The Men from the Boys (3 page)

“Do you remember when we were at Hands Around the Capitol?” he asks. I nod. Of course I do. “I tricked with that guy. What was his name?”

“James,” I tell him.

“Oh, yeah. Is he dead?”

“How would I know?”

“I was just wondering.” He closes his eyes. “Ask Lloyd. Maybe he knows. He tricked with him, too.”

And he might very well. Lloyd stays in touch with his tricks, even falls in love with them a little bit. I could never understand that—at least, not before last summer. It's a dangerous game, falling in love with tricks. They can break your heart in a whole different way than a lover can.

Lloyd was supposed to come with me here tonight to Beth Israel to see Javitz, but he got beeped at the last minute. He's a psychologist for a crisis program over at Mass General. Mom always wanted my sister to grow up and marry a doctor; I beat her to it. “Tell Javitz for me,” Lloyd said on his way out the door, “he better not die or anything when I'm not there.”

Lloyd loves Javitz in a way I can't: free of guilt, free of a history that lingers between us. I envy that love. What must it be like, I wonder, when there's nothing that hangs around in the back of your mind like dirty socks in a closet, their existence unseen but their presence always known?

And Javitz loves Lloyd in a way impossible for me: free of doubt, free of competition. We're basically the same age, Lloyd and I, and in the gym we play silly little games: who can press the most weight, whose pecs stand out better beneath a white T-shirt, who gets the most looks from the boys. Yet neither of us would admit to playing such games or the seriousness with which we play them.

“You're thinking about Lloyd and what he told you that Sunday morning last month,” Javitz says.

“No, I'm not,” I lie.

“Jeff, you've got to stop being so afraid.”

I react. “I'm not the one preoccupied with death.”

He gives me a look, eyes wide and eyebrows up. Maybe he's right: why else has my mother's riddle—that damned radiator with the steaming fangs—come back to haunt me?

“You and Lloyd have been together for six
years,
Jeff. It's all right to be going through this.”

“We're not ‘going through' anything,” I snap.

I wonder if Javitz ever thinks about what he and I might have been going through had
we
lasted six years. I met Javitz when I was just twenty-two, the same age as Eduardo, the boy I fell in love with last summer in Provincetown. Javitz was thirty-seven, just a little older than I am today. He seemed so
old
to me then: but old in a
good
way—a way these boys I trick with must see me. An older brother who's still young enough to fuck but old enough to explain what's going on. Before Javitz, all I had been looking for was a place to put my dick. Wide-eyed, eager, and horny, I was new to Boston, having arrived for my grad program in English at UMass with all the zest any boy feels upon his first move to a real city. I met Javitz at a reading by Allen Ginsberg, the very first poetry besides Dr. Seuss I'd ever heard read out loud. But what excited me more was the prospect of the boys who would undoubtedly show up. I wasn't disappointed. There were plenty of boys, but it was Javitz who caught my notice, Javitz with his long black hair and smoke-chewed laugh and the magnificent way he saw right into my terror.

“You there,” he said, across the cheese and crackers. I raised my eyebrows questioningly. “Yes,
you
.” He grinned. “You look as if you need someone to show you around.”

I did, of course. We made a date for the next night. He took me to dinner at an Italian restaurant in the north end of Boston, with red and white checked tablecloths and carafes of red wine. He promised to show me gay Boston and, if I wanted, gay New York too, sometime. “Sure,” I agreed, awestruck, sitting across the table from him. He knew so much, had been to so many places.

“How old are you?” he asked, sitting back in his chair.

“Twenty-two,” I told him.

“Twenty-two?
Who has ever been twenty-two?” he sighed grandly.

“You, I imagine,” I said, trying to be cute. “Once.”

It worked. He winked at me, and both of us were hooked. “So,” he asked, next question: “Are you out?”

I lied, of course, and told him yes. Isn't it funny? No one's ever closeted when you ask them. But Javitz, as I was to discover, was a big-time activist, and he saw right through the cobwebs that shrouded my closet door.

