Boys of Life

by Paul Russell

  I could tell she was impressing everybody with her talk. It sort of depressed me, though, so I went outside on the deck where the night air was cool. There’s something I always like about fall, the leaves turning and coming down. I couldn’t see them because it was night, but I could hear the dry sound they made when they fell. From inside Lisa’s house I could hear music on the stereo, and people talking, but out there on the deck it was the leaves falling I could hear louder than anything—leaves falling in the dark where nobody could see them.

  “So—it’s a Boho,” I heard this voice say behind me. I turned around and probably didn’t look too thrilled.

  “Just kidding.” It was the man with the cat mask.

  I shrugged. I wasn’t all that interested in talking to a guy wearing a cat mask, even if he did have a great body under his silver spandex.

  “You know,” he said, “I think we know one another.”

  I looked at the cat mask.

  “I’m pretty sure I’d remember,” I said.

  He pushed the mask up over the top of his head and grinned at me.

  I did know him. I didn’t know his name, but I knew he owned some outfit that built fences around swimming pools. He was in Mad Joe’s a fair amount to buy stuff. I guess I’d always sort of noticed him—he was about forty, this wiry frame and gray hair cut real short. He didn’t remind me of Carlos—nobody I ever met ever reminded me of Carlos. But I have to say, whenever he came into Mad Joe’s, I got this whiff of something, some itch of electric current I used to know back when I was living the life I lived in New York. The Boho life, Monica was probably calling it inside at that very instant.

  I guess that’s why I’d look at him the way I did whenever he was in the store. And he must’ve noticed it. I didn’t think I was being too obvious about it, but I guess I was—because before I knew what was happening he was touching me. It was this brazen thing—he just reached out and grabbed my crotch. It took me totally off-guard. I backed up against the deck railing.

  “Whoa there,” I told him. “You’re pretty off-limits.”

  He didn’t take his hand off me. He just looked at me.

  I guess I should’ve thrown a punch at him just then, or something like that—but I didn’t. I’ve always respected people who knew exactly what they wanted.

  “I could just tell about you,” he said.

  “There’s not anything to tell,” I told him.

  He’d moved in against me and put his arms around my waist. It was all sort of sudden, and before I knew it he was pressing his crotch up against mine. He was getting a hard-on, and I guess I was too.

  “You’ve got me all wrong,” I said. “You’re barking up the wrong tree.”

  “I’m a cat,” he said. “I don’t bark. You know you want it, don’t you?”

  “No, I don’t know that,” I told him.

  He’d worked his hand down the back of my pants, and his finger was creeping up on my asshole.

  “I really don’t want this,” I said.

  “I’ve always thought cocks speak louder than words,” he told me, pressing himself against me so I knew he could feel my hard-on there.

  His middle finger had wormed its way up my asshole, and now he started sliding it in and out of me, like he was fucking me. I think I leaned my head against his shoulder and just let him go on with it. I couldn’t do anything else. I didn’t want to. It brought back too many memories, and I knew what I’d always know—how my body didn’t really belong to me sometimes, it was just something I was inside of. Meanwhile the cat man was humping himself against me, and I was humping back. He put his tongue inside my ear and that did it—I went crazy shooting off inside my mustard-colored Boho trousers. I bit his shoulder to keep from crying out, and he bit my ear. I don’t know whether he came too or not, because at that instant Mr. Computer came out the back door with a beer in one hand and that stupid keyboard in the other. The cat man and I broke apart like nothing had happened, and I’m sure Mr. Computer didn’t notice a thing.

  “Aren’t you guys chilly?” he asked. “Anyway, you’re wasting your time out here. All the hot chicks are indoors.”

  “We’ll be in in a sec,” the cat man said. “We’re out here looking for shooting stars. And I think maybe we found one.”

  When Mr. Computer had squeezed his way back indoors, the cat man said in this totally normal voice, like we were talking swimming pool fences, “You should stop by my place sometime. We could have something pretty hot going on.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so.” I was still tingling where his finger’d been up my asshole. To tell the truth, I wanted to bend over right there and get fucked like I hadn’t gotten fucked in two years—but I also felt suddenly empty and terrible inside. “I’m a married man,” I told him. “I’ve got these responsibilities.”

