I wanted. I wanted to see what it felt like in my hand. How it unfolded from his skin. What it tasted like when I had it so far in the back of my throat that his pre-come gagged me. To know how it fitted me, how it slid in, tip-first, cracking me open.
I didn’t owe Santo anything. The fucker didn’t even have the balls to dump me proper. Just ‘your hair smells funny’ and his hand on my ass and making me sit on the other side. Hot-cold, hot-cold.
The busboy put his mouth on my neck, rubbed his teeth together around a bit of my skin. His soft hair fell against my cheek. I curled my fingers around his cock, the lean length of him, imagined him fucking me on the séance table, bending me over one of the barstools that went up and down, letting me suck his cock in the laboratory among all those misshapen heads and three-eyed sheep.
He slid a couple of fingers into the tightness of my jeans, aimed them against the lace of my underwear, grunting a little against my neck as he pushed downward. His fingertips barely brushed my clit, sending soft little sparks of desire through me that made me arch my hips. I pushed into his touch, feeling his cock twitch and pulse inside my fingers. He pulled back, enough so I could see the desire building in his eyes, the way his lids half-closed, heavy with lust. His voice too, damn, that deepened husk that never failed to get me.
‘You could stay,’ he said. ‘My place.’
‘I could,’ I said.
Santo was still looking at the menu when I came out. I took a long look at his face, all serious, thought about his cock for a minute. Fuck, that boy had a good cock. I said that already, didn’t I? I was going to miss it. But dumped was dumped.
I slid out and he didn’t notice. Down the stairs and out into the bustle of the city. There was a huge bookstore nearby that I liked, and a tiny park. I’d find something to do in the city until Jekyll’s closed.
There’s more to this story. There always is, right? Like how I came back later and the busboy was gone. How I didn’t even know his name. How all I had left was the feel of his cock pulsing against my skin, the memory of his teeth tugging at the soft curve of my neck.
How the bar was all aflutter with the talk of the cute Italian boy who’d come with his girl and been abandoned, how he’d planned a big deal for her, had a ring and everything.
Santo always did act weird when he was nervous.
That was a long time ago. I never took the train back home from this place. The city loves me like no boy I’ve ever had. Its streets are long, lean cocks that pulse with lust and hit all my right spots. Its dark holes are the places to explore with my fingers. It bites and scratches and claws and fucks me. And I bend for it, down on my knees, let it enter me. It’ll never leave me. It’s in me. Now and always.
About the Story
Bits and pieces of this story are true. The rest is not. What is true is this: I grew up in New York, but didn’t visit the city until I was sixteen. I nearly peed my pants when someone whispered, “Clarice” in my ear on a haunted hay ride. I loved taking the train into the city and then going to the Jekyll & Hyde Club and sitting on the revolving stools. I once had an Italian boyfriend with a beautiful cock. The part that is not true? All of the sex in the city. Sadly.
As a kid growing up on a farm in upstate NY, the Big Apple was far away and quite foreign. The only things I knew about it then were that you could see a Broadway show (whatever that meant), that it was “full of gays” (which meant gay men, then, and which was said with both distain and awe) and that it made our taxes really, really high (according to my father, every time he yelled at us for leaving the lights on or standing with the fridge open).
I think that when you grow up in or near a city, you don’t realize it for what it is. It isn’t until I left and moved to the West coast and everyone I met – I mean everyone – wanted to move to NYC that I looked back and thought, “Wow, I could have gone there any time, and these people have saved up their whole lives for the opportunity.”
Now that I’m older and haven’t lived in New York for a long time, I miss the city. But I miss it in that way that you sometimes miss a dead relative – because you’re supposed to and because she sometimes gave you sugar cookies with real frosting. So I go and visit the grave of the city sometimes, just to read the inscription, leave some flowers and maybe say a few words of mourning. And, of course, I keep my eye out for a fantastic fuck in the back room of a restaurant; after all, anything can happen in the Big City.
Sophia in Astoria
by Thom Gautier
Sophia added you as a Friend.
Sophia who? A photo, above a name, showed a sun-kissed female face framed by fine blonde hair. Large blue eyes stared from my screen. ‘Remember me?’ a message asked. ‘I used to go out with Caz Theopholos?’ My late friend, Caz. That Sophia? Yes. Yes, I remembered her.
