The Men from the Boys (25 page)

Javitz heads off to the dunes. “My birthday gift to myself,” he purrs.

That leaves just Eduardo and me.

“Well,” I say, “want to spend the night?”

He laughs. “Maybe I should just get used to it.”

“Get used to what?”

“Oh, that whenever Lloyd's not around, I can come by. I mean, if Lloyd hadn't gotten beeped, you'd be sleeping with him tonight. I'd have to go on back to my guest house, sleep by myself.”

“Or you could have gone out and tricked.”

He sighs. “This is all very new to me, you know.”

“Me, too,” I admit. “No one's ever lasted the way you have.”

I stretch out on the bed. Eduardo joins me, laying his head on my chest. “It's just that you always hold the upper hand, Jeff. That makes me uncomfortable.”

“Look,” I say, getting a little impatient, “can't you just see it as an opportunity? That whenever we have an opportunity, we'll be together? It might be that some night I'll want to be with you and
you'll
have other plans—a date or something. I'll just have to accept that.”

He looks at me as if I'm being absurd. “Everything's got to be equal,” he says.

“Fine. Then it is.” I put my arms around him, my lips finding that spot behind his ear.

“Wait,” he says, pushing me away.

“Eduardo, what is it?” I'm impatient; I can't help it. “Why does this have to be so di
_f
ficult?”

“I can't help my feelings. They may be irrational, but they're my feelings.”

“I can't help my feelings either,” I say. But what am I feeling? I look over at him, at his big brown eyes, that shock of hair tumbling into his face. How alive I feel next to him, how vital. How—and I laugh to think it—
young.
My dick is heavy whenever I'm with him, my laugh quick in my throat.

“You've been incredible, buckaroo,” he says, touching each of my eyes with his forefinger. “When I'm with you, I feel so good—so good about myself, about being gay, about everything ahead of me. But sometimes—”

“Sometimes it's not enough,” I finish.

“Yes,” he says, and the sadness in his voice is thick. “Sometimes it's not enough.”

This is what I fear. This is that nameless gremlin that lives deep down inside my gut.
They will leave me. They will all leave me, because it's not enough. Because I'm not enough.
“Please don't go,” I whisper, and I hear the shakiness of my words. Immediately I take a deep breath and change my tone, a veneer of strength rather than an admission of fear. “All right,” I say, confident again, the way Eduardo wants me to be. I pull myself up, look away from him. “Go if you must. We can end it right here. I can't give you any more than I already am. If that's not enough, I understand.”

But I wouldn't understand—no, not at all. Can he not see how I really feel?
I love you, Eduardo
—would it be so hard for me to say? Lying here beside him I feel adrift and confused. I thought we could rewrite the rules so we all could be together, define our own very special places in each other's lives. But why then is it so hard? Why does it feel as if I must choose between the two of them, and why do I feel that ultimately there will be no choice for me to make?

There's silence. “You can't go,” I finally say, a cocky grin masking my fear. “It's my
birthday.”

It works. “Oh, Jeff,” he says, lunging at me, kissing me so hard I think my teeth might crack. I wrap my arms around him, squeezing him, grabbing my right forearm with my left hand. He feels so thin in my arms, so slight. I can feel his heart beating between us. I taste the sweat of his skin, the staleness of his breath. Clothes are shed quickly and feverishly. We resume our tangle, our kissing, our breathing heavy in each other's face. “Eduardo,” I say, pushing the word out with my tongue, using that tongue to lick his neck, his ears, driving him wild, making him pull at the sheets, utter oaths to God. My mouth is on his belly, his dick, his balls. I push my hand under his ass and take hold of it. His eyes peer up at me through his legs, now in the air, around my neck. “I want you so fucking bad,” I tell him, and that's true: I want him more than he can ever possibly understand, I want all the blood inside him, all the thoughts in his head. He just cries, rolls his eyes back and cries. I feel as if I might cry too, but I don't: I hold it in, hold it back, the fear, the rage, the pain, the lust, the love.

