Through the noise, the man says, “First time here?”
“Yes,” Vernon says and nods.
The man smiles some. There is something friendly and genuine about him, and Vernon wonders if he knows what kind of bar he has wondered into. Then the man leans closer, to be heard, and calls, “You look like a frightened rabbit, you know that?”
He smiles; Vernon smiles in turn this time. “That’s how I feel,” Vernon calls back. What he feels in fact is an amount of relief.
“Haven’t been to a place like this in a few years,” the man calls. “It’s a meat market.”
“Is it?” Vernon says.
Nodding, the man says, “It must be the weather. I just felt like talking to someone new, someone I didn’t know. I enjoy that at times.”
Vernon nods; it’s a fair reason, he thinks.
“Are you in trouble?” the man calls.
“What did you say?” Vernon says.
The smile continues on the man’s face. “You heard me,” he says, in his pleasant manner.
Vernon cannot resist smiling again, almost laughing. It seems the closest laughter has come to his face all day.
“Well?” the man says.
“Yes,” Vernon says. “Yes.”
“Personal problems?” the man says.
“Yes.”
His head turned to listen, the man nods almost professionally. “What’s your name?” he calls.
“What?”
The man almost glances. “I said, ‘what’s your name’?”
“Tony,” Vernon calls back, believing the man sees through this lie as readily as he saw through his evasion.
“Wes,” the man says, offering his hand.
“I beg your pardon,” Vernon says.
“Wes.”
Vernon nods, without eye contact. The man sips his drink, and Vernon follows suit, glancing at the man now as he does so. He is not good-looking, at least as Vernon has ever calculated good looks. He is friendly, though, Vernon thinks, and he seems quite intelligent. If he looked at him now, Vernon would smile, he knows, cooperatively.
The man doesn’t look at him, though; as if to the floor, shifting his head near Vernon’s face, he calls, “There’s another room there. Let’s sit in there where we don’t have to shout.”
Vernon nods.
They shift along, Vernon following. Stopping near the door, the man says, “What are you drinking, Tony? I’ll get us a couple to take in.”
“I’ll—” Vernon begins, as if to reach for his wallet.
“No, no, on me,” the man says easily, handling his glass to Vernon. “What are you drinking?”
As Vernon tells him he nods, seeming to know already. Pointing, the man says, “Meet you right at the door in exactly two minutes.”
Vernon steps over, holding the two drinks. Well, he feels better already, he says to himself. Maybe he should have come here, come out long ago. Maybe he’d get over what had happened to him. Maybe he wouldn’t have been so insecure with Anthony in the first place. Maybe he would have had the psychological advantage with the teenage wonder.
Glancing into the room, into an infrared darkness highlighted by the revolving strobe lights, he sees faint orange lamps here and there, then a cigarette lighter flaring; to the left is a partial view of a translucent floor over which are sliding and walking the silhouettes of couples dancing. It doesn’t fit with the man, he thinks. Dancing in a roadside bar as the sun goes down. Or is it himself, as always, who doesn’t fit? What would his mother say, he wonders, if she saw him now? Oh, God. Anthony would berate him for being a fool, for giving in to trashy impulses.
The man, appearing, smiles politely, winks somehow, and says, “Better follow me.”
Vernon follows. He thinks again how much less alone, less at sea, he feels already, no matter what Anthony might say. Across the room, placing the drinks on a table and sliding into the vinyl seats on either side, he says, “Why is it so dark?”
“Tacky, isn’t it?” the man says. “It’s so people can make out. It’s intended to be sexy.”
There is the subject, the reason he is here, Vernon thinks. He lifts his drink, realizing all at once how anxious he feels, and sips.
“Here’s looking at you, sort of,” the man says.
Vernon sips again, to join in the toast. “What do you do?”
“You shouldn’t really ask that,” the man says. “But I’m a lawyer, in a nearby town. I keep my personal life quite apart from my professional life.”
“Well, I’m sorry,” Vernon says.
“No problem. What do you do?”
They both laugh. “Nothing, really,” Vernon says.
