Lawnboy (7 page)

I calmed down soon enough, fed my coins to the soda machine: a lighted box with a smeared, eye-shaped logo. The soda tasted delicious, an abrasive splash against the back of my throat. Actually, most of these fellows seemed to be having a decent enough time. Doors kept banging shut, then opening, admitting and releasing the hungry. One trucker-type practically danced a jig down the hall. Another strolled past with a look of dumb wonder on his face. “Oh, what the hell,” I said to the graffitied walls. It was time to stop thinking so much.

Still, I imagined William staring down at me through a hole in the ceiling, cataloging my gestures. I imagined his footsteps clomping across the parking lot, his husky brusque voice taking over the sound system. The music faded to static. “What are you doing here?” he said, grabbing me by the collar. “I can’t believe you’d punish me like this.”

Foolish thoughts. Foolish.

I found an empty booth and bolted the door. I panted slightly, dazed. Was I going to be sick? It still held the scents of its last inhabitant—perspiration, Right Guard, spilled semen, body heat. I rested my head on my knees. I glanced upward. Al Parker floated across the flickering screen, legs shining like the flanks of some heavenly animal. My vision blackened for a moment. I loved Al Parker. I concentrated on his exuberant brown beard, his hard vascular chest, his rakish Semitic nose. I concentrated on his dick, an enormous fleshy thing that wagged when he walked, with a jaunty personality all its own. But there was more to him than that. It wasn’t just his body, or his personal warmth, or his casual, fluent masculinity. It was his very persona, which told us that sex was fun, that there was a wide, wide world out there, more complicated and various than we’d ever assumed. He’d never call anybody else a faggot because he himself was a faggot, and he felt just fine about that, thank you. Unfortunately, he wasn’t here anymore: another soul, lost, like half the world, to AIDS. At least his image still quivered with life. I looked at the screen, then down at myself. There was Al, there was me.

I closed my eyes. When I opened them, Al was fucking a tall, rangy kid with a gap between his teeth. Together they gyrated over a workbench. The camera panned the kid, surveying every square inch of his skin, grazing past a deep violet mark on his wrist. A burn, a bruise, or what I feared it was? His hair—parted down the middle, shaggy over the ears—seemed right out of 1979, just before protected sex had become an issue. I hated to think the kid had done this while sick, all for the sake of making a few fast bucks. But who would have known then? Who would have thought the world was on the brink of such threat?

I went soft in my palm. I wanted to be home. I wanted its banality, its routines, the anonymous sanctuary of its dull gray rooms. Already I thought of the dogs barking as I worked the key into the lock. I thought of their tails whipping my legs, the weight of their snouts in my palms. And their eyes—how they closed them in gratitude whenever I stroked their heads. Time to get out of here. I pulled up my pants, my right leg prickly with sleep. Home: odd to think of it that way, but that’s what it was now, for better or for worse.

I opened the door. Before me stood the most beautiful man I’d ever seen.

We looked at each other, quizzical. An awful thrill went through my stomach. Had we known each other once? “Evan,” he might have said.

He stood there longer than was exactly comfortable, as if he, too, felt paralyzed. Though he was altogether perfect, it was his eyes that drew me to him, large brown eyes that revealed a soulfulness, an abundance of spirit, with just enough wryness thrown in for good measure. There wasn’t a wall between him and the world. Everything, I imagined—praise, insult, injury—registered on his psychic screen. I glanced about the booth as he walked down the hall. What should I do? The wadded tissues on the floor, the twisting bodies of the videos seemed otherworldly, radiant now, imbued with the richest amber light. I imagined taking him in my arms, nipping him, tugging the skin of his neck between my teeth. Then reaching downward for his belt buckle, rubbing circles on his stomach with my fist. A shard of paper dropped through the chicken wire overhead, and a note? Was that what this was?
I want you right now. Meet me in #2.

My face blazed. I strolled down the hall toward the indicated door and entered the booth, reaching out into the darkness. My breaths quickened. His chest was warm, softer than I’d imagined, yielding. He smelled of orange rind, fresh laundry. He exhaled in a slow, satisfied half-whistle.

Only when my eyes adjusted did my presumptuousness become clear to me.

“You’re here,” whispered an odd, balding man.

“But—”

“What took you so long?”

He pressed a soft palm against my cheek. He gazed at me with such tenderness and awe that I couldn’t say no to him. He wasn’t attractive. His forehead sloped, speckled and vulnerable like the underside of a fish. I’d like to say that I treated him with warmth and compassion, some modicum of fellow feeling. Instead, I guided him to the floor, jerked down my zipper, and gave him exactly what he wanted.

