Boys of Life

by Paul Russell

  “Anybody,” I said.

  “Not to worry. You’d get your heinie back to Kentucky.” Carlos said it like he was really impatient with all this stuff. “You’d fit right back in like you never went away. You’re not a Jew or a nigger or queer or anything you have to worry about. So relax, enjoy. Somebody like you, in America—you’re not going to have to worry.”

  It made me think. He was right, I could just go back to Kentucky and keep on living the way I used to think I’d be living my whole life.

  “I wouldn’t leave,” I told him. It surprised me to hear myself say that, but once I said it I knew it was completely true. It was like one more door closing behind me. And I didn’t even like Sammy—he was the most self-centered old man I’d ever met, thinking I was always just sitting around waiting to hear another story about Jews in the ghetto. Besides, he had this way of sucking the saliva in at the edges of his mouth when he talked that was completely disgusting.

  “I’d become a Jew,” I said. Carlos laughed really loud.

  “Yeah right,” he said. “Wear a little beanie cap. Tony the yeshiva boy.”

  “What’s a yeshiva boy?”

  “Never mind,” he said.

  “It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot,” I insisted. Actually it wasn’t till that minute, but I knew if I had thought about it I’d have come to the exact same conclusions. And Carlos was making me angry, the way he wasn’t listening to what I was saying. Like he thought it was something I needed to get out of my system and that was that.

  “But why?” Carlos asked. “If they told you you didn’t have to. That you could just go back to being normal and you’d escape.” He looked at me with his serious look and sort of massaged my arms. I could tell he was trying to figure out if I might be having a nervous breakdown or something classy like that.

  I didn’t have any kind of answer to his question “Why?” I didn’t know why I’d do what I said, but I knew I would. I could see that guy in the picture in the book really clearly.

  Carlos sort of ruffled up my hair. “Anyway,” he said, “There’s nothing safe anywhere. Look at you.”

  “Look at me what?”

  “You’re doing your laundry and look what happens.”

  “Oh that,” I told him. “Was that a bad thing?”

  “Was it? “He was making me uncomfortable again. “Do you want to go back to Owen?”

  The trouble was, I did sort of. I wasn’t being very happy in New York, doing nothing all day except roam around on my own—The Company sure wasn’t much company to me—or like today, sit around and read comic books and drink by myself, and then feel hung over so drink some more.

  I asked him, “Are you trying to get rid of me or something? Trying to send me back home?”

  Carlos laughed, but this time it was a quiet laugh. He started unbuttoning the buttons to my shirt. One at a time and slowly, and looking the whole time right in my eyes. I looked at his face, his eyes that were very serious-looking right at that instant, and I just lay back there and let him unbutton my shirt because what could I do? It was always like that when he started to touch me, especially that winter in that apartment where I was always cold and my skin felt cold and my hands and somehow Carlos’s hands weren’t cold like mine, they were warm and rough. When he’d start to touch me, laying his palm on my bare chest and stroking my nipples with his thumbs—something went all over me. I couldn’t do anything except let him do whatever he wanted to with me. It was like I was dead and in the grave and here were his hands warming me up and back to life.

  “I’m not trying to send you anywhere,” Carlos said. He pulled my shirt off me and rubbed his hands along my belly, right where the waist of my jeans was. “You’re right here,” he said, slipping his fingers down under the waistline to where, even though I didn’t really want it to, my dick was starting to get hard. “You’re in for good,” he said, “and you’re right—there isn’t any going back.”

  “Then I’m not going anywhere,” I told him. He ran a hand along the front of my jeans, and my body arched up to meet him like it had a life all its own. I sort of moaned. He unzipped me and pulled out my dick, and rolled it around in his hand, looking at it even though he’d seen it a hundred times before. But he was always interested in what it looked like. Then he bent forward and took it in his mouth. He’d done that to me also about a hundred times and still it made the floor drop out from under me. I loved touching my fingers to the base of it where his lips were wrapped around.