We went back to his apartment, a third-floor space in Cambridge near Harvard Square, crammed with books on Plato, the Trojan Wars, and Billie Holiday. Javitz taught ancient history at one of the community colleges. He enjoyed teaching, he said, but activism was what he loved most. “Every once in a while some trick will try to impress me with his knowledge of the fall of the Roman Empire,” he said. “I tell them: ‘That happened fifteen hundred years ago. Did you vote in the last election?' ”

He showed me pictures of the very first New York Gay Pride parade, pasted down in an old photo album with those little black corner holders. They revealed Javitz—back when he was still David Mark Javitz from the Bronx—in his big fuzzy Jewish Afro with peace signs dangling from around his neck. Later, he moved to Boston and became one of the heroes of the movement. In his scrapbook were clippings of demonstrations, of the passage of the gay rights law, quotes from David Javitz highlighted in yellow. One even had his photo (how much rounder his face was then) with the caption “Gay Activist Demands Change.”

I remember when we all got together for the city's first ACT UP meeting. Talking about getting arrested made me nervous, but Javitz assured us all he'd gone to jail before. He'd been in anti-war protests during the sixties, he. explained.

“I was in grade school during the sixties,” an ACT UP boy with seven piercings through his nose teased.

“That's
your
misfortune,” Javitz responded, unruffled.

He was fond of saying: “Youth is nothing but an instant in time, when we don't know what the fuck we're doing but we believe ever so earnestly in the importance of doing it.”

He told me he'd tested positive just a few months before, one of the first to go for the test after it became available. He was also the first person I knowingly had sex with who had the virus. I was young. I don't remember any fear. Hot, healthy, horny. I'd read the pamphlets, been to the workshops. I knew my way around HIV. There was never any fucking with Javitz, not even with condoms. I rarely took the head of his dick into my mouth. When I did, it was a big occasion, one that he was grateful for but never expected. It was the mid-eighties. We all were so different then.

Right now, I can't remember why I broke up with Javitz. We lasted not quite four years. I was twenty-six. He was forty-one. Maybe that was it. But it's hardly enough of an answer: we don't talk much about it, so maybe we'll never know.

“I wonder if I'll see Richard Nixon when I die,” Javitz is wondering.

“Heaven wouldn't make much sense if you do,” I reply. “Republican crooks and angry AIDS activists living together for eternity?”

That's when it hits me: why my mother's riddle has come back to me at this particular time. And why it so terrified me all those years ago. It didn't make any sense, and mothers were supposed to make sense. The riddle was utter nonsense, and that's ultimately why it scared me so.

I mean, if what happened to the girl was that the radi ate her—what is a “radi”? If that little syllable had some double meaning—slang for “rhinoceros” or something—it would have carried some logic that would have made the riddle much more clever. But “radi” means nothing, so how could a “radi” eat her?

Thus I had an image of this heinous radiator coming to life like some mad creature out of the late-night horror movie and devouring the poor girl. It would have strained against its bolts, finally breaking free, its hot iron elongating into claws. Then it would have loomed over the girl before consuming her in its steaming mouth.

But now, as I sit here and watch Javitz fall asleep, I think that the reason the riddle so frightened me was not so much the demonic radiator but the image of the girl being shut up in a room with no way to get out—abandoned, left to die, forgotten. They put her in there and left her all alone, defenseless, against that hellish radiator. And my mother had the nerve to ask: “What happened to the girl?”

Hah. As if she didn't know.

Provincetown, June 1994

“Aw, yeah, man.”

His nipples taste salty. I test them with my teeth. Eduardo moans softly in appreciation. Rare that a boy's nipples should be so sensitive. Usually takes years.

He's stretched across my bed, still in his vest and shorts. I lick the hollow space between his taut pectorals: smooth warm skin, tasting bitterly of sunblock. He has a fit of passion: grabbing me from behind he pulls me down to his mouth. We kiss hard, clinking teeth, an accidental toast. He rolls over to straddle me and begins kneading my chest, playing top for as long as I let him.

