Boys of Life

by Paul Russell

  I did, unfortunately—which didn’t mean I didn’t still feel like I’d gotten totally dumped for some new kid he had the hots for.

  “We have to put everything else behind us,” he went on. “We have to make the best movie we can.”

  I remembered the way Verbena shot flame from her butt. And Sammy shivering his way through all those February days because he thought Carlos’s movie should get made. So who was I to say no, just because I wasn’t crazy about waving my dick around in front of Seth’s camera?

  “I’m not pressuring you,” Carlos said. “I want you to think about it. I want us to make the most amazing movie we can make. It’s not porn—you’ll see that. It’s going to be something terrific and beautiful and when it’s over, years from now, when you’re lying on your deathbed, you’ll be glad you had something to do with it.”

  As I’m sure you know by now, I can be talked into anything, especially if it was Carlos doing the talking; so though I said, “I’m not going to let you pressure me,” I think Carlos knew as well as I did there was no way I was going to say no. Because I really had meant it when I told Seth the day before that things weren’t over, they were just starting out—and if Carlos wanted me to make a porn film with him, if that was where we were going to go, well than that’s where we were going.

  So we came back down from the top of the city, scaling our way down those little streets that weren’t really streets, and looking back every once in a while to see the city start to look more and more like a real city the more we came down out of it.

  In front of the city—the part of the warehouse that was done up to look like a desert—a kid about my own age was sitting. So this was the famous kid Carlos was fucking up the ass these days. He was sitting on a fake rock underneath a fake palm tree. I’ll always remember that first glimpse I had of him: smoking a cigarette, looking completely out of place there but at the same time relaxed, like he didn’t care where he was. Like he was this person who carried around whatever he needed right there with him, and so it didn’t matter.

  So much for first impressions.

  “Scott,” Carlos called to him, and Scott got up and came over to where we were. You have to imagine the two of us there, Scott in the prep school outfit he was still wearing since he’d hopped the train in from Connecticut that morning, spiffy and rich to the core with this sullen spoiled look on his face and a haircut he must’ve paid twenty-five dollars for—and then scruffy me with my hair pretty long and nothing but jeans and a T-shirt and these gorgeous snakeskin cowboy boots Carlos had gotten for me back in the spring, which I wore all the time.

  Scott smiled and ran his hand through his blond hair and let it fall back in place, which I guess you can do if you have a fancy haircut. And I have to admit, he had this really great smile. He wasn’t very big—he looked only fifteen or so, but I found out later he was seventeen. This wiry little body and thin clear face with one single bright red pimple on his cheekbone. In the meantime he was checking me out too—looking me up and down, I guess to see what he was getting into. And I could tell he was nodding to himself and saying, Yeah, I can do this, no problem—even before we’d said a single word.

  “So I guess we’re making this big movie together,” he said.

  He stood around with his hands on his hips, completely relaxed like we’d known each other forever. I still didn’t know what to do; part of me wanted to bolt from all this, while the other part was holding steady, thinking, Okay, let’s see what happens. Let’s see exactly what Carlos has come up with this time. Because I never doubted he really had come up with something. Even though I was furious with him and also it was a little painful to be standing here with this kid he’d just dumped me for, at the same time I knew there was a movie here, and Carlos wouldn’t be putting us through all this if there wasn’t.

  I remember suddenly thinking, I don’t care whether Carlos wants me to fuck this kid or not—I’m going to fuck him. It came like a bolt of lightning and I was completely sure of it and completely sure I could do it. I’d never fucked anybody in my life before—and now I was urgent at the thought of fucking this kid, sinking my dick into him till I had him sobbing and moaning. I felt in control for once. I was somebody who could take some kind of revenge.

  That sounds like bragging, and I admit it. But I could also see Scott was the kind of person anybody could do anything with and he wouldn’t care. Even before I knew anything about him, I could see it written all over him.