  Now that we were like this, it seemed even more upsetting to think about that kid caught in the picture. Stopped there forever, and us going on, moving around like we were. Alive. Not that I didn’t like us like this, but I just kept seeing that kid in front of my eyes, and that one expression on his face that was going to be caught like that forever.

  Carlos raised up and started pulling my jeans off me, lifting one ankle and then the other to free me up completely. “Look, don’t go getting goofy on me, okay? Sammy’s just a paranoid Jew, so forget it. I mean, if anybody’s earned the right to be paranoid it’s Sammy, but don’t let that fuck you up. Okay? It doesn’t have to have anything to do with you.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Why should I listen to some paranoid old Jew?”

  “Right,” Carlos told me. “How do you know he’s not making all that stuff up just to impress you?” Which was something I never thought of before.

  “Besides,” he went on, “I need you.” He was taking off his shirt, sliding his pants down so we were both completely naked with him straddled on top of me, which is something I really loved when we got down to that point. “I’m counting on you,” he said, “for that movie.”

  “Yeah?” I said. “Tell me more.” I wanted to hear him talk about that movie. It was the reason he’d gotten me here, and now two months had gone by, and nothing. I thought maybe if I gave him a blow job he might keep on talking, so I guided his dick toward my mouth.

  “That’s nice,” he said. “That’s great.”

  It wasn’t something I’d ever done with him before. Usually Carlos was the one who wanted to do things, and I just lay back and enjoyed them. But this time felt different. I wanted to ask him more about the movie, but my mouth was full, and then I got to thinking about other things. I got the idea—strange to say, I’d never gotten it before—that since it was something he did to me that I liked, maybe I should do it to him too. So I reached my hand around his butt and squirmed a finger down his crack till I found his hole, and I started to press my finger up it.

  He grabbed my wrist. “Sorry,” he said, “off limits.”

  I pulled off him. “And mine’s not?” I said.

  He sat up and kind of rocked back—then he spread my legs and started rubbing his finger into my asshole. It sent hot chills right up me. “Do you want it to be off limits?”

  He could have me groaning in no time. “No way,” I told him as he pressed his middle finger all the way up. “No way.”

  It was hard to tell who was winning, but after that it was pretty much whatever he wanted to do with me was fine, he could do it.

  Still, all I could think while he was doing it was: the Jew kid in the picture, didn’t he die hungry, of bullets, when he lived past the picture they’d got him in? It was what I couldn’t get out of my head.

  Later, after we both fell asleep, I could only sleep about half an hour before I was wide awake and staring at the ceiling. Next to me Carlos wasn’t moving, or even breathing as far as I could tell. But then that was the way Carlos always slept—on his back and completely still. If you went to sleep with him like that and woke up eight hours later, you might’ve been in fifty different positions but he hadn’t moved an inch. I think some of the time he wasn’t even sleeping, he was just lying there thinking. He’d lie completely still, and if he couldn’t get to sleep it was still a way of resting—his arms folded across his chest and his eyes closed like some kind of Egyptian mummy.

  I propped myself up on
my elbow to watch him. In the orange glow that came in through the plastic over the windows, I could see his face—thin lips, and smooth tight skin, and those high cheekbones that could make him look like a Cherokee Indian. It never occurred to me at the time that Carlos might be a Jew.

  I thought about some of the pictures in that book, people the Nazis killed in some riot. After they took the bodies to a warehouse before carting them off somewhere else—Sammy told me this—Mendel went in there in secret and took pictures of the faces, so people could look at those pictures and know for sure whether their son or wife or whoever was one of the ones that got killed.

  Lying there in that orange light, Carlos looked like he could be dead too. His skin could’ve been ice cold to the touch. I thought about the faces of those dead people in the pictures, how their eyes were open with a kind of shocked look like they’d just been going along alive one instant and suddenly the next they were dead. It was sort of the look you might have if death was some invisible wall that you were walking along and just ran smack into without any warning.

