by Don Schecter
“I’m finished sunning for the day,” he said. “Let’s go up to my room. Would you like that?”
I wasn’t prepared for the lack of artifice, for the sincere directness of approach. I stammered, “Yes, I really would.” I could hear my eagerness to be with him revving up my voice as my mind raced to catch up with his. “But, I’m awfully sweaty. How about I shower and come to your room in fifteen minutes?”
“Suit yourself,” he said. “You look pretty good to me.”
I thanked him for the compliment. Imagine these youngsters! How different from the skulking we did as kids…hell, still do! It was downright refreshing to be complimented and sought after by a kid so good-looking and popular. My ego was in acceleration.
I showered and powdered and deodorized in my usual effort to please. Fifteen minutes later I was at his door, which he opened still in his trunks.
“Hi,” he said. “My name’s Gary Olson.” He held out a large hand and shook mine firmly.
“Jack,” I said. “Jack Palmer.”
“It’s a shame you went and put your clothes on just to let me take them off,” he said, grinning, as he started to lift my shirt. He bypassed my lips and went straight for my shoulders and chest, kissing, licking, lightly nipping. The rest of my clothes and his trunks went flying as his enthusiasm grew. At some point, he either threw me onto the bed, or backed me onto it—I don’t remember—all I know is that I was rushed, overwhelmed, taken unawares; and that it was breathtaking.
Lapping at my armpit, Gary made a sound like, “Yawkk!”
“What’s wrong?”
“You used a deodorant,” he said, with his tongue sticking out of a face twisted in disgust. “That tastes awful.”
“Sorry. Force of habit. I should have thought.” Actually, I never would have thought.
He went to the sink and wet a washcloth. He scrubbed both my armpits and then did a quick job on my crotch. Returning to position, he resumed lapping away. “Hmm,” he purred contentedly. “That’s much better.”
But I wasn’t reacting, and he seemed not to be noticing. Gary’s youthful enthusiasm was just that; it had nothing to do with me. His large frame sprang about, and just as I was warming to one position, he abandoned it for another. I couldn’t get him to slow down and let me into the game. He liked older men, but he had no idea how to please them. And I suspected he’d never hold still long enough to learn.
Finally, like a blind calf stumbles across its mother’s teat, his mouth found my penis and he started to suck. I figured at that point I could regroup and start responding, but Gary went at me like a bear savaging a fresh kill. His head pounded up and down in such furious motion, I was simply left behind, without sensation; and his activity lasted all of twenty-five seconds. He snapped to a kneeling position at the foot of the bed, his rigid erection pointing at me and said, “Now, you do me.”
“Not without a condom.”
“I don’t have any.”
“Didn’t you pick them up as we registered?”
“No, I don’t use them.”
“Well, you should.”
“What I mean is, I’ve never fucked or been fucked. I only suck, and I don’t believe you can catch anything that way.”
Where had he heard that? This was 1983 and the ways HIV could be spread were still uncertain. “At your age, you’ve never fucked? With anybody?” I asked suspiciously.
“Don’t you have the desire?”
“I sure do. But with all the AIDS nastiness lurking in the shadows, I’m holding off until I meet the right man. And then we’ll be monogamous. I’m afraid that if I tried it, I’d get hooked. I wouldn’t be able to stop, and I’d get myself in trouble.”
“It sounds like a harsh sentence to impose on yourself.”
“I’d rather not know what it’s like. That way I don’t know what I’m missing.”
“Lie back on the bed. Let me see what I can do without a condom.”
I used my tongue in as delicate and romantic a way as I could muster. I lapped at his balls, his inner thighs, and everywhere on his shaft except the opening. I wanted to thrill him, drive him crazy with desire, show him how it should be done. He suffered my ministrations for maybe a minute and a half.
“I’m sorry but it’s not the same. Won’t you do some proper sucking?”
“Even assuming you’re right, and that oral sex is safe, until it’s proven, I have loved ones at home to protect. I can’t take a chance for their sakes. I owe it to them to be sure.”