  He shrugged. “I’m married too. Everybody has to live their own life.”

  And that was true. We walked back into the party and headed for different corners of the room and stayed like that the rest of the night. And even though he came into Mad Joe’s about every other week like nothing ever happened, I made sure not to look his way. I guess he got the message—or maybe he was content with that little bit of trick or treat he got from me at Lisa’s party, and decided just to settle for that.

  THERE WAS THIS ONE PARTICULAR STREET IN Memphis I used to drive down every day on my way to work. I didn’t have to drive down it—in fact, it was a couple blocks out of my way—but on the corner was this movie theater, one of those big old-fashioned kinds you don’t see anymore. It was all closed up when I first got to town, but then somebody bought it and opened it up to show foreign movies. There was a big marquee out front, and every three or four days they’d be showing a different movie.

  Every time I drove by there and saw some new movie playing, I’d feel like this fugitive who’s gotten himself a new identity and is hiding out—but he knows sooner or later he’s going to walk out his front door and there’ll be some car he doesn’t recognize parked across the street, and then he’ll know they’ve tracked him down. A year went by, three years—but some day, I knew, one of Carlos’s movies was going to show up on that marquee.

  MONICA’S DAD LOVED TO GO FISHING. THERE WAS this lake down in Mississippi, about twenty miles south of Memphis, where he’d been going since he was a boy. It was the lake where Monica’s brother, Gary, tried to roust out the water moccasins with the shotgun.

  “Fishing?” I said when Monica told me her dad wanted us to go out with him sometime. “It’s the middle of winter.”

  “Winter’s the best time,” Monica said. “When it’s cold and early in the morning—that’s when the fish’re biting.”

  “My idea of fun,” I said. “When it’s cold and early in the morning.”

  “Dawn,” she said. “I told him we’d go next Saturday.”

  I always tried to be a good husband. Monica dragged me out of bed while it was still pitch dark, and we sat in the kitchen drinking coffee waiting for her dad to come by and pick us up.

  “What’re you doing?” she asked me.

  I was eating coffee beans. “If I’m gonna make it,” I said, “I better be all charged up. There better be some light socket out there to plug me in to.”

  “Fishing’s relaxing,” she told me. “You’ll scare the fish away if you get nervous.”

  “I’m always nervous,” I said. “I’ll be especially nervous in a boat in the middle of a lake full of water moccasins.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” she told me. “Snakes sleep in the wintertime.”

  On our way out of Memphis we drove past Graceland. I’d never been by there before—I didn’t even know it was there. Don couldn’t believe it. “They’ve got billboards from here to the North Carolina border advertising Graceland,” he said. “First thing you see when you come into the state’s a billboard in the shape of a pink Cadillac. COME HOME TO GRACELAND, it says.”

  “I never noticed them,” I had to tell
him.

  Along Elvis Presley Boulevard, there were billboards everywhere—cars, liquor, plane flights to Mexico. They were selling everything. At five o’clock on a Saturday morning, the street was totally deserted except for those big lit-up signs. There was this huge cut-out of Elvis playing the guitar, about fifty feet tall. It was probably the only billboard in town Don hadn’t put up, and he was jealous. “Does that make some kind of statement or what?” he said. He craned his head around to keep his eye on that sign as long as he could while we drove past. He didn’t want to let it go. I turned around too—but from behind, it wasn’t Elvis anymore. It was just some scaffolding and you couldn’t tell what it was supposed to be.

  Once we crossed over into Mississippi, Memphis sort of trailed off, like it lost interest in being a city anymore. We went driving through this country of sharecropper shacks half-falling down, and tacky little country stores with rusty gas pumps in front—but mostly just cotton fields as far as you could see. It was about dawn when we turned down a dirt road that headed back into some woods, and after a while we came to the lake. There was a tarpapered cabin there, up on stilts—a ladder led up to the door, and a sign that was tacked there said SHANGRI-LA. Signs were posted up everywhere, pieces of plywood with big lettering, like somebody’d gone hog-wild with a paintbrush one afternoon. NO TRESPASSING BY ORDER OF THE ROYAL TISHOMINGO HUNTING & FISHING CLUB, said one sign. Another said, KEEP ON DUMPING TRASH HERE & THERE WON’T BE NO MORE FISHING.

