Between Men

by Richard Canning

  I told him to touch his toes and to stand on his toes so his muscles were taut and he relinquished his balance to me. I bent him in half and really gave it to him, bringing forward another measure of time, sort of fast-forward. My goodwill counted for nothing. He felt compromised and humiliated, his ass taking the place of his head. Half of our bodies sizzled in the space heater, half froze like planets without atmosphere. The flesh on his body was intelligent and knew what it was doing, except for the mounds of his ass, which were ignorant and required tenderness and direction. Stupid in the sense of giving blind access and needing to be organized by a penis. That is the penis speaking, but what did it do but disorganize? I wanted to keep him from coming till he was desperate. I grabbed his tiny waist, pulling him up, he wouldn’t, I pulled harder, and then his huffing noises told me he was coming. “Why didn’t you say so?” He stood. Bill said that was the first time he was penetrated by a cock, and I was surprised. I would not have been so rough, but he was glad. To return to my shame—orgasm.

  When I looked in the mirror in his bathroom, I didn’t see the conflict inside me that seeks resolution inside some man’s rump—the strange continual urge that suffers so much from its simplicity. Instead, I saw my father, who’d died two years before. Would I be writing more if I had less sex? It’s an idea from the fifties. I shove gratification down, and up pops a force that pushes civilization forward. I suppose sublimation was the last gasp of empire and the Freudian version of republican restraint. Certainly, peering at Bill’s butt hole from a distance of two or three inches, I felt unbelievably lucky, though at the same time I wondered what I was doing to myself, and where my body came into it, as though mixing some grief into my excitement made the excitement honest, as though this sex were duplicating something that made me teary. I had not allowed myself to put my mouth on his asshole because that was not safe sex, but I wondered if I was harming myself in some other way. Early sexual experiences torque one’s sexuality because they are the expression of all sexual need. What can be said about sex when one is old? Since each experience could be the last? It’s hard not to feel sex as some mistake. Some extra fear has gathered around the sexual urge. Testosterone drips from a leaky faucet that someone forgot to turn off. It’s rotting the foundation of the structure. Will I want sex when I can no longer move or speak? Would I be spending my old age trying to remember some boy’s butt hole seen first through my bifocals? A vague tear burning miles deep inside the empty sky of my chest, world too large, a pang of emptiness, delicate terror.

  Bill wore an alarmed expression when I kissed him good-bye. I had forgotten that he saved all kisses for his girlfriend. When I told Denny about this part, he said, “God, I hate when they do that.”

  The Piers

  Dale Peck

  The past makes for a bad traveling companion. It can’t be led but drags you back with every step, distracting you, slowing you down, throwing you off course. What I mean is, I’d needed to change at Ninety-sixth Street for the local and I almost slept through the stop. I opened my eyes just as the bell signaled the doors’ closing, and I threw myself out of the car and ran straight into the hot sucker punch of the station. For a moment all I could do was waver on the platform like a blade of grass. The heat seemed to have left me paralyzed, and only instinct kept me upright. The first part that came back was my hand. My wrist really: it was a quarter after eleven; and then I checked the security of the key around my neck. The sun dripped through the sidewalk gratings, painting shadows that mockingly resembled the bars of a cage. Voices fluttered down as well, the shed feathers of conversations floating somewhere above me, and as I followed the words down I caught sight of a fat black woman whose breasts were underlined by twinned crescents of sweat. She was eyeing a thin shirtless Puerto Rican man a few feet away from me, something that looked like jealousy filling her eyes. When the Puerto Rican man caught the black woman looking at him, she turned belligerent.

  “Whyn’t you put your shirt back on?”

  The man shifted position with exaggerated nonchalance, scratched his balls. “Whyn’t you mind your own business?”

  “You think that turns me on?”

  “I’d like to turn you off,” the man said. “At least turn you ’round.”