  Which is the sort of thinking you can only do so long. I crawled out of bed, careful not to wake Carlos up. I put on some clothes—it was way too cold in that apartment to be wandering around butt-naked—and went into the kitchen, where I sat down in the dark with my bottle of Canadian Club.

  I thought about getting really drunk, as a way of putting all that stuff out of my head. But I didn’t drink. I took a sip or two and realized a drink wasn’t what I wanted. That was probably the first time in my life I ever realized something like that, which shows how far gone I was that night. Somehow I guess I’d thought Carlos was going to be able to say the one simple thing that’d get rid of everything that’d been going around in my head, and that’s why I blurted everything out. I hadn’t meant to do it. But now it was worse instead of better—with the worst part being that I could see nobody was going to help me. It was something I was going to have to work out by myself.

  I grew up on Carlos right then—not that I ever thought he was going to get me through stuff, but I do think I hooked up with him back in Owen because I could see I needed some kind of help. And now that fell apart.

  I still don’t quite know why I did it, but I got up and walked over to the door and unlatched it, and stood there for about fifteen minutes. I felt the way a skydiver probably does before a jump, leaning way out into space and knowing once he lets go, that’s it, free-fall and a long way down. Then I left.

  I closed the door behind me and told myself I knew exactly what I was doing. Of course I didn’t know, and when I think back about that whole night it’s like I was totally drunk even though I was completely sober. But there I was out on Avenue C at what must’ve been three in the morning—and I’ve already said how the nighttime in New York had a way of freaking me. I started walking west.

  I didn’t get too far, as it turned out—just to Tompkins Square Park between Avenues B and A. Even though it was freezing December and the middle of the night too, it was still full of people—guys standing around these trash cans they’d lit fires in to keep warm, and other guys sitting on benches all wrapped up in army blankets, or just wandering around with dazed looks on their faces like they had no idea where they were. In the middle of the park where all the sidewalks came together, this black guy was standing there just saying, Smoke, smoke, smoke, over and over in this dead voice even though nobody was buying. But it was like once he got going, he couldn’t stop.

  There were also men who kept watching me with these hungry eyes. They’d walk up close to me and then veer away at the last minute, like I was somebody they thought they recognized but then didn’t. Or maybe it was the other way around—they were the ones who wanted me to recognize them. I knew what they wanted—I’d seen queers in New York, I knew all the ways they’d look at me when I passed. Now here they were, roaming around in the middle of the night still looking, and here I was too.

  I guess whatever carried me out of the apartment just all of a sudden gave out and I was standing there without a clue when these two Puerto Rican kids came up on bikes. They must’ve been about eight and ten, just little kids, and when they said, “Yo man, what’s up?” I asked, “What’re you guys doing out here? Why aren’t you home?” Which may sound dumb, but it was the first thing that came into my head—I guess with the park so full of guys cruising for a chance with little kids like that.

  “Don’t look like you’re home neither,” the older one said. He was missing one of his front teeth.

  “Don’t worry about me, man,” I told him. “It’s late. You guys should really go home.” I think I was suddenly thinking about Ted and how I wouldn’t want him out in a place like this.

  “Yeah, fuck you too,” the little one told me. They’d moved up so their bikes were on either side of me.

  “You a faggot?” one of them asked.

  “Do I look like a faggot?”

  “Everybody looks like a faggot to me,” the older kid said. “Just don’t try nothing.”

  “Am I trying anything?” They’d sort of locked me in between their bikes and all of a sudden I wasn’t sure what they were up to.

  “He’s no fag,” the little one said.

  “Naw, he’s no faggot,” said the older one.

  “So what’re you two up to?” I asked, since obviously they’d decided to let up on me a little.

  “Eh,” the older kid spit on the ground and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Whatever.”

