Buenas Noches, Buenos Aires

by Gilbert Adair

  I still hadn’t seen the customer’s face. From behind, all I could tell about him was that he was short and had tufty black hair and – because he was wearing a sleeveless white teeshirt – slim, downy arms. (I dote on down.) But just as he was giving up and going, I got it. Lady Putty? Lya de Putti! He meant Lya de Putti, of course, one of those demented divas who palely haunted the silent cinema screen. Almost without realising I was doing so, I spoke her name aloud, which made the now grateful customer, half-in and half-out of the shop’s front door, turn at last to beam at me. My heart melted, my cock swelled.

  He was eighteen, from Seoul. He was based, however, in Tokyo, a trainee maquilleur for Estée Lauder, and he was in Paris for prêt-à-porter week. He was also (I was touched by such an outré taste in one so young) a fan of the more exotic silent movie stars, both female, Putti, Brigitte Helm, Pola Negri, and male, Valentino, Ramon Novarro, Rod La Rocque – except that, as I gathered from his very iffy command of English, he understandably preferred collecting images of them to watching their films. I observed him with fond fascination as he thumbed through the Minotaure’s systemless jumble of dog-eared sepia stills, from which he soon unearthed a handful for his own collection; and under the queens’ now cynically amused scrutiny I helped him extract the change to pay for them from his tiny blue Smurf purse.

  Kim was as lean as a whippet. If it’s possible to be short and gangly, he was it. Though I knew instantly he was homosexual, he wasn’t at all effeminate, even when he giggled, which was a lot. His French was nonexistent, his English not much better, so that, for the first time in my life, I was deeply grateful to the Berlitz Method. As for his facial beauty, the spectrum of sexual tastes being as inclusive as we all know it is, I really can’t see the point in describing it at futile and probably counterproductive length, except to say that it was ‘me’. Let the reader visualise a face for himself.

  When we left the shop, I treated him to a club sandwich and a Schweppes at the Flore; and since his afternoon was to be taken up doing whatever it is maquilleurs do at fashion shows, we made a date to meet on the place Saint-Germain-des-Prés at nine.

  I tried to kill time by going to a six o’clock screening of a film, one whose plot I found next to impossible to comprehend, distracted as I was both by my doubts as to whether Kim would keep our date and my wish-fulfilment reveries about what we’d get up to if he did.

  And he did. In the cinema I’d noticed despite my itchy state that some scenes in the film I was watching, a hammy and hackneyed old Hollywood potboiler made in the nineteen-thirties, much of it set in the South Seas, had had recourse to crude back-projection. Well, as I hurried along the boulevard Saint-Germain and, from a distance, made out the diminutive Kim, standing alone in the Drugstore entrance, it felt to me, too, as though everything behind him, the Drugstore itself, the rue de Rennes, the lit-up Tour Montparnasse, blotting out the sky like the keyboard of a giant accordion, were so much stock footage, all of it belonging to an alien and less luminous world than he who was to be the star of my evening.

  Since, for the duration of prêt-à-porter week, Kim was obliged to share a room with another Estée Lauder employee in a Right Bank hotel, we went back to the Voltaire, foiling the night porter by stepping first into the bar for a drink and sneaking upstairs half-an-hour later through a now abandoned kitchen. I wasn’t permitted to bring guests back to my room after ten in the evening and it had already occurred to me that getting him out of the hotel either at dawn or in the wee hours of night, depending on whether or not I’d risen to the occasion, might well prove to be a thornier proposition. But I told myself I would cross – or throw myself off – that bridge when I came to it.

  Once inside the bedroom, whose frugality startled him, Kim asked if he could use what he charmingly called ‘the roo’, which I interpreted, correctly, as ‘the loo’. I told him there was none in the room itself and that the nearest was a communal WC on the landing below mine. Or else, I added, my heart beating like a bongo, he could use the washbasin, as I generally did. He giggled; then at once unbuttoned his flies (rather than unzipped – ‘zips not eregant,’ as he put it), stood, his back to me, up against the porcelain basin and let the cold water run. Nothing at first seemed to happen. He giggled once again. ‘Not come. Is hard in pubric,’ he sighed, turning to face me with the whitest and toothiest of smiles. I no longer hesitated. I stepped up behind him, looked down at his uncircumcised cock, which, held as it was between his thumb and index finger, resembled a tiny, almond-hued balloon waiting to be inflated, and – saying to him (even though I knew he wouldn’t understand what I was talking about), ‘Shall I be mother?’ – inserted my own thumb and finger around its base. I gave it a shake. Nothing. I shook it again, less gingerly. Still nothing. Then, with my left hand, I turned the cold tap on full blast and suddenly, glistening like morning dew, the pee came – I felt it course through his little rainpipe, through his lovely little drainpipe – causing Kim to laugh delightedly. When he’d done, he said to me, ‘Liggle it.’ So I liggled it – liggled it till its flaccidity started to stretch and firm in my gentle clutch.