‘How long has it been since we saw each other?’ I asked in reply. ‘Ten years?’
She wrote back: ‘Thirteen, I think.’
Sophia, my new friend who was hardly ‘new’. Her name, her photo, her contact, stirred me. The more I thought of her, the more stirred I was, stirred even as her contact salted the wound of losing Caz. I rifled through boxes for traces of Sophia from back then and found an old favourite photo: Sophia and my ex-wife, in their early twenties, posed side by side, in little black dresses, taken at the first wedding that Caz and I had attended. What struck me about the photo, and probably why I kept it, was how immature my ex-wife seemed standing next to Sophia, who, lithe, long-legged, was seated with her legs neatly crossed, her posture upright on an oversized sofa, and was gazing into a somewhere else that only she knew, far out of the photo’s frame, into a future that was maybe here.
Sophia. Sophia and Caz. The loss of Caz shadowed my life. Over two decades ago, when his parents divorced, he had moved from Astoria, Queens to The Bronx, where he and I became virtual brothers. We snuck our first beers together. Took clandestine subway trips during the city’s wild west high crime days. We’d learned about sex by swapping favourite porn magazines. He preferred Playboy and brunettes; I favoured Penthouse and redheads.
At eighteen, Caz fell in love with Sophia. We went to bachelor parties and our friends’ weddings. At twenty, he broke up with Sophia. He and I travelled cross-country.
At twenty-three, he got back with Sophia. We got shitty jobs and then we got better and better jobs. At twenty-five, he broke up with Sophia for the last time. We tried, and failed, to stay in grad school. In our thirties, I got married. And then divorced. With Caz’s help, I got back on my feet again. I started dating. Then, as soon as my own life had traction, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. “Six months,” the doctors told him. There’s fate; and then there’s fate. Caz lived exactly one year from the day of his diagnosis. Dead at thirty-five. During his final weeks, his ex-girlfriends, mostly blondes, flocked to his bedside. Their expressions stupefied by regret, eyes heavy with unspoken laments for lost opportunities, they stared at him, mourning without quite mourning, like ancient Greek lovers who have arrived too late for one final bacchanal with their dying god.
Sophia. Half Greek, and, if I remembered right, half Dutch. Sophia, from the Greek word for wisdom. I recalled from my college days when I studied philosophy that Socrates supposedly said that ‘Nothing is preferred above justice.’ But there is no justice. The good die young. Miserable bastards live to be a hundred. This is true in Astoria, that manic Greek-American neighbourhood in Queens, where ole Socrates would have felt at home, and it’s true everywhere else in this manic world. But if there’s no justice, there is erotic consolation. The ancient Greeks knew about erotic consolation. Sophia. Yes, oh, the consolation. I felt an erotic frisson seeing Sophia’s name in my inbox. She wrote now and then. She explained to me how, two years after she broke up with Caz, she married ‘a mistake’. She had twins with this mistake. She and the mistake had moved to a gated community in South Carolina, etc. Etc. When she h
eard Caz was dying, she wanted to come up to New York, visit him one last time. ‘But my girls needed me here,’ she wrote to me, as if she were also apologizing to Caz. When she spoke to him on the phone from his hospital bed, he encouraged her to get a divorce from ‘the mistake’. ‘Life is not short,’ he’d told her. ‘It’s less than short. Live your life.’
After Caz died, she took that carpe diem seriously. Now she was remarried to a man who, judging from her homepage, looked stable, Southern, suburban. Her words suggested she was bored, comfortable, wistful. She confessed that she thinks of Caz, ‘Every single day.’ She elaborated on the theme only once. ‘Whenever I see the New York City skyline on a TV show, I think of Caz.’
Our e-mails kept up for several months like this, so it was karmic and unsurprising when Sophia e-mailed that she was coming to New York, visiting some cousin whose house in Queens had just been bought up by a developer. ‘Might you be around?’ she wrote. ‘Dinner?’
Yes, I told her, I would be around. I even mimicked her laconic style. ‘Yes, dinner.’