  A few people standing nearby chuckled. Headlines fanned faces, eyes darted back and forth; the woman had at least a hundred pounds on the man and she moved in a little closer.

  “You think I like seeing your skinny-ass chest and itty-bitty stick arms? You know what you should do? You should take a bath more often. I can smell you from here. And whyn’t you pop those zits stead-a leaving them whiteheads all over your chin? You got herpes, boy?”

  The man looked angry but distinctly intimidated. “Lady, I’m-a pop something besides a few zits.”

  “Yeah, I’d like to see that, you skinny runt.” She stepped closer to him, and I heard the schmear of sweaty feet sliding in sandals. “C’mon, twiggy, let’s—”

  The downtown local roared into the opposite platform then, and, overpowered by its noise, the woman seemed to lose interest. She wandered away from the man with her hands on her hips, shaking her head, and as she walked away I remembered the confrontation between the cabbie and the men in the van the night before, and it occurred to me that here was New York. New York was always interrupting itself. New York was an accident waiting to happen. Even now, the woman was listing toward two boys who were throwing a baseball back and forth. She was talking to her shoes, the boys were oblivious to anything but their game, the pop! of the baseball against their palms measured out the moments to the impending disaster like a leaky faucet and it seemed to me if the ball did strike her then the ensuing bloodshed would be on a par with “Carnage on the GWB.” But how did one yell “Look out!” in New York City?

  I looked at the woman’s back. I wondered if Trucker looked like that, from the back, standing: thick and shapeless as a stick of unpulled taffy. I wondered if Trucker had walked into his own baseball as blindly as this woman, and I looked behind me then, saw that the downtown train was still in the station, and quickly, before the baseball struck the woman and she exploded in a shower of blood—before I could stop myself, and before anyone could stop me—I jumped onto the tracks, one palm pressed to my chest to keep the key my mother had left for me from bouncing around. I hopped over the third rail, pulled myself up into the joint between two cars even as the brakes belched a jet of hot air and the train lurched toward Eighty-sixth Street. I thought I heard someone yell behind me but I didn’t turn to see if it was the woman being struck by the baseball or someone exclaiming at my recklessness. I just opened the door, sat down in the first empty seat; I refused to look at my fellow passengers, keeping my eyes down until I was convinced we were safely in the tunnel. No newspaper would report this story, I told myself: as far as I was concerned, the fat woman, the thin man, the two boys and their baseball, and Trucker were now and forever safe. I only had to worry about myself.

  At no point during my flight had I actually thought I was skipping out on my appointment at the clinic. It had simply slipped my mind. As soon as I remembered, I told myself I’d get off at the next stop and catch the uptown line. But the next stop came and it was Eighty-sixth Street and I didn’t get off because I wasn’t sure if there was a free transfer to the uptown train until Seventy-second. And, too, I’d broken out in a sweat, and the air-conditioning just felt too good to give up. New York, I was learning, was much easier to deal with when it was just a headline and three or four smeared graphs.

  So the next stop was Seventy-ninth, the next Seventy-second. As the train was pulling out of Seventy-second I was still telling myself it was OK—it was early, I told myself; I’d have a bite to eat and then head back uptown, the testing center was open till four, maybe only three, but according to Trucker’s watch it wasn’t even noon and I had plenty of time, I told myself, plenty of time. When the conductor announced Christopher Street, I got off the train with the feeling I could eat a l
ittle something, do a little window-shopping, and still make it back uptown with time to spare. What I was thinking was that I was a gay man new to New York City and I still hadn’t seen Christopher Street or the West Side piers, and so I walked down one to get to the other. Along the way I acquired a juice, something beet purple but tasting more of ginger and carrots, some candles, and the phone number of a middle-aged man who’d chatted me up at the juice bar (he was wearing his own jumpsuit, yellow rather than orange, and he used the coincidence as his pickup line). The morning’s drama was gone and in its absence a weightless calm had taken me over. I stuffed the phone number in my wallet, dropped my half-full cup of juice in a trash can, and then, my feet bouncing in those shoes as if I walked on balloons, I crossed the West Side Highway and saw the Hudson River for the first time.