  Kim stayed in my room till two in the morning then slipped away – it seems without attracting the porter’s attention, since the subject was never brought up by Madame Müller. And during all the time he was with me he just couldn’t resist – like most boys of his age, gay and straight both – twiddling his cock, tugging it, fingering it as though it were a rosary or a set of worry beads. But then, what else in the world but a cock, one’s own or another’s, instils so instant and enduring a sensation of well-being, only by being touched? And I remember thinking: if God had not meant for boys to play with their cocks, He would not have made their arms just long enough to span the distance from shoulder to crotch. A cock is one of the wonders of the world – what am I saying, is the wonder of the world – and not much in that world is as iniquitous as the fact that it contains billions and billions of cocks (‘billions and billions of cocks’ – has there ever been so divine a conjunction of words?), all of them seen by God, that jammy bastard who sees everything, but next to none of them, alas, by me. It’s all the more iniquitous in that there will surely come a time in the near or far future when, with the invention of some as yet undreamt-of radiographic technology, everybody on earth will gain at least virtual access to everybody else’s private parts and look back with disbelief and pity on the benighted twentieth as a century of unimaginable sexual deprivation. I thought, as well, of a comment once made by the dissident Soviet poet Andrey Voznesensky. Speaking of certain especially reactionary members of the then Politburo, he said – and I quote from memory – that they had faces so ugly they ought to be hidden in trousers. For the period it was certainly a courageous joke to make publicly, and it was also quite witty, but, oh, what a calumny of the most mysterious object in the world. That metaphoric, metamorphic member, that dusky, musky muscle, that acorn that already harbours the embryo of a great oak, that dual-purpose contraption, so comical yet so awesome, that would be an unnameable monstrosity were it to protrude from an armpit, let’s say, or a nostril, but that, just where it is, just where it’s supposed to be, makes the isosceles triangle of a boy’s limbs so enchanting and male nudity so much more interesting, so much less predictable, than female! (A man can mentally strip a woman, but how, with the least hope of accuracy where the bulge in his pants is concerned, can a woman mentally strip a man?) Hide God’s masterpiece in trousers? If I were dictator of the world, I would make it a capital offence to hide a cock in trousers. I would make it compulsory for every boy and man on the planet, all those billions and billions and billions of them, Voznesensky included, to walk around with his cock flying in the breeze. I would –

  Basta! All I meant to convey by that paean to the penis, my own penis’s last stand, my libido’s last hurrah, was that I could have spent the whole night just monkeying about with Kim’s – which was, as I say, on the smallish side but compensated for that by being lovably chubby
and kind of spouty – without feeling the need to gravitate to any heavier-duty stuff. And, indeed, because of my wonderment at his cock’s dexterity – as also because of my fear that, if I proposed or attempted something more robust, I would spoil what was shaping up for me, by contrast with earlier disasters, as practically an idyll – that really is, as I remember it now, all I did do. I didn’t fuck him, nor was I fucked by him. I didn’t rim him, nor was I rimmed by him. I flicked my lithe lizard-tongue over his sweet, sweet cojones and invited him to sit his plump, olivy little buttocks astride my nose (that old fantasy of mine) while I gave him the daintiest of blow jobs. Not so dainty, though, that it didn’t make me come at once over my own abdomen, which meant, as always, that I was abruptly no longer in a fit state to be given a blow job by him.

  That could have been that – the usual – except that I remained throughout on so elated a ‘high’ (I decided, if I may be allowed a groanworthy pun, that I definitively preferred, or at least until something better came along, Asian cocks to Caucasians) it never struck me that Kim might have sought a more energetic session, particularly as he too seemed to get pleasure out of the tame adolescent games we did play, even if not as much as I did. But when – at around two, I say – he started to dress again, he looked at me sideways and said, almost word for word, what Carla had been about to say so long ago, ‘You funny boy, Gideon.’ When I stared back at him, not knowing whether I ought to take offence, he explained what he meant: ‘You rike Bambi sex.’ Then he kissed me on the lips, unlocked my bedroom door and slipped away. He was flying back to Japan the following day and I never saw him again.

