“Mind if I sit down?”
It was the bouncer from Tipitina’s.
“Make yourself comfortable,” I said. Suddenly I was alert, roused from my torpor. I felt the presence of sex and danger at once, cool air flowing over me, tingling my flesh.
“You all by yourself this afternoon, hunh … seems like I’m in the same situation. My lady doing her social duties today, letting me fend for myself, so to speak.”
He was leaning back against the bench, blue serge slacks pulling tight over his thighs, a polka dot shirt gapping here and there down the front. His hair was slick with pomade, and he had a gold-capped tooth that shone in his smile. Around his neck was a chain hung with small charms, amulets. The smell of peaches, of sharp cologne, talc.
He looked down at my drawing pad, then around the park.
“What sort of drawing you do? Not much here to look at, that’s the truth. Draw some of this night life here in the Quarter, get some of this here local color.” He laughed, a low rumbling sound that got inside you, made your skin dance. I felt his magnetism, his sexual energy. He leaned a little closer, lowered his voice, let it boil slowly, confidentially. I was feeling fidgety, uncomfortable, stuck to the moment like a fly on flypaper.
“Too hot out here by half. What do you say we take a walk over to my crib. It’s not far, just over toward Jackson. Get us a little re-lax-a-tion.” He winked as he articulated each syllable, and my face got hot, and he laughed to see the color there. Maybe, if I didn’t say anything in compliance, it wouldn’t be my fault. Maybe I could just drift along …
HIS CRIB AS HE CALLED IT was a basement apartment, small and dark with a dressmaker’s dummy in the corner and sheets of paper stuck with pins on a big red upholstered chair. He switched on an electric fan that had little strips of ribbon hanging from it, got out a bottle of gin, and poured two glasses.
“Here’s to it,” he said, and drained the glass in one motion, then reached over and pulled me against him.
“Feel that?” he wanted to know, his lips moving against my ear … “That’s what all these women wanting hereabouts … gonna give you some today, see what you can do with it.”
He pulled back, and I took as much gin as I could swallow. He looked at me till I looked away, and his trousers came off like the skin off a banana. I got scared for a moment, but that passed, and then he took charge and I just let it happen, getting hotter and hotter the guiltier I felt. His joint was like a forearm and a fist, the kind you see drawn on rest-room walls, in eight-page bibles, never expect to see in life. Not up close.
“Bigger it is, the easier it is,” he was saying, stretching me out on the carpet. Some little fluffy yellow cat had come out of the shadows, and stood watching; I stared at its face as mine bent backwards. With James, sex was give and take and a lot of caring. This wasn’t anything to do with that, this was winding me and unwinding me like a top, seeing how much and for how long, playing with a rag doll that didn’t protest.
More gin, and more. I was learning about life, taking a good long drink at the well of the senses. And hearing the bells of St. George’s, closer than on Borchardt Street, so close they seemed to come from inside my own head. Feeling they might crack the walls of my skull wide open, keep me crazy and freakish, for good and always.
It was late when I finally pulled away from Leopold and out of his sticky lair, so late the stars were out and the moon was filling up with light, the night birds busy in the trees. It might be James was still asleep, and I could keep mum. Maybe you did something like this and just walked away from it. Dad once said that a man has to take his actions upon himself, and keep them to himself—that telling all and whining for forgiveness only put the burden on somebody else. Was that true?
Back at Mrs Odum’s the supper plates were still clean on the table in the dining room, and the sound of Thomas watching TV in the kitchen seemed to me reassuring, calming. I crept up the stairs, but caught the glances of Mr Mulkin and Mr McBride who were sitting in the parlor playing checkers. I felt they could see everywhere my body had been and everything it had done in the last few hours. But they were gentlemen, and, seeing me creeping in so furtively, pretended they didn’t see me at all.
Upstairs, the light was off in James’ room, and that was when I should have left well enough alone. But I was in a state, and had to be sure everything was as it was before my adventure—that was a good word for it—and so I pushed his door open and peeked inside.
“Mickey? I been wondering where you all got off to. Come over here … come on …” He was propped up in bed, with no light but the moonlight coming through the window and I couldn’t tell how long he’d been awake.