  I’d read about the old piers, seen pictures even, or one picture. It must have been taken from a boat far out in the river, and it showed a swaybacked ramshackle structure that looked like a section of an old-fashioned white-beamed roller coaster, but a roller coaster built for giants. On its maze of warped scaffolding had sat or leaned a half-dozen shirtless men whose baskets and brush mustaches were visible across a hundred yards of water. My fathers, I said to myself, my gay dads, for they’d had as large (or as little) a role in my upbringing as my real father. But the pier was long gone, in its place was an asphalt strip that stretched from Chelsea all the way down to Battery Park City, a tar ribbon as flat, black, and ugly as any Plains highway. It was the province of joggers, skaters, bicyclists, dog-walkers, hand-holders even, of all persuasions; but where the men who once came for an anonymous fuck now went I didn’t know. Maybe they were all dead. Maybe, for the same reason, their descendants now preferred to score in juice bars or gyms or online, but as I made my own slow way down that ugly promenade—it was the very antithesis of the Yellow Brick Road—what I found myself wanting was a quickie, something to stop the normal flow of time and erect a little wall between the morning’s misadventure and what still lay in store for me uptown.

  What I got was a splash.

  In the movies there are shouts when this sort of thing happens, but in the real New York, I was discovering, no one shouted when you expected them to. They ran, they gawked, they even pointed out the scene to anyone who did or didn’t care to look, but they discussed the situation in a seen-it-all-before tone of voice, and as I hurried toward the confluence of bodies and bicycles at the river’s edge, I, too, felt strangely unexcited; curious, but not aroused. Snippets of voices came to me.

  “Did he fa—”

  “I think he ju—”

  “Where di—”

  “Over the—”

  And then I saw him. He floated face up, not more than ten feet out, his arms wafting on either side of his body, his legs pale shadows beneath the surface of the water. Save for the current’s rollicking southward drift and the membranous movement of his white shirt and pants, he was still, and for a moment I felt it as well as saw it, the tranquility of floating. His eyes were open and he stared straight up. I could see the sky as well, its cloudless expanse reflected in the smooth water around his face, but it was the man’s face that held me, his blank eyes, his hair like seaweed darkly haloing his head, his lips puffing out like rising dough with his refusal to answer the shouts from people on shore.

  “Are you OK?”

  “You need a hand?”

  “Can you make it over here?”

  “Man, what the fuck you doing?”

  Then someone mentioned the police, someone else mentioned the fire department. A skinny man in running shorts ran off to find a pay phone even as a half-dozen other spectators pulled cell phones from purses and pockets and belt-slung holsters, but that was all the help anyone seemed willing to give. With a weak gesture, the man in the water used a fingertip to pull a splayed lock of hair off his face, and all the while the current carried him steadily south—toward, I saw then, a dark tangled mass of pilings, the jagged base of some long-gone pier, perhaps even the one I’d seen photographed. For a moment its ghostly specter hovered above the river, the ghost of a ghost, and by the time the apparition had dissolved I found myself on the chain-link fence separating the walkway from the river, my feet, freed of those shoes for the first time in nearly a year, pinched in the tight little diamonds, my fingers curled like grappling hooks and pulling me up with a grace and strength and speed I didn’t know I possessed. This can’t be happening, I was thinking, but that thought was erased by pain, belied by it, as the jagged top of the fence pierced the fabric of Trucker’s ridiculous jumpsuit and seamed my leg like a plow opening up the soil. For a moment I saw the river below me, as black and impenetrable as a chalkboard, and then I saw my reflection, the boy I’d seen two weeks ago in the barber’s mirror, the fleshless struts of his bones outlined inside the jumpsuit like the crossbars of a kite, his hairless skull as unadorned as a death mask. I wanted to say something to that mask, but before my brain or my tongue could find the words, my real mouth bestowed a rushed kiss on its reflection, and then I was in the river.