  There was trash all around the cabin—tin cans, newspapers, tires. It was a pretty unappealing place. Cypress trees were growing out in the lake; their knobby brown knees stuck up out of the water the way the stubs of all those old piers do along the Hudson River in NewYork.

  Inside the cabin a big Confederate flag with burn holes in it draped along one wall. Two men were sitting at a table drinking. When we came in, they jumped up and slapped Don on the back and hugged him with these great bearhugs. “How’s it going, buddy?” they said—not talking but shouting, whooping it up. They must’ve been drinking a while—coffee mugs full of whisky. Their faces were all red, and they moved around the cabin in these big sloppy motions, pulling out a couple of folding chairs for us from under a pile of tarps, getting out some more coffee mugs from a cabinet that hung on the wall.

  “This is my girl, Monica,” Don told them. One of the men pulled out a bottle and splashed a little whisky in each of the mugs.

  “You was wee-high last time I saw you,” the man said. He patted her on the head. “You remember me?”

  “Sure I remember you,” Monica told him. She picked up her coffee mug and swirled the whisky around in it. Then she gulped it right down. What I always loved about Monica was, nothing ever fazed her. She just entered right into things. “You’re Sonny,” she told the man. “You have that soybean farm. And you’re Ross, right? You were the restaurant man. You ran for the senate that time. You’re famous.”

  “Used to be,” Ross said, “used to be. Not famous anymore.”

  I could tell she impressed him, though. “Your girl’s got her head screwed on,” Ross told Don.

  “Like her old man,” Don said. “And this here’s my girl’s husband, Tony.” He grabbed me by the arm like I was some trophy he was showing off. Which I guess I was.

  Ross and Sonny both looked me up and down, but they didn’t say anything.

  “Been out yet?” Don asked them.

  “Too fucking cold,” said Ross. “If you’ll pardon my French.”

  “You got a fine accent there,” Don said. He held out his mug for more. I’d never seen him drink whisky, only beer. It flushed his face right up. “I’d take you for a native with an accent like that,” he told Ross.

  “I’m not a fishing man,” Ross said. “I’m a hunting man.”

  “Don’t believe a word,” Sonny said. “He just came down here to get drunk. Get away from the wife and kids.”

  “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do,” said Ross. He was a big shaggy man, and I tried to imagine him running for the senate—making speeches, kissing babies, shaking people’s hands. Both those guys made me nervous. The way they looked me over, I got this feeling they could see right through me to something they didn’t like. But they were too polite to say it. I’d got out of the habit of people looking through me—in New York it always happened, but usually in Memphis I fit in fine, like I’d always been here. Sometimes I even felt like Monica’d been this net the South threw up to pull me back where I belonged.

  Sonny and Ross were keeping up this loud back-and-forth with Monica and Don. It was like I wasn’t there with them, which was fine. I walked around the cabin looking at stuff. There were a couple of bags of groceries—breakfast makings—sitting on the table, and a little camp stove. On one of the walls somebody’d taken an old signboard that used to have an Indian’s head painted on it, some hook-nosed chief in his war bonnet, and they painted over that with white paint; then they painted the rules of the Royal Tishomingo Hunting & Fishing Club in red paint—but the white was so thin you could still see the old Indian peering through. The rules said:

  1. No Ladies

  2. No Niggers

  3. A good time will be had by all

  4. No shooting of firearms in the cabin

  5. Please do not gut fish inside the cabin

  6. No spitting or pissing indoors

  7. Shut out the lights when you leave

  8. What lights?

  “Here Tony, my man’’—Sonny was nudging me with the whisky bottle—“it’s gonna freeze your ass out on the water.’’

  “Tony’s tough,’’ Don said. “He lived up in New York City.”