“No matter,” he said brightly. “Just let me go to work.” With this, he reversed our positions, so that I was on my back in the middle of the queen-sized bed. Then he went to the bath area and returned with a body oil he used to coat his erection. “Just hold your arm close to your side.” His body lurched against mine, landing so that his navel lay across my face, and began to pump away. It took me a moment to realize he was fucking my armpit.
Well, it did nothing for me, but it was novel. In the moment I took to evaluate it, Gary leapt across me and started working in my other pit. His more than two hundred pounds kept thudding against me, coaxing the springy mattress into a wild dance.
Seasickness crossed my mind.
Thirty seconds later, I was taught a new variation. He folded one of my legs over the other in the shape of the numeral 4, and proceeded to hump my knee joint where the calf and thigh held his member firmly. Of course, the other knee was similarly treated in under a minute. Huffing and sweating, really working hard, he imparted that he appreciated bodybuilders because the elbow opening between a massive forearm and a fully developed biceps muscle was especially desirable—the recipient could vary the pressure applied by flexing his muscles. One never knows what useful knowledge one may acquire!
He asked me to lie on my stomach, re-oiled his cock, and pumped my thighs while lying on top of me. I think he intended to maintain this position to climax, but he was frustrated by the depth of penetration he could achieve as my butt was more rounded than he anticipated.
He requested I turn onto my back and press my thighs together tightly. He stretched out on me and pumped away. This was mildly erotic as I got to see him working, and to touch his body. But as he pounded me with his whole weight, I began to feel like tenderized meat, and totally out of it. Gary, dripping sweat, was just coming into the stretch. He bolted to a kneeling position at the end of the bed and pulled me against him, my legs spread around his waist, ankles dangling beyond the mattress.
With his left hand he worked my lengthened but soft penis, while he pumped furiously at his own erection with his right. I might as well not have been there. Gary’s eyes were either closed, or open and unseeing. He was communing with himself internally, a Norseman practicing eastern meditation. Then his head jerked sideways and a low growl passed his lips. His body flushed even redder than his sunburn as his first burst of semen sailed over my head and struck the wall behind me. The second splatted just below that, depositing a fleck or two on my face in its flight. The third and last salvo splashed wetly onto my chest hair.
What a show! Worth the price of admission. I compared that youthful display of jet-propelled spasmodics to my own seed, which has dribbled over my fist for years, steadfastly refusing exhortations to flight.
Now I expected he would collapse against me and rest, and I would have a chance to hold him, but I was wrong. He awoke from his trance, dipped his face to my chest, and wiped it clean with his tongue. Then he sprang from the bed, and began to wash the oily residue off his softened dick at the sink. It was clear he was through with me. He was pleasant but uninterested.
“I have to be downstairs in five minutes. You’ll have to go now.”
I got off the bed and donned my gay apparel. I couldn’t help but admire the dripping spots on the wall.
“You’ll have to wipe those up,” I said.
“Right. I’ll take care of it. It’s something I’m used to.” He gave me a perfunctory peck on the cheek and pushed me out t
he door.
I went to my room trying to assimilate all that had just gone on. In a hot shower, where I removed the oil slick that coated me, I decided Gary hadn’t lost interest in me as a person because he never had any. I had been an object for his throbbing hard-on and, having ejaculated, he needed nothing more. Ahhh, youth.
A year later, I attended another convention in a Seattle hotel with a lover in my own age bracket. As we were checking in, my friend said, “There’s your old fuck-buddy over there.”
I looked across a sea of faces in the direction he was pointing and could discern none that looked familiar, other than those I knew well. Suddenly, a large man in a leather jacket, decorated with chains and silver studs, lumbered toward me with outstretched arms. As I allowed myself to be enveloped in a bear hug, I frantically searched the Rolodex in my mind for a match. There was none. The clean-shaven man hugging me was as bald as Daddy Warbucks, wore a gold earring, looked like an ex-con, and perhaps could have played a pirate’s henchman in a film. Not the pirate captain, mind you; he wasn’t leading-man material.
