido was as strong as ever, which made the situation worse. I felt like an injured athlete who could only cheer his team on from the sidelines.
It wasn’t that I had a problem relieving myself when I was alone; in fact, I was content to do it almost every evening. With the help of some furtively viewed net porn or even just a memory from the gym or the showers at boarding school, I could get myself off in five minutes. The fantasy would never judge me for taking too long, for not being hairless or buff, for having a zit on my chin. When I was with other people, something inside me shut off. But I was afraid to switch to other drugs, or to stop the medication entirely, afraid of the depths of depression that could result, catapulting me into the darkness I had first experienced at eighteen. I couldn’t afford to be unstable in my first year in New York. Yet this morning, unsatisfied, having just had Real World Guy, and yet not having had him at all, I knew something needed to change.
And what was the business about the acne? Was that why he didn’t like me, because I didn’t have flawless skin? He had called me, I reminded myself. He was the one who had wanted to set up a date.
Maybe he was just an asshole, plain and simple.
I transferred to the number 6 train at Fifty-ninth Street. At Grand Central, a boy with shoulder-length wavy blond hair boarded and sat across from me. He pulled out a manuscript and started reading, pencil in hand. I wanted to ask him about it, but I couldn’t get up the courage. He was wearing a white oxford cloth shirt and khakis, so he must have been headed for work, though it was barely 8 A.M. He didn’t look uptight the way someone like Jamie would in such an outfit. He looked fresh and pure, as if he had stepped out of an Ivory Soap commercial.
He noticed me watching him, so I averted my eyes. At Twenty-third Street, he stuffed the manuscript in his bag and got off the train.
After showering, changing, and fortifying myself with a large coffee, I arrived at the office right at ten. Donovan greeted me as he happily clacked away at his keyboard.
I checked my email and started working, annoyed that he hadn’t asked me about the date. At quarter to eleven, he turned toward me. “I totally forgot about last night. How was it?”
“It was good,” I lied.
“Are you going to see him again?”
“No, probably not,” I said, as I fiddled with a paper clip.
“Oh, fuck it, it was terrible. He’s a total idiot. I’ve had dates with eighteen-year-olds that were better. And the sex—” I paused, not knowing how much I wanted to reveal. “Let’s just say he was totally into himself.”
“At least you can say you scored,” Donovan said, shrugging.
“Who scored?” Sonia asked, standing in the doorway.
“Toby slept with the gay guy from The Real World, Donovan said before I could tell him to shut up.
“How was it? Was it fabulous? Tell me it was fabulous!”
“It totally sucked,” I said.
“This would make a great piece for our new column, ‘Star Fucker,’ ” she said. “You know, real life celebrity encounters. Lola is going to write about doing Mick Jagger, but she won’t have it ready until next week. You can launch the series if you want.”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to go down that path. A girl I knew from college was a sex columnist for another Web site, and it had all but ruined her personal life. All she could attract were freaks and exhibitionists, and she was reviled by half of the twentysomething population of New York, most of whom were jealous they didn’t have the sex life or the journalistic success she had. But she was laughing all the way to the bank: Miramax had just bought the rights to turn her columns into a feature film.
“I can’t write about this,” I told Sonia. “I mean, what about the drugs and everything? I’m sure the story would get back to him somehow.”
“Pseudonyms, baby,” she said. “Just say he was a ‘twenty something reality TV star.’ There are so many of them out there.” She wagged her finger at me. “Remember what they say about good writing.”
“What do they say about good writing?”
“I don’t remember exactly what they say, but it’s something like ‘Good writing comes from the darkest truths.’ ”
I wasn’t sure I was ready to whore out my personal life for the enjoyment of CityStyle’s readers. Writing about nightclubs was one thing; writing about my cock was another.
3
Though I always claimed he was, Kent Simmons wasn’t the first guy I ever slept with. I had never told anyone about my actual first experience, because it happened to another person, another Toby Griffin.
When that Toby Griffin moved into his freshman dorm room, one of his roommates, Jim Huntsville, was, in the words of their college’s dean, “in the process of flamboyantly coming out.” This meant he had attended the introductory Gay and Lesbian Co-op meeting, wore a pink triangle pin on his backpack, and told anyone who would listen that he was bisexual.
Toby wasn’t ready to take such a stance, and so he watched and observed, attending that same meeting, staying silent but taking everything in. One of the coordinators at the meeting thought they should celebrate National Coming Out Day by each carrying a pink balloon to class. Toby imagined people bursting those balloons in protest, the pink rubber shards falling along the flagstones of Cross Campus like fetuses, shriveled and pathetic.