I enter him knowing full well that I have not broken contact to find a condom in the drawer. I enter him feeling nothing but passion, and he says, “Yes, yes.” I fuck him harder than I ever remember fucking anybody, and finally I do cry, because I can't believe how incredible this is. Fuck them all, fuck condoms, fuck all those hot healthy horny bastards, fuck safe sex, fuck AIDS, fuck Eduardo, fuck myself, fuck getting older, fuck the rules, fuck family, fuck love, fuck, fuck, fuck.

Then I come, pulling out as fast as I can, suddenly sick and ashamed of what I have done. I shoot onto his stomach, but I know my first explosion shot up inside him: the eruption of my love for him, shot up into the living, breathing, pulsing warmth of his body, shot with all the fury and the passion that has been bottled up for too long inside me, the most beautiful, most exhilarating orgasm I have ever had.

SEX

Boston, March 1995

What I can't seem to get off my mind this morning is that day with Eduardo last summer, the day it rained and we got caught on Commercial Street, taking refuge under an awning as the thunder clapped overhead, as the rain came washing down the street like a great torrential flood, and we kissed there in plain view of everyone, and never before or since did everything seem so perfect.

There have been too many gray, overcast days of late. I had become convinced spring would never come, that I was trapped in a twilight zone of eternal winter where time was frozen and change impossible. But no such luck: the days have ticked by, the boxes of bric-a-brac have grown, Lloyd and I continue to search without success for another place to live. This morning he went off on a spiritual retreat with Drake, a weekend at an ashram in upstate New York. “Maybe I'll come home with some answers,” he whispered as he bent over the bed to kiss me good-bye.

I had only one thought: The Fens will be hopping.

My computer remains covered. There will be no writing today. Whatever it was that had aroused my passion just days ago is gone, evaporated like the snow on the sidewalks under a surprising March sun. I pull on a white sweatshirt and jeans with holes in the knees, exposing long thermal underwear. Then I slip into my old black leather jacket, faded remnants of old crack-and-peel slogans still on the sleeves.

The Fens are the Fenway Victory Gardens off of Boylston Street. For years they've been a cruising area. I'd heard the stories, read the reports of police crackdowns and gay bashings in the area. But here straight people also walk hand-in-hand among the roses in June. Fathers push strollers and yuppie women in Nike sneakers jog along the paths on their lunch hours. It's down by the river, where the reeds grow tallest and clump together, that gay men suck each other's dicks. A couple of years ago, the reeds were hacked down by police to stop such activity. At the time, I thought it was a sensible thing to do.

Now the reeds have partially grown back, and I'm glad for it. The first man I see is off the path, over near the river. The reeds in the still-icy water are bent and broken from months of snow. They look like the skeletons of flamingos whose feet had gotten stuck in the mud last fall. It is not a pretty place, not yet. Soon, the green will return to the grass, the leaves to the trees. Thousands of wildflowers will bloom: daisies and buttercups and bushy pink clover, shaking their little heads in the spring breeze at all the sordid activity around them. Now, under the first sun of the season, there are no other witnesses to what we do here.

The man nods at me. I think: Perhaps. He reminds me of the librarian. Slight of build, slight of hair, timid, startled to see me. I think again of the scene at the rest stop last year, when the tables were turned on me, when I played bottom to such a one as him. I shudder, for just the briefest of moments, discarding the thought. It is too intense, too frightening. To fall to my knees before this man is a terrifying thought. If I did, I fear, I would never stand up again. He would walk away sated, a sweet, sickening look of satisfaction on his unassuming face, but I'd remain where I was, unable to rise, my ankles caught by my desire and pinned to the ground. They'd find me much later as they would those flamingos: nothing but thin dry bones.

I move past him, farther down the path, towards a ring of trees. Here I feel safer, and the man I see in the shadows appeals to me. He is big, handsome, broad-shouldered. That his gut falls over his belt does not disturb me: here, in this place, perception is different. Anonymous sex is not, as Javitz likes to pretend, egalitarian. The very fat and the very old, the ugly and the sick still lurk on the sidelines, rarely allowed to participate and only occasionally permitted even to watch. Such a one as I remains prized: more than one scene have I broken up, the sound of zippers in my ears as I pass by, the scuffle of feet in the dust following me as I continue down the path.