He pulled back and saw no light of recognition in my eyes. “Don’t you remember last year…by the ocean? Gary Olson?”
God, I hate to be caught flat-footed, but I sure didn’t see my Viking. I sputtered as I vaguely indicated his shining pate. “Wha’d you do to yourself?”
He was disappointed with me. “I told you I was a hairdresser. It’s different every month. Don’t you like it?”
“Oh, sure.” I tried to recover. “But you can hardly blame me. There’s so much face I didn’t get to see last year.”
“I understand. We’ll catch up later. Nice to run into you again.”
I stared after him, still refusing to recognize this billiard ball as my youthful Viking.
“How did you recognize him?” I asked my friend.
“Oh, I’ve known him for years. He’s queen of the quick-change artists.”
In the elevator on the way up to our room, I gave some thought to Gary Olson. This year, he would not even have caught my eye. I concluded that, although modern youth seems to have no trouble asserting and redefining itself, perhaps, after all, it does have a row that’s pretty hard to hoe. I wondered who would grace Gary’s bed that night, and if anything had changed. I didn’t think so but, of course, I had no way of knowing with certainty. I could only be sure of one thing; happily, it wouldn’t be me.
Transfiguration
“Shut that damned thing off,” I shouted over Callas’s vibrato. “Dennis, please turn it off.”
Dennis’s free hand moved feebly across the sheet until it located the small black remote. He pushed a button and the music stopped abruptly.
“You have forty recordings of that aria; why does it always have to be Callas?”
He smiled impishly at me from the hospital bed that had taken over our bedroom.
“Because she is immortal,” he said with satisfaction. “Turning her off doesn’t kill her.”
“Everyone who ever cut a recording is immortal. You don’t know what her voice does to me. It grates on my ears like fingernails on a blackboard.”
“La Divina sings Casta diva like no one else ever has. Her voice excites me and makes me vibrate with life.”
“I know,” I said, relenting, remembering how our playing field was slanted—
Dennis’s flame nearly extinguished; me, pulsing with vitality. “It’s the voice that makes them live forever, like Garland and Monroe.” He had said that to me many times.
“And maybe Sally Kellerman. When she does a voice-over, I see viscous oils dripping over the product she’s hyping, like Log Cabin syrup over Aunt Jemima pancakes.”
“She isn’t dead yet; she can’t be immortal,” I protested.
“But she will be, Joel. I’m leaving you behind to watch it happen.”
Dennis raised his hand with the dripping IV attached, and beckoned to me. I sat on the edge of the bed and placed my palm under his so as not to disturb the needle.
“How are you?” I asked in a serious tone.
“Fine. All right. Terrible. I’m fine because I can still listen to Callas. I’m all right because I’ve been thinking about what it means to die, and hoping that at this stage of my life I might be privy to new insights. I’m terrible because I haven’t come to any conclusions yet.”
“Are you in much pain?”
“No, actually. I think the cancer must be destroying the nerves as fast as the blood cells. My ability to feel pain seems to have gone with my ability to stand up by myself.”
I looked into his face. It was drawn from weight loss, but still fine-featured and handsome. At seventy, Dennis’s face could have modeled for Modern Maturity. His eyes glistened with intelligence and wit, but his body had shriveled; he was now a glowing mind atop a matchstick. I easily carried him in my arms when I changed his sheets.
“If it has to be, I’m glad it’s this way,” I said.
“Which way?”
“If your body were sound and you were in a coma, I’d be so frustrated and lost without you. This way, I can be with you and we can share things until the very end.”
“That’s what I’ve been thinking about—the very end. Perhaps there is none.” He looked at me thoughtfully, and I waited for him to continue. “I’ve been thinking what a small, insignificant intelligence I’ve got—in the scheme of things, I mean—and if I can’t understand the latest scientific theories, maybe that’s the reason I can’t resolve dying.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked on cue, knowing he enjoyed being prompted.