  I remember thinking how strange it was, those two kids on their bikes in that park in the middle of the night—totally out of bounds, and at the same time acting like they owned the place.

  “We’re just hanging,” the little kid said. “Want to hang with us?”

  “I don’t know,” I told them. “Maybe for a while.”

  “Yeah, hang with us for a while,” the older kid said. “Should we ditch the square or what?”

  “Should ditch it,” said the other one. The square being Tompkins Square, where we were. We went east along some streets back toward where the apartment was, then past it over to Avenue D, and I knew we were looking for something but I didn’t know what it was supposed to be. The older kid was whistling this tune but I didn’t recognize it. Nobody was talking or anything, so I didn’t try to talk either or ask what we were doing. I was just hanging with them for a while—it was strange to be with kids instead of an old man like Sammy for a change. I remember I was liking the cold air. I kept taking it down deep in my lungs and living off the flat hard taste of it. It was clearing me up like no drink ever did—plus I wasn’t thinking about Carlos or Sammy or anything, which was the first time in a long time.

  In front of us on the sidewalk was this old man lying up against a building with his face to the wall—asleep, I guess, and he had this old coat with newspapers stuck to it. You know how leaves and dirt’ll stick to some piece of candy you drop on the ground? That was the way this old man looked, like somebody’d rolled him in a bunch of old newspapers and they’d stuck to him. The two kids got off their bikes and leaned them against the wall. Then, like it was something hilarious, they snuck up on that old guy—he was either asleep or completely passed out, you couldn’t tell which. The older kid mouthed one two three, and suddenly they were both kicking the shit out of him. I mean, kicking so hard you heard the sound of their shoes hitting him in the ribs, these thumps that were incredibly loud and made you sick to hear.

  He yelled and swatted at them, but not much, because mostly he just lay still like he’d passed out again. They kept kicking at him; then they rolled him a few feet to sort of unwind him out of those newspapers he was wrapped up in. Their hands were all over him—in his pockets and feeling up his coat—and I could tell the little kid had found a couple of dollar bills and some change in one of the pockets.

  I stood there next to where their bikes were leaned up against the wall. I never saw anything like it, and it took me a minute or two to figure it out—and by then th
ey were already through doing what they were going to do. I think when they saw I wasn’t going to help but just stand there like an idiot they didn’t pay any more attention—they just dropped me like that. When they were through, the older one sort of slapped the top of my head with his hand.

  “Faggot!” he said, and they both laughed and jumped on their bikes and rode off. Which left me standing there with this old man on the pavement—I didn’t know if he was alive or what, because he wasn’t moving even though there wasn’t any blood I could see. Like I said, I couldn’t do a thing—I just stood there like he was an old bag of trash somebody’d dumped. I probably should’ve seen if he was okay, but everything was feeling more and more like some kind of bad dream. I remember thinking, if I just turned and walked away it wouldn’t’ve happened—it just wouldn’t be there anymore.

  I couldn’t do it. I went over to where he was lying on the ground, face down, and I turned him over to see if he was still breathing. I didn’t know what I was going to do next, but that seemed the place to start.

  When I rolled him onto his back, his face was staring right up at me, and it was then I recognized he was the old man with the golf club, who Carlos had said I’d see again.

  I left him right there. I wasn’t going to touch him—it spooked me too much. I turned around and walked off quick as I could, and I was probably even whistling while I was walking just so I wouldn’t completely freak out.

  Then suddenly it came to me right on the street there between Avenues C and D, like I was actually saying it out loud it was so clear and upsetting: those queers in the park are just like Carlos. The only thing is, Carlos found me in a laundromat and not in a park. It made me break into a run when I thought that, and I ran all the way back to the apartment. Carlos was still asleep, and I went right to him and shook him really hard.

  “You’re wearing your clothes,” he said. He was really groggy. “You’re cold.” He was like somebody swimming upstream to try to break out of his sleep.