In that light, there was something catlike about his eyes, the deep brown shining with a milky blue. I came to him and lay down beside him.
“I’m sorry I’ve been outside so long, just drawing, out in the park, trying to get something done …”
He didn’t say anything in reply, and I pressed close against him. He’d thrown off the sheet and lay smooth and naked in the patch of moonlight, and I thought, this is a painting, this is art, just this.
In a soft voice he asked, “Where’s your drawing pad?” His hands weren’t moving on my body the way they usually did. He was waiting, hanging in the moonlight.
I’d left my pad at Leopold’s. Thrown in the chair with his old lady’s dress patterns. Left behind, forgotten.
“Gotta get a new one,” I said, in my squeaky little voice. “Used it all up.”
“I bet you did,” he said, slow and deliberate. He sat up, facing away from me on the other side of the bed. “Better take a shower,” he said in a flat voice I’d never heard before, “cause you be smelling like something out of a whorehouse.”
He was up and pulling on his slacks and shirt, bending over to lace up his suede shoes.
“James …” I didn’t know what words would come out of my mouth, but the panic I felt was something I had to cover.
“I don’t want to hear it. Whatever you think you gotta say, you go tell it to the wall.”
He was standing by the door now, and I jumped out of bed and tried to put my arms around him, but he pulled away. I guess he saw in my face the fear and panic and shame. Maybe he relented a little, and for a minute let me hold on to him. Then he was out the door, and down the stairs. And I wasn’t half of something glorious anymore. I wasn’t sure and proud and invincible. I was shivering and cold in an overheated room in New Orleans, somebody small and insignificant and alone, somebody who’s just thrown away more than he knew he had.
Next morning, I got up out of that pink bed and went to work as usual. Crying through the night hadn’t done me any good, and waiting for James to come back had made the minutes seem hours. I decided I would go off to Regalia, and when I came home in the afternoon, he’d be there again, and he’d understand I was miserable about going off. He’d forgive me, and everything would be fine.
It was a humid morning; the men at the factory had their shirts off by ten o’clock. The Louisiana State Fair had sent in a rush order for cattle and poultry rosettes and badges, and old Harris was running back and forth, exhorting the women to clean it up, clean it up.
Just before noon, when there was a temporary lull, I saw out of the corner of my eye that Louie had leaned back in his chair and was giving his nether self an airing. He looked over at us, to make sure he had a gallery, but only Roscoe and I seemed to be aware of him, busy as all the rest were lining up their Firsts and Seconds and Honorable Mentions. And I saw that Roscoe was in a state himself, as if the steam coming off the type was rolling off his head and shoulders: as if he was some kind of animal about to jump.
The clack-clack of the presses covered the words he was saying—I could only see his mouth working and the muscles of his jaw clenching and unclenching. He turned to look, and abruptly turned back to his press, letting the length of red ribbon he was printing fall beside him. He leaned forward for a moment and pressed his forehea
d against the wall, and I could see a tremor moving across his shoulders.
Then he wheeled around and came at Louie with his line of type, brandishing it above his head like a hammer. He was yelling and swearing, and Louie stood up so fast to ward him off, his pants stayed in the chair. He twisted away, his joint slapping one thigh then the other, and thrust him off. Roscoe was scrambling over the type table, Pica and English flying all around him, and I was suddenly in the middle of it, trying to pull him back. Beets, the man on the other side, was pulling at me, and it was as if Roscoe was made out of iron himself, he was so powerful. Red-eyed and furious he fought back—the letters in his type stick were like hot, glowing teeth. All the women were screaming, and the girl just on the other side of Louie’s desk was looking across at him with an expression of horror and disbelief.
Harris scurried over from the far end of the long workroom —I had my eye on him as much as on Roscoe, thinking now it would all come to an end, when Roscoe turned and caught me across the stomach with his smoldering stick.
So hot it didn’t burn at first, the type left three letters on me —when I looked down I saw the SEC burned into me, and was outraged, and I slumped against the table. My strength drained away. The pain came fast enough, and then I was flailing at Roscoe, with Harris and Weeks standing over us, and the other printers finally getting Roscoe’s arms behind him.