Though she grew up in a row house underneath the Triboro Bridge, back in the day, Sophia was aristocratic, reserved, Sphinx-like. She and I had rarely conversed. The odd aside when she spoke to me, however, left an impression. She was a fan of innuendo. How a cigar is never a cigar. At one dinner party, she’d made a subtle remark to me about the astonishing length of the host’s bread sticks. Another time, watching the Super Bowl, she’d asked me had I noticed how all the play-by-play announcers sounded as if they were describing sex: “up the middle”, “in the pocket”, “going deep”. But beyond recalling those sporadic quips, I couldn’t remember actual conversations from back then. Now, though, we had lost Caz. We’d be able to converse.
Still, as our reunion neared, as if trying to read tea leaves, I dug through more old photo stashes. I scanned photos with Sophia in them and loaded them on to my computer. I cropped other people out, including Caz, so that all I was left with were images of Sophia. Sophia in a little black dress. Sophia in a sequin dress on New Year’s Eve. Sophia in a black bikini on a beach.
I even downloaded her recent online photos. Sophia in denim shorts in front of a forest waterfall. Sophia playing lakeside Frisbee with her twin girls. It felt unhealthy, this cut-and-paste voyeurism. It also felt satisfying, healing. After all, she had gotten in touch with me. Caz was never far from my mind; I worried that I might be unburying the dead.
‘Take your time when you get back to Queens,’ I wrote Sophia as the day approached. ‘See old friends. See a Broadway play. Then, only if it won’t be too painful for you, we can meet face to face and try dinner.’ She didn’t immediately answer. For a very long three days, I wondered if I had telegraphed that I was wussing out.
The morning she was due to arrive, she phoned me from JFK Airport. Her voice had that smooth, glassy cadence that I remembered: soothing. Yes, I agreed, we could eat in Queens. Sure, a Thai place she knew. Did I eat Thai? she asked. I assured her I ate Thai. ‘Then you’ll eat Thai,’ she said. ‘I will eat Thai,’ I replied and we both laughed.
She suggested we meet in front of Aphrodite’s Delicatessen in Astoria.
‘The place Caz and I used to buy beers on the way out to Jones Beach?’ I asked.
She giggled. ‘That a one.’
I didn’t tell any friends about this meeting. This not-quite-date. This Thai dinner with an ex-girlfriend of a dead friend. A dead best friend. It felt too inexplicable to reveal to anyone else, too hermetic. Mythic, maybe, as much as Queens would accommodate my myth.
I got a haircut, a shave. I dressed in a jacket and crisp dress shirt, Italian loafers. Like an idiot, I didn’t bring anything to read on the long N train ride out to Astoria. My hands trembled. I paced. I could imagine Caz watching me and laughing from the beyond. My libido was teenage-like, fired up by everything in the subway car. Grinning models in teeth-whitening ads. The red lace stockings of a Russian-looking passenger who blushed and pulled her skirt over her knee. Racy cognac ads with two Asian models draped around the arms of a bald, clean-shaven African-American stud. New York, I thought, sex as the city.
When I emerged from the subway in Queens, I paused at the top step and stared across at Aphrodite’s Deli. Sophia was there, taller than I remembered. Her blonde hair was longer too. With her arms folded across her chest, she was distracted, intense, casting her large blue eyes left and right, cat-like, trying to predict my direction. A blonde shimmer haloed her, separating her from the brick buildings and ashen-faced commuters. Her pale blue blouse, her designer navy blue skirt, her dark blue strapped heels, her leather purse – a Fendi, I could read, as I got closer – slung lightly over her thin shoulder; all of her contrasted with the deli’s paint-splattered, cluttered storefront.
When I was within a few feet, my stomach churned. I recalled, in a rapid, seamless montage, countless moments when Caz was alive. Girlfriends with big hair. Messy break-ups. Bachelor parties spent trawling for hookers in Hunts Point. Drunken nights at Shea Stadium. Boring bowling nights. Dead-end double dates in the Nineties. How crazy Caz was about Sophia. How, to him, when he was single and feeling adrift, she’d always been the one. How crazy he was made by her. Small details came to me too. How Sophia had mistakenly bought him a Jets jersey instead of a Giants jersey for his twentieth birthday. How Caz had confessed to me that she once gave him an insanely slow foot job while he tried to talk to his angry boss on the phone. I blushed at the memories and coughed and tugged at my jacket: ‘Get your shit together,’ I could hear Caz mutter to me, as if he were a director coaching a nervous actor. ‘Step into the scene.’