  “Can we get to work now?” Carlos said abruptly. It was like him not to even ask me how I was feeling about all this—just to plow on ahead like everything had to be fine. He did this sad smile that tried to be funny but wasn’t. Then the three of us sat down in the sand. Verbena had brought dump trucks of real sand and dumped them on the floor to make the desert, and while Carlos talked I kept running my hands through that sand which was once just sand on a beach somewhere. Looking up at that city on the hill which wasn’t a city but just lumber and plaster and paper, I kept thinking how nobody driving by the warehouse on the outside could ever in a million years guess what was going on inside.

  “This is a perfect moment,’’ Carlos said to both of us. “It’s holy.” He reached out and took my hand and Scott’s hand and held them together, covering them with both his hands and holding tight. “This is the movie we’re going to make, and it’s going to take all our self-control and selflessness and our love to do it. We’re going to have to give up everything, and only if we really do manage to give up everything is the audience going to know that. You probably want to hear what it’s about, why the city on the hill, why the silly costumes you haven’t even seen yet, but don’t worry, those’ll come later. Right now you don’t know any of that. Think of it like a dream you’re just starting to have; you’re starting to find your way around inside it, and you start to think this dream is your own body you’re moving around inside of, this is what the dream is, it’s your own body, what your own body can do. It’s a way of thinking about that body, it’s a vision of that body—you could call it a porno-theology, the holy life locked inside muscles and skin—and then all that turned inside out, like a glove, and spilled out into the iconography of the Bible, the Renaissance, all our ways of thinking up to now, the present. Can you see that? What can you do with it?”

  It was like Carlos was trying to hypnotize us, which I think was more or less working on Scott, who just sat there nodding. Whatever Carlos said was fine with him, he could listen all day to it. As for me, well, I could tell from the word go Carlos didn’t have any idea what he was saying. But that was okay: I knew he was trying to talk his way into something that maybe one day would make sense, but he wasn’t there yet. It was something I totally recognized from making Gomorrah with him. There weren’t any exact words yet for what he wanted to say. There wouldn’t be any till he made the movie, and then the movie would be exactly his way of saying it.

  In eight months, I told myself, he’ll be telling some interviewer all this stuff he’s telling us now, and that interviewer’ll be eating it up. It’ll mean something then.

  It’s what I always respected about Carlos—the way he was always looking for some way into places nobody’d gone before. Right then I knew I had to be in this movie. I had to help him get wherever it was he was going.

  Scott on the other hand was willing to try anything just for the kicks of it.

  “I love this instant right now,” Carlos said. “The way you’re sitting here, you don’t know a thing about each other. There’s only one moment like this between two people who are just meeting, and this is it, this is that one perfect moment where everything goes from here. Can we start filming? Can we take it from here?”

  He motioned with his hand and Seth was there with the camera, the guys who were working on the city cleared out of the way and the klieg lights were on and there we were, we were making Carlos’s movie.

  I wished I had a long, long swig of whisky somewhere to slug—because my heart
was thumping away in my chest like no tomorrow. Scott was smiling his pretty smile at the camera like he had no idea what was going on, and I think he probably didn’t. Carlos stood up and moved away behind Seth, who was zeroing in on us. I think I told you before how Carlos was scared to death of being caught on camera even for a few frames that could get cut out anyway. It was this thing he had—like some primitive tribes, Seth always said, who’re afraid for their souls.

  “Just remember,” Carlos was saying to me and Scott sitting there on camera in the sand in front of this fake city in a warehouse in Brooklyn, “it’s reality, whatever happens, reality definitely is the sum total of all this.”

  Scott looked at me and smiled. “So, it’s nice to meet you,” he said. I had to laugh. I was scared to death, because I knew it was all up to me. That was why Carlos needed me—nothing was going to happen unless I made it happen. And if something did happen, and it was interesting, then that was the only thing that counted.

  Well—then let’s make things interesting, I remember thinking. I reached out and touched Scott’s cheek with the tips of my fingers, barely grazing the skin. Scott seemed completely indifferent to that, it didn’t even register on him. I put my other hand up and touched his other cheek, stroking both his cheeks, which were completely smooth—he didn’t even have the slightest trace of a beard yet.