“You’re not a student?”
“I have been,” Vernon says. “Not anymore. Yes and no.”
They drink. You don’t have to lie, Vernon is saying to himself, not here in the dark.
“Well, what is your story?” the man is saying. “Why are you unhappy? Why in trouble?”
“Oh,” Vernon says, “it’s okay. I mean, I’m okay.”
“I would say,” the man says, “either it’s a coming out or it’s a loss, a death maybe, or a broken heart.”
“It’s a couple of those,” Vernon says.
“Which couple?”
“Well, I’ve never done this,” Vernon says. “And I’m not sure I should. I guess I’m doing it because I got rejected by my friend. I didn’t know what else to do.”
The man drinks, slowly. “Some things I guess you just have to go through,” he says. “If you could afford therapy, that would certainly help. I think it was smart of you, your instincts were right, to get out, you know.”
“I’m glad I met you,” Vernon manages to say.
“Well, how can I help? We could go to my place and talk. Relax. Take a long, hot shower. Talk things out. Have a couple of drinks. No pressure, I mean. You understand? Who is this ex-friend of yours? What does he do? Do you want to talk about him? Is he older than you?”
“Well, the person I’ve been close to, he’s not a man like that. He’s a boy. He’s younger than me. Quite a bit younger.”
“Really.”
“Yes.”
“You’re just a boy yourself.”
“I’m twenty-one. Twenty-two. I don’t even know how old I am.”
“You could pass for seventeen or eighteen. You look, to tell you the truth, like a high school student. You look like a high school athlete who wandered into the wrong place altogether.”
“I did wrestle in high school,” Vernon is pleased to say. “It was because I was way overweight at the time. I’ve never regained the weight, though.” He smiles; it occurs to him how he has warmed to this man, how easy it is to say things to him here in the dark.
“I think you won the struggle,” the man says.
“Thank you,” Vernon hears himself say. “I didn’t mean to say . . . that I didn’t want to go with you. I don’t mind that. You’re the first person who’s been nice to me in a long time.”
“Now, I hope that’s not true,” the man says.
I’d say ever, all my life, but I know you wouldn’t believe it, Vernon thinks. “It’s true,” he says. His eyes seem about to fill. Is it the wine? he wonders.
The man only stares back, perhaps in embarrassment. It’s true, Vernon is thinking. It is true. “I came out,” Vernon says then, “I came out here to debase myself. Because I couldn’t stand who I am. It’s not working like that.”
“I know what you’re saying,” the man says in a moment. “I wish I didn’t. But I’m afraid I do.”
CHAPTER 15
CLAIRE HAS TWO PLATES IN EACH HAND, ON HER WAY TO A booth of four, and there is Eric at her side, saying something, nearly getting in her way. “Not now!” she says. “My gosh, I’ll talk to you in a second!”
She feels upset for being so short with him, and anger with him for being so inconsiderate. Returning from the booth, circling around tables, taking up dirty dishes on the way, Eric is at her s
ide again.
She knows what he said the first time—he is asking for money—and it is money she is responding to when she says now, “My gosh, Eric, can’t you see I’m working?”
He tags after her to where she places the dirty dishes in a plastic tub.
“All I want is a dollar to stop at Smiley’s.”
“I heard what you want. The answer is no, Eric. I’m sorry! You know darn well we don’t have money to waste every time we turn around. You just had an ice-cream cone.”
“I’m hungry.”
“Have a peanut-butter sandwich when you get home.”
“I don’t want a peanut-butter sandwich.”
“Eric, I have to work. That’s what I’m getting paid for.”
He says nothing.
“What time is your program on?” she asks.
“Eight o’clock.”
“Well, you go watch it then. And have yourself a sandwich. And a glass of milk.”
“It’s not on yet.”
“Eric, come on now, stop being such a grump.”
She returns to work, walks away from him. Moments later, through the wide doorway into the adjacent pool table room, she looks over the faces to see if he is still there.