But a paunch here is irrelevant. At tea dance, it would render the man unsuitable—no, more than that: invisible. At least, that is how he would be treated, although we would see him quite well enough and comment about him later, as if to say: “How dare he come here? How dare he offend us in this way?”

“That's the whole part of gay life that I can't stand,” Eduardo's voice is saying, even as the man's thick, stinking cock is in my mouth. “You got to act a certain way, look a certain way.”

“Oh, come on, like you don't play that game, with your boots and your vests without any shirt.”

When was that? Why, even now, even here, do my thoughts wander back to Eduardo, of a long walk along the beach, ice cream cones melting over our hands in a hot midday sun?

“I don't,” Eduardo insisted. “I'm not big and buff like you're supposed to be.”

“You're twenty-two. You don't need to be.”

“Puts a lot of pressure on us. I hate the whole tricking scene.”

I laughed at him. “You sure could've fooled me the night you picked me up.”

“You picked
me
up,” he said.

“As I recall quite distinctly,
you
approached
me,”
I pointed out.

He pouted, as if I'd never understand. “Why are gay men so addicted to sex?” he suddenly asked, and of course, I lectured him, telling him that sex was wonderful, beautiful, a rare gift—and that we as queers had one up on straights because we could embrace that gift, revere it. We'd already rejected part of the paradigm in fucking our own gender; why not go all the way and rewrite the rules of sex? “Sex makes us different. Not just
who
we have sex with, but
how.”
Was it me who said that to Eduardo, or Javitz who said it to me?

“But why is being different always
good?”
Eduardo asked me, his face pained with an expression I didn't fully understand then and can only surmise about now. “What's so great about being
different?”

I gag. The man is getting a little rough, pushing my head into his crotch, impaling my face on his dick. I struggle to break free, but he holds me there. I push at his thighs, finally wresting enough control to stumble backwards. His dick pops out of my mouth and wobbles in front of my face. There's another man now beside us, a fat, bald man whose stubby pink dick stands at attention. He pushes in toward me, but I turn my cheek to him. I cannot bring myself to touch him. I return to the first dick and resume my task.

He's gentler now, and he comes rather quickly, big gobs of white that streak the scuffed black leather of my jacket. He reaches down and tousles my hair, as if I were a good boy, or a good dog. I stand up and our eyes connect for the slenderest of seconds. These are the moments that continue to surprise me: the unexpected humanity of these places. Just when I've reduced this man to nothing more than a fat, smelly cock, he winks at me, and in that flash of eyeball I see a mother's devoted son, a grieving lover, a frightened father perhaps. He moves away brusquely, buttoning up his fly. I watch him as he goes, and wonder for a moment if I'll ever see him again.

In these places, few words are ever exchanged; sometimes not even a glance. But with each body comes another encounter, a deep, primal interplay of flesh. In those moments when a man comes, when he looks into my eyes with all the gratitude of a child, or when I come, feeling the warmth of a hand suddenly on my neck and the purr of appreciation in my ears, in those moments I love these men with all the passion with which I have ever loved anyone. I am lost in a deep and awful bliss, caught in a cycle of giving and receiving, discovering a generosity in myself and others I'd never known before.

Except, of course, for the fat man who stood on the sidelines watching, who zips up now and moves back along the path.

My heart aches for the man I have just sucked. The love comes fleetingly here; that does not make it any less profound, any less real. But in my mind I imagine him returning home: to his lover, perhaps, a gentle, understanding man for whom the fires of early passion have long since smoldered, but whose warm embrace is constant and enduring.

I consider leaving. I've gotten what I came here for: a hot memory, to hold in reserve, for some rainy weekend when Lloyd is gone, as he is so much of the time these days. I'll lie back on the bed and spit into my hand, stare up at the ceiling, and remember. No: I'll reconstruct. I'll view the scene as if I'm up there in the trees, looking down, watching myself and these two other men—yes, even the fat man will be part of my reverie. Mostly what I will recall is the flash of the man's eyes as he left, when our souls connected for that most tender of moments.