  Bambi sex? So was Kim, too, disappointed with me? Even just minutes after his departure, when I was already starting to review in my mind the chronology of the night’s events, complete with slow-motion replays of its highlights, even then, as I mentally relived activities I couldn’t imagine Bambi getting up to with Thumper, I had to acknowledge that once more I had let my partner down. And if I can’t pretend that on this occasion anxiety gnawed at me as voraciously as it had so often done in the past, I did go to bed just a shade less euphoric than I expected I would. A cloud no bigger than a boy’s genitalia had cast its shadow across what I’d hoped would become one of my most precious memories, and I resolved that with my very next ‘conquest’ I would properly lose, and not just mislay, my onerous virginity.

  This next conquest was Mathias, a Swiss mathematics student, immensely tall, well over six feet, handsome in a brainy-looking way albeit not actually my type. We got talking while queueing for a film in an antiquated cinéma d’art et essai near the Sorbonne, we occupied adjacent seats inside the steeply raked auditorium and we went off for a drink afterwards.

  He was a strange one, was Mathias, and I would have been content to forgo the sex that was clearly going to end our evening together – a prospect that was already implicit in our chat in the queue – if he himself had not been so keen. He had, though, an unnervingly ponderous presence at odds with what I could only presume was his lust for me. In the café where we had our drink, there was a permanent absence of anything approaching a smile on his face whenever I cracked a joke. And three or four times, out of the blue, he would ask, in French, a dumbfounding question whose relevance to the conversational matter at hand was moot, to put it mildly. ‘Was Thomas Alva Edison a homosexual, do you suppose?’ or ‘Haven’t I seen your face on the back of a Penguin?’ (he couldn’t recall the name of the writer he had mistaken me for) or ‘Do you like dinosaurs?’, to the last of which I could only reply, helplessly, that I could take them or leave them. He would, moreover, voice these questions without launching any of them in my specific direction so that they hovered between us like telephone calls waiting to be answered except that I wasn’t a hundred percent sure they were for me.

  An hour or so later, after walking along streets washed by rain that had begun to fall just as we entered the café and stopped just before we emerged from it, like a chambermaid conveniently making up your bed while you’re in the hotel’s breakfast room, we arrived at his chambre de bonne in the rue de l’Estrapade. I immediately enquired, as Kim had done, if I could use the lavatory. It turned out to be a communal one, like mine at the Voltaire, further along the same top-floor landing as his own studio; and as I started to walk back out of his room, I heard him ask, ‘C’est pour chier?’ (‘Is it to shit?’)

  ‘Eh … en fait, oui,’ I replied, trying not to sound too embarrassed. ‘Pourquoi tu poses cette question?’

  He grabbed my hand, drew it to his crotch and made me feel his stiff cock – a thing of outlandish, even Tom-of-Finlandish, proportions – under his jeans.

  ‘Parce que je vais t’enculer. Tu comprends maintenant?’ (‘Because I’m going to fuck you. You understand now?’)

  He then held out his right hand towards me and unexpectedly stroked my chin.

  ‘Mais comment? Tu es imberbe?’

  ‘Imberbe?’ It was a word I didn’t know.

  ‘Beardless,’ he said in heavily accented English. ‘You don’t shave?’

  I blushed. ‘Twice a week. I’m blond. It takes a while to show.’

  He stroked my chin once more.

  ‘I like it,’ he said, unsmiling.

  The lavatory was of the hole-in-the-ground variety. Hunkered down, I started having second thoughts. I’d never been sodomised before and anticipation of being skewered by that member of his – as I imagined it, it would be a kind of hara-kiri from behind – was already causing my own cock, by the speed at which it was starting to shrink into its soft scrotal throne, to signal to me its malaise at what lay ahead for both of us. I made up my mind. Leaving the hole unsluiced – from his room Mathias would certainly have heard the sound of flushing – I slunk along the landing and down the stairs and it was only when I was about to step out into the street that I remembered the resolve I’d made to myself.

  If I were to creep away now, I’d have to mark up the encounter as just the latest of my sexual indignities (even if this would have been the first time I had ever walked out on somebody else). No, I said to myself, the new me couldn’t let that happen; and, a moment later, I closed the front door from the inside, tiptoed back upstairs and reappeared on the top-floor landing as though nothing untoward had occurred in the meantime.

  Glowering at me with that unsettling intensity of his that I’d already come to fear, Mathias at once asked, ‘Qu’est-ce qui t’a pris si longtemps?’

  ‘Oh, tu sais … ‘I replied, closing the door behind me.

  There followed on his part a few seconds of silent rumination. Then he said, rather insultingly, ‘En fait, c’est mieux comme ça. J’aime pas les culs sales, moi.’