Toby had heard Jim describe himself as trailer trash, which discouraged snickering when he told stories about driving his pickup truck on the dirt roads of Wyoming and working construction at a dude ranch. The only male influence in his household was his mother’s on-again, off-again boyfriend. Jim was attending Yale on a combination of scholarship money and student loans. But none of that mattered.
Here it was now: Yale, the great gay mecca of the western world.
Toby knew what he wanted, but it was the getting there that was the hard part, not the act itself, but the before, the approach, like a trip more stressful to pack for than to take. On his tenth day in New Haven, two days into classes, Toby found himself with Jim, drinking watery beer at Naples, the local student pub and pizzeria. With each new pitcher, Toby’s resolve became greater. In the twilight of beer haze, in the hopsy, nicotine-tinged world, it made sense: Jim would be his first boyfriend. Living arrangements, after all, had already been settled.
That evening, they were back in the common room, and their other two roommates, Steve Wallace and Colin Lydell, had gone to bed. Jim was lying on the couch, drunk, and smoking a cigarette, which was against dorm policy.
Toby, who was equally intoxicated, asked Jim about what it was like to be gay in Wyoming.
“I slept with a few guys there,” Jim said. “But I wouldn’t say I was gay.”
Toby sat on the edge of the couch and leaned over Jim. “I think you’re cute,” he said. “Can I kiss you?”
Jim gave a half-nod that said, I don’t care what you do.
Toby placed his lips against Jim’s, thrusting his tongue in Jim’s mouth.
“Easy there,” Jim said, pulling away. “You gotta go a little slower. Haven’t ya ever kissed a girl before?”
Toby said he hadn’t. He tried again. His body was shaking.
“Don’t be so nervous,” Jim said.
They proceeded in the dim Ikea light, removing articles of clothing, folding out the futon couch and transforming it into a bed. Toby lay back on it, clad only in his boxers. Jim removed them, revealing Toby’s erection.
Oh, God, Toby thought, let this be okay. And then he felt it for the first time, an experience he would have hundreds, thousands more times: his penis in another guy’s mouth.
He tried to relax and immediately came.
“Shit,” Jim said, spitting onto Toby’s navel. “You should have told me you were going to do that.”
“I didn’t know it was going to happen,” Toby said. “I’m sorry . . . can I get you a towel or something?”
“Naw, it doesn’t matter.” Jim rolled over onto his back and Toby began to massage Jim’s penis with his right hand. This was the time to conquer the inevitable, to do the thing that would make him truly gay. He went down on Jim.
His crotch smelled of sweat and laundry detergent. It wasn’t bad, actually; Jim’s penis had the texture of chewing gum. Like a big, fleshy piece of chewing gum.
Toby kept removing hairs from his mouth. That was the most surprising part, the taste of pubic hair on skin.
After Jim came, the two of them lay together for a few minutes. Toby ran his hands across Jim’s chest. Here it was, a real live boy. His fingers went to Jim’s right ear, its lobe pierced by a single stud.
“When did you get your ear pierced?” Toby asked.
“Two days before I left Wyoming,” Jim said.
“Do you want to spend the night here?” Toby asked. He and Jim were going to be boyfriends, so their roommates would surely understand. My Wyoming boyfriend, he thought.
“No,” Jim said. “I should take a shower.”
“Do you want to take one together?” Toby asked. He wanted the evening to last longer than this.
“No,” Jim said.
Toby woke up the next morning and opened one eye. Steve was getting ready for class.
“Hey,” Toby muttered. He was hung over and wished he could continue sleeping.
Steve looked at Toby in disbelief, as if Toby had just told him he had murdered his baby sister.
Two can play that game, Toby thought, so he said nothing else.
The day went by quickly. Toby threw on sunglasses to ward off the sunlight on Beineke Plaza and fired up a cigarette before his 9 A.M. class. He was a little shaky as he got his breakfast at Commons, but happy. So this is what it feels like, he thought. I’ve gotten it out of the way. I’m now a member of that elite club of people who have had sex. It was a distinction that, at age eighteen, still carried some weight.
Unlike previous days, when the suite had been abuzz with activity, when Toby got back to the dorm that afternoon, he was met with silence. He holed up in his room and tried to work. At 9 P.M., Steve and Colin appeared at Toby’s door. Steve was an Upper East Side brat who had gone to school in the city and seemed to know everyone. Colin, who in Toby’s opinion was dumb as a brick, was at Yale on a baseball scholarship. What distinguished both of them was that they were big guys: each six-foot-three, with broad shoulders and thick, tanned necks. Compared to Toby and Jim, they seemed more like seniors than fellow freshmen.