She spots him. She feels relief. A pool game is taking place, and he is standing at the wall in a line of others. Nothing on his face says that he is watching though, and she wishes Matt were with him. In another moment, carrying a refill bowl of chili to a large bearded man sitting at a table with his wife, her mind shifts to other things. It’s fine that they like the chili, she thinks. But if they keep ordering it like this, there won’t be a drop left for her to take back home.
CHAPTER 16
THE MAN IS BAREFOOT, ALTHOUGH VERNON HAS NOT SEEN him remove his shoes. “You have to try to relax,” the man says, as music reaches down around them from above.
Vernon tries. Being in a stranger’s house with its particular odors and objects has him tense, however, until, as instructed, he closes his eyes. This seems to help, even as he squints and peeks some at first. The music is classical piano, well recorded, carefully amplified.
He allows himself to be undressed. Looking down, eyes closed most of the time, like a shy, complacent child, he lifts a foot, raises an arm when told to, maintains his balance. Standing in this darkness, in his underpants, he hears water spittle and spit its spray in the shower stall behind him.
“Warm water will help you loosen up,” the man is saying close by.
Vernon is peeking and squinting less, enjoying the darkness, and he cooperates as the man slips his underpants down and off over his feet. Standing, keeping his eyes closed then, he experiences nakedness in a way he has not known before.
“I guess I’d forgotten just how needy you were feeling,” the man says, guiding him by his elbow into the stall.
Vernon peeks some here, as he settles in under the water. The shower stall is contemporary, off-white and double-sized, with chrome nozzles and flexible hoses between the handles and the main shower nozzle, which is as large as the head of a sunflower. A contoured bench seat is on one side, and the curtain is transparent. On a glimpse of the man, naked, approaching—Vernon did not know what was going to happen next—he turns more or less into the spray and closes his eyes once more. His feet on skid tread on the floor, his eyes closed, he feels for a moment as if he is in childhood again.
“Feel better?” the man says, stepping into the shower stall behind him.
Vernon keeps his eyes closed and doesn’t say. He wants to ask what is going on. He wants to say that he doesn’t feel sexual, that he only feels lonely, that this isn’t what he wanted. He imagines Anthony shaking his head and laughing at what a fool he was to go out like this.
“Keep those eyes closed,” the man says.
Vernon does, as he knows the man is lathering soap over himself close by. Vernon tries, too, to feel as a child again, but it isn’t working now. He feels himself sliding back into despair. “I’m just going to wash your back now,” the man says, his voice and face feeling too close.
Vernon stands there, eyes closed, as the man lathers over his shoulders and back. “Come on, Anthony, relax,” the man says. “Loosen up.”
“I don’t feel . . . sexual right now,” Vernon manages to say.
“No need to,” the man says. “I’m just trying to help you relax. But you have to try, too, my friend.”
Vernon tries once more to relax. The man washes down over his legs, to areas of his ankles he had never known were alive to touch of the kind. Feeling more childlike then, his anxiety does seem to be washing away, even as the man is washing and lathering up over his cheeks and in between. “That’s better,” he hears the man say.
Is this a child’s feeling of security? Vernon wonders, as he works to relax, as he thinks of attention of the kind given to him by his mother. Was she ever so fond or affectionate in her attention? he wonders. No, she really wasn’t, he thinks. She wasn’t rough, but neither was she gentle. Mainly, of course, she wasn’t anything, because she usually left him to do things for himself. Almost forever, he thinks, she left him on his own.
Oh, his poor mother, he thinks. She was young and it wasn’t that she wanted to be like that. It was more like she didn’t know. Nor did she want to dislike him, he thinks. It was more that she just didn’t know what to do with him. Nonetheless, he thinks, she didn’t have to leave him alone and neglect him as much as she did.
He returns to the present. Time seems to have slipped away again while his mother was on his mind. And he seems to have dozed, as the man lathers him, as it occurs to him how extremely tired and in need of sleep he is, here upon all the sleepless hours he has known over the past days.