“Well, the latest theory is that the universe doesn’t have any beginning or end; it loops back on itself and encloses everything. There’s nothing outside it—on the back side, as it were—because it has no back side. And I simply can’t comprehend that…that there’s nothing beyond something.”
I felt a swell of joy inside me as Dennis launched into one of his flights of reason. In our twenty years together, I couldn’t hope to remember the number of times I lay with him after sex, my head on his arm, dozing as is my wont, as he gestured with a cigarette at the ceiling and philosophized. He was always trying to make the world make sense and, for me, it seemed he almost always succeeded because, at my stage of life, I was still grappling with the easy problems. Dennis, thirty years my senior, was always in the lead.
As he did when he taught in college, he loved to shepherd an inquiring mind; and I was willing to follow him wherever he led. Fearlessly, we attacked religion, politics, sex, and the life force. We rarely came to conclusions, but we never ran out of material.
“Go on,” I encouraged. “I know there’s more to this.”
“Well, it’s obvious. If they are right, and I can’t perceive it, then maybe life is endless and has no boundaries, and I’m just too stupid to conceive of it.”
“I’m afraid that life is like television, my friend. Little substance, lots of commercials, and when you turn it off, the picture shrinks to nothing and everything goes black.”
“Ah, Joel, my friend, you’re forgetting that I hold the remote. I can always switch it back on.”
“Unless the set is broken.”
“Well yes, there’s that. I’ll work on it some more.”
His eyes twinkled: it was so hard to believe he was leaving me. I took a deep breath.
“Suppose I give you your medicine and you get some sleep?” I drew the drapes part way.
“Yes, sir,” Dennis said, his eyes still glinting in the half light. “And then, if you’ll put in your earplugs, I’ll just drift off with a little Callas.”
I averted my face, but he knew I was smiling and shaking my head. I couldn’t deny him his most enduring pleasure any more than I could stop loving him.
Our days continued like that: mild interplay punctuated by longer and longer naps, with Callas lulling Dennis to drowse, caressing him when he roused. He hadn’t made up his mind about life after death when, two weeks later, with his
beloved Callas whispering in the background, Dennis died peacefully in his sleep.
We held a wake, our friends and I. There were no tears as we were all well-prepared for Dennis’s death by the months when he was bedridden. They brought food and wine and came to celebrate Dennis’s life. We toasted him, wherever he might be, and hoped he was attending never-ending concerts by Garland, Monroe, and Callas.
We watched a videotape of Niagara—well, maybe we didn’t watch; we let it play in the background. It was one of Dennis’s favorites—so bad it was good, he was fond of saying. We paused our joking and conversation for Marilyn’s rendition of Kiss and, when the carillon played the melody, I was transported back to all the films connected by bells that Dennis had loved: Valli’s bells, Jean Seberg’s, Maureen O’Hara’s.
Dennis had always said he regretted resembling Joseph Cotten in Niagara; however, he liked the fact that I resembled Marilyn’s mysterious boyfriend: wavy black hair, slender, and heavy in the chest. The resemblances were purely physical of course; nothing in our lives paralleled the plot of the film.
As our friends departed, in pairs or singly, they wished me well. Some stayed to straighten up the house and put away the food. They offered to help me restore the bedroom to its former appearance—nothing had been touched—but I wanted to leave it as it was for a while. I wasn’t ready just yet to let go.
I sat in the living room and sipped a glass of champagne. I wasn’t sad; I was a realist.
Much of my grieving had already been done while Dennis lived. But every now and then I needed windshield wipers to clear my eyes, even though I had known this was coming.
God, he was thirty years my senior! Barring an unforeseen event, there was no way this wasn’t going to happen. So I preferred to look on the joyous side, the years of happiness.
You can be sad about inevitability, but you can’t let it get to you. It’s the way of the world.
I walked into the bedroom and switched on the light. Even the IV was still standing there. The last time I helped him walk to the window, with the IV attached, he said he felt like Pinocchio on a string. He said he wanted to be a real boy, free to wander. Well, he was free now.