  I’d never untied somebody’s tie before, and it’s not as easy as you might think—but finally I managed to get it loose. He kept looking right into my eyes, and I kept looking into his—the way Carlos always did to me. Was that where Scott learned it too? I had to wonder. I unbuttoned the top button of his shirt; suddenly he turned his head to the side and looked up at the ceiling. Then he did this peculiar, sweet thing. He started singing. I don’t know what it was—he was singing very quietly and it faded in and out so you could only hear parts of it, and I don’t know who he was singing to, but it was like some little child singing. It scared me half to death.

  Carlos was going wild. I could see him out of the corner of my eye, behind Seth and the camera. He’d taken a handkerchief out of his pocket, and he was gnawing on it, he was so excited at what was going on. It made me excited too—I concentrated on unbuttoning Scott’s shirt, one button at a time, and sliding my hand in between the cloth and his skin. He wasn’t wearing any T-shirt, and his skin was ice cold. I found one of his nipples, and rubbed it till its little nub got completely hard and I felt the gooseflesh around it. Scott was still singing—he’d forget a little of his song, and then remember and pick up wherever he could. I thought he could be some kind of mechanical doll, especially with his skin so cold and hard; and I could feel his ribs, the way his skin stretched tight between them.

  I wondered if this was giving Scott any kind of hard-on—I was completely stiff in my jeans and it was even a little painful, the way my dick didn’t have the room it wanted—but looking down at the front of his pants I couldn’t tell. I remember it seemed important to me to know, and I half wanted to grope him down there. But I remembered what Carlos said about all this—how everything was happening here between us for the first time, and after that there wasn’t another first time. I had to make it last as long as I could, I had to use that self-control Carlos was talking about. Which was definitely some kind of exciting thing to do.

  Scott wriggled his shoulders to help me slide his jacket off him. Then both my hands were inside his shirt and I felt up under his arms to pinch his little tufts of hair. His ice-cold body was sweating something furious. I rubbed my hands down his sides, his hip bones just under the waist of his khakis. He was still singing, but then every once in a while he’d catch his breath, especially when my fingers would slide under his waistband to graze his bush of hair down there. He’s got to have a hard-on, I thought—I was fixated on that hard-on, and whether he had one or not.

  But I shied away from his dick. I was trying to go really slow and stretch things out like maybe time itself was slow motion in here and if we could stretch it out thinner and thinner we’d fall right through. I liked that idea a lot, which sounds like I was drunk or something—but I wasn’t. I was the most stone-sober I ever felt in my whole life. I wanted to cry I felt so sober.

  I unbuttoned Scott’s shirt cuffs, then I pushed his shirt back on his shoulders and peeled it off. I touched his arms at the bend of the elbow. It made him stop singing. “No,” he mumbled in this groggy way, the way somebody would if you bothered them in their deep sleep.

  That did it. All this time we’d been sitting facing each other in the sand. Now, grabbing Scott by his belt loops, I yanked us both up so we were standing face to face. It wasn’t the smoothest thing in the world—we both sort of stumbled our way up—but I didn’t want us sitting in the sand anymore. I wanted us standing with that city in the background so Seth could get a shot of us there.

  I was facing the camera and I could see Carlos off to the side watching. I looked over to him—and then I kissed Scott. I thought it was probably what Carlos wanted—but it was also exactly what I wanted. I wanted to get back at him for everything there was to get back for.

  I pushed with my tongue and it went right into Scott’s mouth. He tasted like metal, this flat hard taste, but when I put my arms around him he went liquid—his little ice-cold body went flowing in against me in some kind of motion the whole time, his crotch rubbing up against mine, grinding away at me in fact.