“Only then what happened,” the man is saying, “is they pushed me ahead of them along this alley. Then they turned into what was a kind of abandoned repair garage for cars, made of cinder block. It had a lot of small, translucent windows, and the floor was cement. God, I remember that. Old oil stains everywhere. Beer cans. Rubbers. Cigarette butts. An odd light through the windows, like the color of Coke bottles. And that, thereafter, even that color took on erotic significance. Became part of my repertoire.”
Continuing to lather or massage Vernon’s back, the man’s hands work up to and around the sides of his neck, sending pleasant shivers through him. The man keeps a distance; except for his hands, he avoids contact and Vernon is only occasionally aware that the space between them is not empty. “Of course,” the man is saying, “because I did know the one boy from the high school, I probably wasn’t as frightened as I should have been. I’m not sure I had a reasonable idea of what it was they had in mind. Although I suppose I did. It certainly was the time when I was debasing myself, because in a way I was going along. Looking to die in shame, to live again at last. What you say you haven’t gone through—which is remarkable for someone your age. What I mean is, they were calling me faggot names and so on as they pushed me along, and they said other things that were rather clear, and in some deep, deep way it was something I know I desired.
“There I was. I was thirteen. What was most important to me was that I was in the company of this boy from the high school who I happened to believe was a sort of god, you know, as you do at that age. He certainly was, to me, just about the most incredibly striking person in existence, even as he was pushing me in the back with the others. He was an absolute hood and terrible in school—I suppose he dropped out before long—but he had to be the most fearless, most daring person in the world. Fairly tall, fairly thin, an Italian stallion with long blond hair, of all things, hanging down to his black leather jacket. From behind he looked like a woman’s ad for Clairol. Artie DelGreco was his name.
“Once, when I was in the high school, on a stairway, and saw him coming down the stairs, I froze. I stood there and stared at him, star-struck, although I didn’t know at the time that it was anything more than boyish hero worship. He was so famous. I remember seeing some friend, saying at onc
e, ‘Hey, guess who I just saw . . .’
“They began to get a little rough. Saying things, saying they knew what I liked to do, things like that. I didn’t mind at first, but they started to hurt me. One of them—it wasn’t my hero, thank God—slapped my face backhanded, so my nose started to bleed. ‘You wanna suck us off, dontcha?’ he kept saying. ‘You wanna suck our cocks, dontcha?’ I cried and said no no no, and swallowed blood and wiped blood from my mouth and so on.
“The same boy just blasted me in the stomach then. I buckled and went down, and when I tried to get up, which I can tell you wasn’t easy, he shoved me, by my shoulders, as hard as he could, and I went sprawling. He was saying they were going to kill me if I didn’t do it, and so on, and then Artie DelGreco said, ‘Take it easy; let’s just ask him in a nice way.’
“Well—what I did, there on that oil-stained cement floor—I turned or twisted in a way that I was looking up at this boy over whom I had had this remote but serious thing. And I said, ‘Just don’t beat me up. Don’t beat me up.’
“This little smile came over his face. He was looking right into my eyes. As he did this, as he looked, he rubbed his hand over his crotch several times. He said something like ‘This is what you want, isn’t it?’
“I didn’t say anything. I just looked up at him, at his eyes, while he felt himself. But I was taken.
“Just like I am now, just thinking about it,” the man adds in an even softer whisper, as his face comes forward and Vernon realized he has just touched his lips to the side of his neck.
“He unzipped his jeans,” he says. “Let his tool sort of unfold out. There it was sticking straight out. Only I was hard, too, and very excited. ‘Don’t let them hurt me,’ I said to him, for all kinds of obvious reasons. He said ‘here’ or something, and reached himself out, and so I did it. I just let him put it in my mouth, and right into my heart, you know, and I was born. He just rode it in and out, and . . . the truth was, I was so taken with it, and with him, and with who he was to me at that time in my life and how deeply connected we were as human beings—which I bet he knows, too, today, no matter where he is or what he is doing—that I just closed my eyes and let it all be. Nothing in my life or in the world mattered, not anything, for at least those few minutes. Maybe forever after.
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