The pain and the heat made me nauseous. Beets helped me out of the press room, into the lounge where there was a ratty old couch I could lie down on. I could hear the loud voices, Roscoe’s yelling, almost weeping, then a woman’s voice—which I guessed was his wife’s—rising and falling, and gradually the noise of the machines taking over again. Weeks came in, tight-mouthed and stiff, and said they couldn’t countenance brawling, and that I had better pick up my check and call it quits. Just then the door to the nearest toilet stall swung open and Louie came out, shaking his head and grinning, but looking worried when he saw the blisters on my stomach. He told Weeks it wasn’t my fault, that Roscoe had come after him, and that he was surely indebted to me for helping him out. Weeks looked dubious but grudgingly accepted his words, and I came to understand I wasn’t fired after all. Louie got some salve from the office and patted it on the burn, and wrapped gauze around me, humming his bayou melodies all the while. His tobacco-stained fingers were softer, gentler than I would have imagined, and his scratchy song was like a lullabye—it was all his fault of course, but I felt my anger coming undone as he patted my skin. He leaned close enough that I could smell the tobacco on his breath, his solicitude easing the stinging pain that ought to have been his.
They told me to take the rest of the day off. Louie walked downstairs with me, and said again how sorry he was, and we shook hands. I said it wasn’t his fault, really. I wondered whose fault it was. Roscoe was clearly out of himself, and you couldn’t blame craziness, could you? Blame evaporated in the air, along with the smell of sizing and gold leaf. And there was in the pain I felt something almost ennobling. I felt the sweet sanctity of the victimized.
I wasn’t fired, but I knew I wasn’t going back to Regalia. I sat out on the back porch, listening to Thomas in the kitchen as he chuckled and snickered at the dancers on “American Bandstand.” A blond girl named Franny Giordana was striking attitudes on the Philadelphia dance floor, part jitterbug, part twist, being cute and oblivious. Living for the camera. The sound of Sam Cooke’s high clear tenor came out to me as I sat waiting for James—Bring it, bring it on home to me—ringing out lustrous and lyrical, floating over the hydrangeas and the sweet peas. I leaned against the rickety balcony and knew it was over, all of it: the summer, my life in New Orleans, the spiraling freedom that had tossed me around one time too often.
Through the screen door I watched as Franny’s blond curls and smug pout gave way to the face of Dick Clark, and I looked away, and wondered, in the fullness of my disillusion and self-pity, what was to become of me, after all.
SEX STORY
Robert Gluck
BRIAN UNDID THE BUTTONS OF MY LEVI’S one by one, pulled down my pants and Egyptian red cotton briefs; white skin and then my cock springs back from the elastic—“hello old timer.” A disappointing moment when possibilities are resolved and attention localized, however good it’s going to be. So it’s going to be a blow job—that’s nice. So it’s going to be sex—nice, but less than the world. That blow job defined the situation, then a predictable untangling of arms and legs and stripping off shoes and clothes, my jeans, his corduroys, lighting sand candles, putting on records, closing straw blinds, turning back sheets, turning off lights. Brian has a way of being naked a few minutes at a distance—he politely averts his eyes so I can study him unselfconsciously.
“From his small tough ears, his thick neck came down to his shoulders in a long wide column of muscles and cords that attached like artwork to the widened ‘V’ of his clavicle, pointing the way to his broad, almost football padded shoulders and then down to those muscular arms, covered with blond hair. The tits were firm, and never jiggled, though the nipples were almost the size of a woman’s, and seemed always to be in a state of excitement. A light patch of blond hair was growing like a wedge between them, and a long racing stripe of blond hair led the eye down over the contour of his rippling stomach muscles, past the hard navel, and streamlined down to a patch of only slightly darker pubic hair. There, in all its magnificence, hung the ‘Dong’. Its wide column of flesh arched out slightly from his body, curving out and downwards in its solidness to the pointing tip of its foreskin where the flesh parted slightly exposing the tip of a rosebud cockhead. The width of the big cock only partially hid a ripe big sack behind it, where two spheric globes of his balls swelled out on either side of it. The cock hung down freely, without the slightest sign of sexual arousal, and still it spanned downward a full third of the boy’s young strong legs.