  He did, as promised, sodomise me. It was a methodical screw, raspy and dry, performed without any lubricating fluid, joyless to me but the way he liked it. To start with, the crack in my buttocks, far from magically sliding open as I imagined it would, instead chose that moment to slam shut, so that he had to use his swollen, scarlet but sickly grey-knobbed cock like a battering ram to shove his way inside my dark, subterranean grotto. The pain of being laid siege to brought hot, salty tears to my eyes. I tried to gasp and even to scream, yet no sound emerged, except a faint putt-putt-puttering, inaudible to the naked ear, from the depths of my throat. My face scrunched-up on the pillows of his bed, I thought when he eventually did succeed in impaling me, ramming his manhood home, right up to the hilt, my hilt – I thought, I say, what a schoolboy must think when choking on his first cigarette: this is supposed to be fun?

  Yet, an hour later, when I came walking out into the street as bandy-legged as the grizzled comic relief in some old-fashioned, black-and-white western, not daring to imagine what my bare, bruised backside must look like, I knew for the first time from personal experience something I’d only ever glibly theorised about: that the essence of the homosexual act, of at least one type of homosexual act, is its very virility, an exacerbated virility, virility squared, cubed, veiny, bulgy and
bestial, the virility of the Superman who lurks within every Clark Kent. Who lurked even within me, reader, who lurked even within me!

  It was then that began my systematic exploration of everything the city had to offer the not too picky homosexual with an unhealthy mind in a healthy body. Nothing was to be too squalid for me, nothing was to be too risky, nothing too violent, too homespun, too butch, too camp, too Boschean, too Genetesque, too anything. I had a season ticket to gay sex and I was set on getting my very last pennyworth out of it.

  I had spent my life, or what I had lived of it thus far, cowering in a network of self-constructed fortresses that I had used to shield myself from the real world in which I knew I was a charlatan. I had inflated my few torpid sexual encounters into a flamboyant anthology of copulations that may have fooled my friends but had left me myself more frustrated than ever. I was now determined to enter that world, to experience those copulations at first hand – at first cock – to be pumped full of liquid love by a firing squad of partners, at least some of whom, I hoped, would have the tact to be charmed rather than dismayed by my inexperience and whose own sexual versatility and virtuosity couldn’t fail, I also hoped, to add a sorely wanting lustre to my still amateurish technique.

  I no longer remember with clarity the half of my many and various lovers – but, let me think, there was Victor, French, twenty-six, who had, en ville, the nerd’s tic of poking, with his forefinger, his speckle-frame spectacles back up along the smooth bridge of the nose they would keep sliding down, but who turned out, en privé, to my very pleasant surprise, for he was a real slob clothes-wise, to have a beautifully proportioned, tentacular body with what felt like more than the biologically approved number of limbs, all of them as adjustable and adaptable as the appendages of a Swiss army knife. There was Drew, a twenty-two-year-old graduate student from Chicago with sandy pubes and a curlicued, comma-shaped cock, who taught me that, once got the hang of, riding a boy was as instinctive as riding a bike. I rode him bareback, like some human, hairy Harley-Davidson, at the local YMCA, where he was temporarily putting up in a cell-like room with even less furniture than mine at the Voltaire. There was Benjamin, a nervous, flighty, slightly spotty, slightly smelly adolescent whom I met, on his nineteenth birthday, during an entracte at the Opéra (double bill of Stravinsky’s Oedipus rex and Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortilèges), when I watched him guzzle a whole glass of beer at a single go, his eyes swimming heavenward like those of a newborn babe drunk on its mother’s breast-milk. He took me to his parents’ (empty) house near the Montmartre funicular, where he disappeared at once into the bathroom and reappeared after eleven minutes. (I timed it.) When I started unbuttoning his jeans, and discovered that he was naked beneath them, he looked at me as though daring me to suspect the worst and – here he took a deep breath – said not very convincingly, ‘I never wear underpants.’ (I myself was dying for a pee when I left him an hour later but resisted asking to use the same bathroom for fear of what I might find stowed away not quite out of sight.) There was Damon, a Cuban, ageless, a political refugee, so he said, who had actually been ‘rounded up’ inside one of those stadiums in Havana one had heard about, so he said, and who gave me a brisk businesslike fuck with, unlike Mathias, lashings of vaseline. There was André, late thirties, a martyr to sciatica, with a Roman emperor’s fringe and morosely smouldering features that were dolorous or just droopy depending on whether or not he was your type. A triste tryst. And there was smily Oscar, a Senegalese, twenty-one, a law student who lived in the Cité Universitaire in a cell even smaller and barer than Drew’s at the Y. Blacker still than his jet-black skin – how was this possible? – were his Frida Kahlo eyebrows, his hard-as-tintacks nipples and his enormous conical prick whose roots felt as massive as those of a Californian redwood. When it was fully erect, I could barely move around his tiny room.