When Sophia saw me, the tension in her shoulders relaxed. In her heels, she matched my height. We smiled, partly in relief and partly from that delight that comes from cheating time by meeting someone we thought we’d never lay eyes on again.
I kissed her, a quick tentative kiss that she returned more definitively. She inspected me, head to toe, and said that I hadn’t aged ‘a jot’. She playfully rubbed her lipstick stain off my lips. Her fingers were like cold porcelain. Or marble. Marble nymph fingers, I thought, and I smiled at her.
I could see that she was far less nervous than me. Maybe her Greek blood had helped her give herself over to fate; maybe, not being Greek, I was resisting what all the Greeks knew we couldn’t escape: fate.
‘You got younger,’ I said. She smirked like she didn’t believe me. Her earrings, golden dolphins, set off by her tan.
In a rush of sudden confidence, I opened my arms and pulled her into a warm hug, and she hugged back, firmly. Her soft breasts pressed into my chest. The magnetic attraction of our shared loss radiated out into a tangible present and pulsed like a current as we held that hug. My nose filled with her lilac perfume. The tender sensation of her lean arms clasped round me made my throat catch. I hugged her so hard that I lifted her off the sidewalk.
A train rumbled overhead, like an earthquake in the evening air.
When we let go, her eyes were red and watery yet she was smiling. She adjusted her silver necklace that had tangled under her blouse. ‘That hug,’ she said. ‘Again?’
‘Sure,’ I said, and, then, almost like a dare to which she’d set herself, she grabbed the back of my neck, and pulled me in and kissed me hard. We opened our mouths and let our tongues loll.
I clasped her again and again I did the playful hug-and-lift, this time with an exciting possessiveness. When we let go, I wanted to plant another kiss. And more. What I wanted was to make love to her, right there, in daylight, in view of every passer-by in Astoria. On the gum-splattered sidewalk, I wanted to kneel down, kneel and hike up her skirt and part her long legs, here, with fat men in the deli staring out at us. Peel off her panties and kiss and lick and tease and worship her sex until she felt all her years of pent-up regrets and frozen memories about Caz melt from her, out of her, into a hot, public orgasm, an orgasm more drawn out and blissf
ul than any she’d ever felt with any man. Including Caz. ‘Friends, F-O-C,’ she said, cryptically. Friends of Caz.
I was tempted to ask what she meant, exactly, by friends, but I just nodded, and Like a couple who have eloped in an arranged, shotgun marriage, we locked hands and we walked on without talking. We strolled the long blocks hand in hand without speaking, passing noisy Irish bars and crowded Greek eateries, Italian pizzerias bustling with teenagers and Asian food shops with misspelled English: ‘Boil loster, lo chorestorol.’ Cars honked, mothers screamed. I could pick out Caz’s young face in the faces of young kids on the stoops smoking. I felt his presence hovering around us as if he were part angel, part genie.
Before we were to go to the restaurant, Sophia suggested we stop in at Caz’s mother’s. ‘Do you mind?’ she asked. ‘Or is that too much?’
‘I don’t think it’s too much,’ I said. ‘There’s no script, right?’
‘I couldn’t come here and not see her. But it … It is about us, this,’ she said, waving her hand back and forth between us as she repeated it and this. I heard a sweet embrace in how she said us.
Caz’s mother lived on the ground floor in a dimly lit corner tenement and her shrieks of joyful shock echoed off the bare walls of the lobby.
Inside, Sophia and I held hands tightly, perched on the couch facing Caz’s mother, who sat on the coffee table, leaning into us as if she needed to confirm that we weren’t mirages. As she reminisced, she tapped our knees with excitement, like we were a couple out on a first date, which, in fact, I realized, we were.
At one point Sophia let go of my hand, but squeezed my wrist as if to signal she’d be back double-quick. Seated alone on that old couch, I hardly heard Caz’s mother as she narrated a story around a photo album. I just nodded absently and discreetly lifted my eyes to watch Sophia in the kitchen. She was fetching wine. She waved at me and blew a kiss. I stared at her firm ass under the navy skirt, her elegant gait, her sun-kissed calves tapering lithely into navy pumps. I studied her fine fingers and pink nail polish as she uncorked the bottle. Sitting back on the couch, she greedily reclaimed my hand and handed me my glass of wine. Our thighs pressed together; our feet tapped out footsie as Caz’s mother rambled on and on and on about the past.
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