“ ‘Turn around slowly,’ Cliff said to Rags, unbuttoning his own shirt and pulling it back off his torso ...”
That was from Fresh From the Farm by Billy Farout, pp.2021. I want to write about sex: good sex without boasting, descriptive without looking like plumbing, happy, avoiding the La Brea Tar Pits of lyricism. Brian is also golden, with a body for clothes, square shoulders, then nothing but the essentials decked out with some light and pleasant musculature. He carries his shoulders a little hunched—the world might hit him on the head —which goes with a determined niceness that can become a little grim, like taking the bus to the LA airport to meet me. But if he has his blind spots, Bruce, Kathy, Denise and I said philosophically in various combinations over cups of coffee—well, who doesn’t. It’s that this one doesn’t correspond to ours. Five years ago Brian painted a picture of a house and had many delusions about it. Finally he went to live in the relative safety of its rooms. I can understand that. Brian looks like anyone. Rags looks like no one; he’s an alluring nightmare that reduces the world to rubble. Really, I could never grasp Brian’s looks, a quality I admire. When I understand his face, solve it into planes and volumes, factor in blond hair and green eyes, then he turns his head a little, the essential eludes me and I must start all over. Sometimes he’s intact as a fashion model exuding sunlight. Sometimes he’s a fetus, big unfortunate eyes and a mouth pulled down, no language there, his fingers and toes waiting to be counted.
I knelt and returned his blow job, his body tensed toward me and his cock grew in my mouth according to his heartbeat, each pulse a qualification that sent me backward to accept more. I was not completely in favor of his cock—it seemed indecisive —but he didn’t care about it either. When I complimented him —“the fineness of its shape”—he shrugged and the compliment didn’t register. It was his ass, full and generous, that we concentrated on.
He more or less pushed me onto the bed and tumbled after me, raising our exchange a level by blowing me while looking into my eyes. He’s giving me pleasure and looking at me, keeping me focused. I’m acknowledging that. There’s no way to dismiss this by
saying I’m lost in a trance, by pretending I am not myself. Still, I make up an escape clause—I say: I put myself entirely in your hands and what I know you desire is to put yourself in mine, so I demand what I know you want me to want. I stood and commanded him to blow me, to do this and that: crawl behind and rim me while I masturbate myself. Brian replied, “As James Bond used to say, ‘There’s no mistaking that invitation.’ ” A tongue in your ass is more intimate than a cock anywhere; I receive the sensation inside my groin, in my knees and nipples and wrists. Now this was like a porno movie, or the sex ads in the gay newspapers:
Top (Father, Cowboy, Coach, Cop) wants Bottom (Your prisoner and toy)—and conversely.
29—34? Small waist. W/M, Fr a/p, Delicious tongue worship your endw. Lean back & watch yr hot rod get super done, Sir. Don’t any of you with long poles want to be shucked down and get some down-home Fr?
exhibitionism, j/o, facesitting,
Close Encounters in Venice.
What made it sexy? Probably the posture that isolated sex, isolated fantasy. He blew me and I took one step backward. He murmured, loving to crawl forward. The gesture, economical and elegant as a hawk’s wing, pointed toward a vista that was not geographical.
I lifted him and we kissed passionately, our first real kissing filled with deep tongues and assy fragrance, running my tongue over his lips, each tooth defined by a tongue, our saliva tastes the same, he played with our cocks and I carried him to the— no, first he knelt and licked me, licked my feet and legs, tongued between my toes. “I don’t like pain but I don’t mind a good spanking.” I obliged, spanking him on one cheek, then the other, while he blew me and masturbated himself. Then I had to piss and Brian made coffee. What if friendship and love are extras tagged onto sexuality to give it a margin of safety, of usefulness based on repressive goals, and the relations between subject and object, usually dismissed as a set of perversions, were the heart of sex? Brian slipped into the bathroom while I was thinking and pissing. To my surprise he knelt and drank from my cock, looking at me. I wonder what I’m getting into, I said to myself, getting into it.
Men on Men Page 28