  I was underwater.

  There was a moment then, I don’t know what to call it. I don’t know what you’d call such a state. An ending, or just a transition? A suspension? Maybe “lapse” comes closest. For a moment time stopped, and for that moment I was at peace. I didn’t feel it, didn’t hold it anyway, I couldn’t actually call it my own, but I still felt it around me, as palpable as the river’s water. It was like the moment I crested the Rockies and let gravity roll me down to the plains. This much I can tell you: the closest this world comes to perfection isn’t some kind of willed, built-up thing. It’s emptiness. It’s absence. I heard my heart beat while I was down there. It was the only thing I could hear, the only thing I could sense in that dark plunge, my heart’s outward press and the water’s inward push. For the first time since I’d arrived in New York I had a clear sense of where I ended and the world began. I thought of The Well then. I thought all the water that had never come out of its dust-clogged spigot was right here: I was suspended in it. I floated in the water that wasn’t sex. And then I gave in, for the final time, to Trucker. On our last day together I’d done what I always did. I slipped my shorts off without taking off those shoes, and then I scooted across the seat and straddled him. It was easier if I faced the steering wheel, but that day I knew I needed to look at him. My ankles rode on his thighs and my knees flanked his hips. “Hey,” Trucker said as I undid his belt. “What are you doing?” I didn’t answer, just took what I knew would be there, curled my spine, bent my head so far to one side that my ear was practically touching my shoulder. Friction and the roof of Trucker’s car filled my hair with static electricity, filled my ears with its crackle. On more than one occasion in the past Trucker had burst out laughing at my hair standing on end—Albert Einstein he called me, Don King—but that day all he said was, “Come on, now, don’t be crazy.” But I ignored him, just rocked up and down as I always did. “James,” Trucker said, “don’t you realize things have changed?” And, when I still ignored him: “James? Why are you doing this?” It never took Trucker very long and it didn’t take him long that day, and it was only after he’d finished that I said, “Because it was there for me. Because you had it to give to me. Because nothing’s changed,” I said, “and I never could refuse a gift.”

  It was the flavor that brought me back. The oily stuff filling my mouth tasted like . . . like what? Like a slightly caramelized petroleum-based soft drink: repulsive, yet also sweet and compelling. It tasted like semen, and I almost swallowed a mouthful of it. But I spit it out as soon as my head cleared the surface. I’m not sure how I cleared the surface. Maybe it was just the air in my otherwise empty stomach ballooning my body upward. Swimming seemed to have started automatically, a sort of messy breaststroke, and it was only when I looked in front of me that I remembered the man.

  He was a half-submerged beacon, his white clothes glowing under the river’s surface, and as I swam
toward him I felt the salty water stinging the wound on my leg and it was the only thing real to me, that little pain, but even it had the soft focus of a fever dream, as my mind filled with an image of blood inking the water each time my legs frog-kicked me forward. I performed as if following a script. I swam to the man, and as I got close he turned his face toward mine. “Please,” he said. “Just keep away.” But I ignored his words. I pulled up to him, ducked under the water, and with seal-like agility flipped myself over and came up beneath him so his shoulders rested on my chest. I looped an arm around him. “Please,” he said, struggling feebly, “please just let me go.” His words were in my ear along with the sound of the river, and I could feel his heart beating against my forearm. “Let me go.” I turned to him then. Saw up close whiskers and wrinkles, the softening profile of a man slipping into middle age. I kissed him then, on his cold cheek. I pressed my lips against his skin and just held them there until the man said, “Oh.” And then again: “Oh.” He stopped struggling then, and with my free arm I paddled us to the shore, and there waiting for us was a slimy but still solid length of rope or root just sticking out of the earth as if it were the anchor of the city itself. I grabbed on to it, and then we waited for what would happen next.