  He definitely had a hard-on—I could feel it jutting up hard inside his pants. I broke away to catch my breath from that amazing kiss. Scott was breathing pretty hard, and I was too—my head rushing and my dick aching down in my jeans. He pulled back and looked at me with these solemn kid’s eyes. It was a kind of breather in this little war we were fighting with each other. His lips looked all swollen up from our kissing, and when he licked them I couldn’t stand it any longer. I moved right in against him and undid his pants and slipped both my hands down in there where it was warm, the only part of his whole body that was warm.

  And there it was—I had both my hands around this slim little hard dick. “Oh,” he said, and he leaned over and bit me on the side of the neck, just a light bite. Then he was sucking on my skin while my hands felt on down in his pants to his balls that were tight and little and all clenched up under his dick. I went ahead and shoved his pants and underwear down—he was wearing these skimpy sky blue things, which I guess is what prep school kids wear. He did a step or two, and then he was out of them, we were both stepping all over them in the sand. He was going crazy on my neck and both my hands were crazy on his dick, moving up and down on it in these big slow pulls.

  We broke apart and stood there looking at each other, Scott without a stitch and me still all buttoned up. There was something great about that. I wanted to throw him down in the sand and step all over him, I wanted to show him exactly who was in control here. But before I could do anything, his dick started to completely go soft. I remember—I was really distressed. It was some kind of insult to me, that he’d go limp just like that. But before I could think what to do, Scott had already gone and made the next move.

  He turned around, grabbed his ankles, and bent over. I’d never seen anybody’s asshole before, and it took me off-guard. I could hear Carlos saying, “That’s it, that’s it. Now zoom,” while I just stood there and gaped. I’d tried to touch Carlos’s asshole once or twice because I was curious, but I think I mentioned how that was always off-limits. Now here was this asshole, all pink and puckery and staring right up at me. For a minute I was stunned—like a bird when a cat gets it. My dick completely wilted down to the size of my finger, and I remember thinking, some porn movie this is going to turn out to be where nobody can get it up. I could see Carlos motioning me to turn us so the camera could still get the city in the background. I grabbed Scott’s hips and scooted him around a little; then I took my finger and ran it along the crack of his ass where the camera could see. Very slowly, barely touching it—it was something I’d wanted to do to somebody for a long t
ime. When I got to his hole my finger sank right in. I hadn’t expected that, but before I knew it my finger was all the way in.

  I pulled out, then I stuck two fingers in. Scott groaned and lurched forward a little, but I still had my other hand on his hip so I caught him. I twisted those fingers around. It was amazing how slick it was when you got up in there—like animal innards, which I guess is exactly what it was. He was making noises like I was hurting him some, and that made me go at it even more. I got another finger up in there, then four fingers. I rammed my hand in all the way up to my thumb, and he made this low sound like some animal that’s caught in a trap. Like some wolf chewing its leg off, I remembering thinking.

  This was making my dick get hard again—especially since I kept shoving those fingers up his ass, paying him back for I wasn’t even sure what. But that groan I was wrenching out of him was sweet.

  When my fingers came out of Scott’s butt for about the twentieth time, I noticed something that sort of made me stop. They had this gook on them, shit mixed with some blood is what it was. It made me go soft all over again and sick to my stomach—which he must’ve known somehow, because he twisted away from me and threw himself on the sand on his back. It was like he’d washed up on some shore. There’d been a shipwreck; he’d almost got drowned.

  I don’t know exactly why I did what I did next. I pulled out my dick and pissed all over him. I pissed on his face and on his chest and in his hair and on his dick, I pissed like I was never going to stop pissing and if you ask me why I did it, I can’t tell you. I just did it and it happened and then it was over, Scott was lying there covered in my piss and the sand around him turning dark with it, little grains of sand stuck to his sides where it splattered and my fingers still gooey with his shit and blood. Then Carlos was beside me, touching me on the shoulder and laughing, saying, “Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful—you break my heart.” Which I thought might be a joke till I looked at his face and saw he really was crying, these big round tears rolling down his cheeks—and he was laughing and howling like a maniac and wiping at his eyes with the flat of his hand.