Now his vest is on the floor and my shirt is gone, and we're kicking off our shoes. That's always the most awkward part: the shoes. Unlacing trendy boots—black Doc Martens on him, beige work boots on me—takes time, and pulling them off sweaty feet, with moist, unyielding socks, is work. But we manage. He helps me with mine, even going so far as to pretend to lick the scuffed brown leather of my right boot. Oh, how boys like to pretend they're into things that will in reality take them
years
to actualize.

We're soon just in our cut-off denim shorts, legs entangled. His energy excites me, urges me on. I decide it's time to claim my place on top and wrestle Eduardo underneath me. I grab hold of his nipples and clamp down, little fleshy knobs between my forefingers and thumbs. He groans. I sidle up over his chest and shove my crotch in his face. He bites the faded denim. “Suck it,” I tell him, and he moans again.

I wonder how many cocks this twenty-two-year-old has sucked in his life. Even as he's unbuttoning my fly, I'm doing arithmetic. Even in a moment of such passion, I'm still up on the ceiling looking down. He's twenty-two. Born when I was ten. When Nixon was in office. He was six when I sucked my first cock. Six.

But he knows what to do. How do boys learn these things? How did I learn?

(His name was Gordon, one of my two best friends in high school. “You've done this before?” Gordon asked. He had, of course: with our other buddy Stick. “Sure,” I lied. “Mmm, that's good,” Gordon told me, vindicating my make-believe.)

I ease Eduardo up and kiss him. I taste my own cock in his mouth. “You're so nice,” he murmurs into my ear. I bite his neck, my lips shielding my teeth like living condoms. He purrs in gratitude.

And now he's on top of me again, playing with my nipples while I stroke my dick and reach up to lick the head of his. He groans, “Aw, yeah,” as I shoot—long stringy ejaculations of white that torpedo across the bed and make me proud.
See that, kid?
Go ahead and try to shoot that far. Just try.

He does. And almost succeeds. But I still win.

Then I'm exhausted. “Man,” I say, falling back into the pillows.

He lies down next to me, on his side, his nose to my ear. This is the point where they always want to cuddle. Did I say the shoes were the most awkward part? No: this is.

“Are you one of those types who kicks a guy out after having sex?” Eduardo says, half teasingly.

I look at the digital clock next to the bed, glowing green in the dust-colored darkness. It's 3:25 a.m. “If you want to stay, you can.”

I'm distant. I'm a jerk. He picks up on it. “Do
you
want me to?” he asks in a little voice.

“You should know something,” I say.

“Don't tell me. You have a boyfriend.”

“Yes,” I tell him.

“I knew it.”

He sits up in bed. This, too, is part of the script.

Boys out on the street caterwaul, whooping about something. For a moment, I wonder if they're cute, cuter than Eduardo. In the distance, the soulful sound of a foghorn warns ships not to come too close to this place.

“I can't believe it,” Eduardo says. “Why didn't you tell me before?”

“It wasn't relevant,” I say. I know my lines.

“What do you mean, ‘It wasn't relevant'?”

“I mean, it's okay,” I say. “Lloyd does it too. It's okay.”

Eduardo is shaking his head. “Well, not for me.”

“So when
yoas're
in a relationship, be monogamous.”

“You don't get it. I don't sleep with married men.”

“Well,” I laugh, “you just did.” I reach over, putting my arm around him and sitting real close. “Listen, just because I have a boyfriend doesn't mean I can't get to know other people. That's the beauty of being gay. Not being fenced in by definitions, restrictions. I really enjoyed myself tonight. And I'd like to see you again.”

“Why?”

Good question. Because you have the most beautiful nipples? Because you give good head? “Because I like you,” I say.

“I'm not just looking for sex,” he says, in that righteous voice boys use when they are attempting to stand firm for some principle in which they think they believe.

“So you were hoping we'd get
married?”
I ask, with emphasis on the incredulity.

It works. He sounds suitably embarrassed. “No, no,” he says, looking away. “But I always hope that every new guy ...”