  “New York, New York,” sang Ross. I guess he thought he was Frank Sinatra. “City of queers and niggers,” he sang in this gravelly voice.

  “My own damn daughter went to live in New York for a while,” Don told Ross.

  “That’s how I met Tony,” Monica said.

  “City of queers and niggers and kikes,” Ross sang. Then he said, “The Trilateral Commission runs that fucking city. Did you know that? They elect the mayor and the city council. There hasn’t been a free election up there in years. It’s all faked. Tony, you ever come across the Trilateral Commission up there?”

  “I never heard of it,” I told him.

  “They keep a low profile,” he said. “They’re very smart. They know what they’re doing.”

  “Who’s they?” I asked.

  “Jewish banking establishment. Communist Party. It goes back to the 1940S. Franklin Roosevelt. Their front’s the Rockefeller Foundation, but really they’re everywhere. Infiltration. Basically it’s your large Jewish population up there.”

  “It’s true,” Monica said, “half the people you meet up there turn out to be Jewish when you get to know them.”

  “And the other half,” I added, “are a bunch of queers.” I didn’t mean to say that—it just seemed like the right thing. The way Monica said what she’d said—to fit in.

  “See what I mean?” Ross told her. “You were lucky to meet a normal white man like Tony up there.”

  She smiled—her best smile, her Cherokee-Indian-cheekbone smile—and what I thought just then was: It’s not New York anymore. I’m not a fag. I’m just Tony Blair, that’s all I am. And suddenly I was remembering something Carlos told me once, a long time ago, after I first got to New York, how when they started putting people in the camps, like they did to the Jews back in Sammy’s hometown, I wasn’t going to have to worry. I’d just disappear back to Kentucky and everything would be fine. Suddenly I remembered him saying that so vividly.

  I have to admit I liked the feel of whisky in my stomach at seven o’clock in the morning. I hadn’t gotten drunk in the morning in years, and it felt great to have it go to my head like that.

  “You sure you’re not going out?” Don was saying. “There’s a lake of fine fish out there just waiting to be breakfast.”

  “Too damn cold,” Ross said again. He held
up his mug. “I got my own warm fireside here. I’d be some kind of fool to go leaving it.”

  “Well, that kind of puts the fishing up to us,” Don told him.

  “Somebody’s gotta do it,” Sonny told us.

  I got the feeling they could talk with each other like that all day, without saying a thing. They could live their whole lives that way.

  “Ya’ll hurry back,” Ross yelled to us as we went down to the water and the motorboat that was moored on a little falling-down pier. “I’ll scramble you up a little breakfast.”

  It took us forever to get the motor on the motorboat started. I say us—it was Monica who finally figured out what the problem was. I spent the whole time looking around at how the lake had washed out the tree roots along the bank. It was one of those times when it comes over you—you think it’s just odd you’re here. That’s all—it’s just odd to be here at this exact moment.

  Trouble was, all of a sudden I desperately wanted to get drunk.

  Not with Ross or Sonny; not with Monica and her dad either. Just curled up drunk away by myself somewhere.

  When I breathed out I could see my silvery breath. Now that it was light, you could see it was cloudy—it looked like snow or probably cold rain. Everything was silver-gray—my breath, and the lake and the sky and the tree trunks by the edge of the water. The boat. Only Monica in her red jacket wasn’t gray. That spot of bright red in the middle of all that gray was the most depressing thing of all.

  “How was that for blotto?” Monica said once we were out on the lake. She liked to drink now and then, but she hated drunks. It was something I guess she got from her mom. “Stinko heaven back there,” she said. “What is it? Seven o’clock in the morning?”

  “Good solid fellows,” Don told her. “Backbone people.”

  “I think that Ross guy is crazy,” I said. I never said anything like that around Don—it just didn’t seem worth disagreeing with him about things. I guess that’s the worst thing you can say about somebody, that you just don’t have the energy to want to bother with them. It’s why Don always thought I was sort of feeble. He was used to having friendly arguments with people, the kind where you agree not to disagree too much. It was the way he got on with his friends.