“Suck it,” I mumbled.

“Mmmm.” He gazed up at me with glistening eyes, so grateful, relieved.

“Don’t say a word, faggot.”

I crossed my arms over my chest in a complete affectation of boredom. I thought:
You can be whoever you want. Your name’s not Evan, and your longing isn’t killing you.
I gazed down at my cock slipping in and out of his mouth, numbing every sensation from it, refusing to admit that we were even engaged in the same fundamental work. I didn’t touch him or urge him onward. Loneliness, I thought. This was isolation, and this was loneliness. I saw my bones turning at once to powder, particles of me flying up through the air filters. A broken bell chimed in a distant tree. Was it even sex that I wanted, or something more elusive, more rigorous than that? Had I wanted William to change my life? Had I wanted him to solace my pain, to exchange my former home for a better, more protected one? Had I wanted him to embrace every last facet of me—my speech, gestures, flaws, potential? And in expecting these things, was I pushing him away?

Or, simply, did I want a fraction back of what I was giving to him?

I thought of Al Parker’s bearded face. I pulled back from the stranger while there was still time.

“That was terrific,” he said, smiling.

“Thank you,” I said nervously, giving his shoulder a squeeze.

“No. Thank
you.
” His face glowed with a freshly pink sheen. “I’ve never seen you here before. What’s your name?”

“Kevin.”

“I’m Irwin,” he said, offering his hand to shake.

“Are you okay?”

“Of course I’m okay,” he laughed. “Couldn’t be better. You’re a very hot boy, Kevin.”

“Thanks,” I said shyly, bowing a bit, and left.

I stood upon the hot surface of the parking lot. It was twilight now. Cars rushed by on Route 1, careening past the tank farms, the container complex, the clumps of palmetto in which someone could get lost. The air smelled of napthalene, forest fires. I glanced once up at the sky, the harsh bowl of it, thinking about its indifferent blue, knowing its eye had already focused on the next brutality. What was one more tiny crime? I held up the stranger’s note and released it, watching it blowing out into the traffic. The warm-eyed boy was gone now, gone forever. Whoever told me I didn’t deserve to be loved?

***

When I was eleven, I thought a lot about a boy named Douglass Freeman. I was fascinated by his house. There was nothing else like it: its Colonial-paned windows, its cupola, its gardens with the plywood comic-strip characters (Nancy, Sluggo, Aunt Fritzi). And beside it all, gleaming in the driveway, a new Winnebago like the showcase prize from
The Price is Right.
For most of that year I wanted more than anything to live there.

He was in every appearance an average eleven-year-old with freckled skin, tetracycline-stained teeth, and a stunted brushy plume on the crown of his head. It wasn’t until the end of the school year when every sixth-grader from Gus Grissom was bused off to camp that we learned something else about him. The rumors had been flying even before Mr. Albertson sat us down in the cabin.

“Tonight most of you boys’ll be taking a shower.”

We nodded. We gathered around a citronella candle in the dark. His voice was hushed, grave, as if he were trying to scare us.

“These showers are what we call communal. Have any of you showered with other boys before?”

My upper arms itched. I’d never heard of such a thing. I couldn’t help but think the idea was a little outlandish, even obscene.

“I want you to know that Douglass Freeman doesn’t have a penis.”

Eric Woodworth fisted the air.
“Yes!”

“Quiet!” Mr. Albertson cried. The entire campground stilled, crickets and tree frogs falling mute. “Once more and I call your parents.”

Woodworth trembled, pretending to quash the triumph from his eyes. I was mortified. All this time I’d thought that Douglass’s newest nickname—Dickless—had been nothing more than a harmless, ongoing prank. Hadn’t we all called him that?

“I want you to put yourselves in his shoes,” Mr. Albertson said. His eyes shone with great intensity and warmth. “I want you to imagine what he lives with every day of his life. Do you understand?”

We nodded, humbled and ashamed.

“He’s all boy. That’s all I want to say.”

We nodded again.

“Good. Very good.” Then Mr. Albertson started a story. “There was a boy, there was a girl, and there was a ghost …”

But I couldn’t follow his words. If I’d only known that Douglass’s condition resulted from a birth defect or cancer, I’d have felt better. I imagined my own penis, a thing I’d learned to like, crumbling off in my hand as I cleaned myself with a washcloth. The truth was I’d been touching myself a lot, probably more than I was supposed to. I pulled my legs closer to my chest. Around me boys were laughing, utterly immersed in the tale. Mr. Albertson crouched and tiptoed about the cabin, illustrating his drama with little props: a pin light, a tennis ball, a handkerchief resembling a lady ghost. What was wrong with me? Was I the only one who felt like this?

Mr. Albertson left for the showers, Dobb kit in hand, white towel slung over his shoulder. “Keep an eye on the ship,” he said, his eyes meeting mine.

“Five bucks,” Woodworth mumbled. “Five fucking bucks.”

Steve Strandberg gazed out at the empty, starlit paths. “I wouldn’t go to the showers now,” he said in a lonely voice.

I said, “Why?”

“That’s when Dickless’s there,” said Steve. “He won’t go till everyone’s finished. Sometimes it’s midnight, sometimes it’s three in the morning. The school board had to approve it.”

I pictured Dickless standing outside in the middle of the night, his chest peppered with goose pimples, scrubbing himself with a soap-on-a-rope (a gift from his mother?) while he looked repeatedly, anxiously over his shoulder. It pissed me off to think that only a few weeks ago these boys had played kickball with Douglass, calling him by his correct name, treating him like the quiet, unremarkable boy he was.

But who was I to talk? I’d already made my decision not to shower until I got home.

The week was relentless. Our days were crammed tight with activities—math classes, crafts seminars, athletics—as if our teachers were fearful of leaving us unoccupied. I missed the girls, their precise, intricate outfits, their kindness, their expansive senses of humor. I missed Jane. Without girls, the boys grew wilder, more aggressive, as if shot up with hormones. Gregg Novak, for one, a skinny thing with twig-like arms, lifted me up, spinning me around and around in full sight of seven boys—my legs flailing all the while—if only to show them he could do it.

This wouldn’t have happened back home.

The week creaked onward. I ticked off each day on my calendar, striking it out with a wax pencil, pretending I was doing time at Sing Sing. Soon enough it became clear to my cabin mates—Eric Woodworth in particular—that I hadn’t taken a shower since my arrival. By this time, they’d all showered together and had gotten used to it, barely mentioning Dickless’s name as if he were already old news.

“You haven’t taken a shower,” said Woodworth one night.

“Yes, I did,” I answered. “Two nights ago. You weren’t paying attention.”

He knew I was lying. I stared at his slight chubbiness, knowing that at twenty he’d be ugly, fat, and unlovable. I didn’t know why this comforted me. He glanced over at the top bunk. “Hey, Strandberg, has Sarshik taken a shower yet?”

Steve stared down at his dirty pink feet, utterly silent.

“Your hair’s greasy,” Woodworth said to me. “What’s the matter? You don’t have a dick either?”

“Shut up,” I cried.

I might have downed a glassful of paint. Was I a coward? I couldn’t bear to be talked to like this. It was the moment I’d been afraid of. All at once I leapt up and rummaged through my backpack for my shower supplies.

I hurried to the outdoor shower stalls, leaves rasping beneath my feet. You had to do these things, win the races, catch the fly balls hit to your corner, even if it killed you. If you didn’t do it, you got them mad, and they made you an outsider—someone who was pounced on, spit out like week-old food—and there was nothing worse than that.

But none of these thoughts steadied my pulse.

When I arrived at the stalls I heard a shower running full force, a drain sucking water. I stopped at once. Was it Dickless?

My steps were timid. To my relief Mr. Albertson stood underneath the showerhead, hair flattened to his scalp. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

“Hi, Evan,” he said affably. “Beautiful night.”

My throat was too tight to respond. I nodded, then crept inside the changing room. I stared down at the pocked floor, breathing, yanking off my shirt and pants, dropping them in little balls upon the exposed wooden slats. I was going to do this. Once and for all, I was going to get this over with.

Mr. Albertson smiled at my reentrance. I stepped toward the showerhead beside him and turned on the faucet, testing the temperature. I’d never felt more naked in my entire life, my arms like insect feelers, my chest like the cheapest concave trinket—something to be bought at Woolworth’s. Mr. Albertson rubbed the shampoo from his hair. He dug his fists into his tightly closed eyes. I couldn’t stop staring at his hard furry butt, his balls, his dick—alarmingly big, its head the color of a plum. I’d never seen anything like it before.
And you call this a dick?
I thought, speaking to my own parts in disappointment.