Blackbird (19 page)

“You’re beautiful naked,” Marshall said, smiling. “I knew you would be.” He pulled me to him again and hugged me tight. I pulled away from him and unzipped his pants, and his dick sprang out. It made me think of an arrow – long and straight and big-headed. Almost all my life I’d wondered what it would be like to see and feel another guy’s hard dick. And suddenly here was Marshall’s, pink and pretty, and hot as a Szechuan sparerib.

“You can hold it,” Marshall said. I took it in my hand and squeezed it hard. I could hardly believe I was holding a man’s hard penis in my hand. I stroked Marshall’s dick up and down, feeling it pulsate in my hand, and noticing how his foreskin made for a looser feeling than stroking my own; watched a drop of wet, shiny liquid the likes of which I’d never seen before gather at the tip and fall warm and sticky against my palm. Marshall moaned softly and nuzzled my head, and finally whispered, “Do you want to get in bed?”

“Oh, yeah!”

Being in bed with Cherie Baker had been nice. Really nice. Being in bed with Marshall MacNeill was wonderful. I find it difficult to describe being in bed with Marshall. Both because I get such a feeling just thinking about it (a lump in my throat, and a swelling in my chest, and something of a swelling in my pants, as well) and because I find it difficult to describe the first time I made love with Marshall Two-Hawks MacNeill without using the word “wonderful” constantly.

The feeling of Marshall lying on me in the big brass bed, our bellies rubbing one against the other, hot and slippery, was wonderful. The smell of Marshall’s balls, the taste of his sweat on my lips as I kissed his nearly hairless armpit, were wonderful. His long, muscular, completely smooth legs, entangled with my legs and the sheets; his stroking my leg with the arch of his foot while we kissed and clutched and ground our dicks against each other – wonderful.

You see my predicament.

Marshall crawled down between my thighs and began kissing my penis, licking it, finally taking it into his mouth; and the word wonderful suddenly became grossly inadequate. I could hardly believe the feeling. I could hardly stand it. My entire body seemed to pulsate with excitement and marijuana high. Pleasure zipped across my body like fingernails across the strings of an Autoharp. I was solid gooseflesh down to my toes. I couldn’t stop moaning.

My dick felt bigger than the Goodyear blimp, and somehow Marshall was taking the whole thing down his throat, bam bam bam, again and again and again. His hands were all over me, stroking and pulling and squeezing, leaving tingling pleasure-trails wherever they touched. My head filled with music, seemed to fill the room with a wall of sound the likes of which Phil Spector never dreamed about; hundreds of orchestras and thousands of choirs, tuning up and up and up, louder and higher. And a steam locomotive was chugging faster and faster, and the music got higher and louder. John Lennon said number nine, number nine, number nine, and my hips began to move with a life of their own, and I moaned and Marshall (from somewhere across the world) seemed to moan in reply.

The music went higher, and my back arched, arched, arched, well past the point where it should have snapped in two; Leontyne Price in Valkyrie drag sang an F above high C, while Ginger Rogers sang Pig Latin, and the orchestras and choirs went higher and higher, and my dick was too big, it was gonna burst any second, and the music the music the music, and my whole body spasmed and spasmed and spasmed again, and Marshall held my hips down on the bed, and my head was bursting and I felt like I might just explode (not just come, but piss and shit and vomit and everything, it was all too much). Shirley Temple rolled her eyes and said, “Oh, my goo’ness!”

And I broke apart like a soap bubble, I splattered all over the room, the walls, and the ceiling, and someone was screaming screaming screaming, and after a while (a few minutes, a few years), I realized it was me.

And when I woke up – yes, I’m afraid I actually passed out there for a moment or two – Marshall was lying next to me, stroking my face.

“Make no mistake about it,” he whispered, “you can really come.”

“Thank you.” What could I say?

I reached down and took Marshall’s penis in my hand, and just held it for a while, somewhat torn between the desire to at least attempt to make Marshall feel as good as he’d made me feel, and the desire just to lie there, holding Marshall’s dick and letting him stroke me, for the rest of my life. Finally, I found the energy to crawl down between Marshall’s legs.

I discovered to my pleasure, that I genuinely liked sucking Marshall’s cock. Funny thing, because there’s nothing worse you can call a guy than a cocksucker. You say “Suck my dick” to most guys, them’s fightin’ words. Makes you wonder if there isn’t something really disgusting about it. So, even though I’d almost always been fascinated by the thought of it, I still hadn’t any idea how I’d take to a mouthful of the actuality of it. Still, it had felt so, well, wonderful being on the receiving end of my first blow job, I was determined to do my best to repay Marshall in kind, like it or not: it was only fair. Anyway, as I said, I really liked it, everything about it. I liked the feeling of him in my mouth, the taste of his skin and the funky stuff around his foreskin; the soft, continuous moaning that let me know I was probably doing it right. I even liked the taste of Marshall’s come; sort of a sourdough bread flavor, but not quite.

“Was it okay?” I asked afterward.

“My dear,” he said somewhat breathlessly, “that was considerably better than okay. Where’d you learn to suck so good?”

“Right here.”

“You mean, this was your first?” he raised up on one elbow.

“Yep.” He just said wow, and lay back in bed.

We held each other close for a time (who knows how much time) until Marshall grabbed my dick and said, “You’re hard again.”

“Not again: still.” My dick had not even considered the option of going soft since I’d positioned myself in Marshall’s lap in the beanbag chair.

“Oh, to be eighteen!” Marshall said, and enjoyed a little laugh to himself. He fingered my balls a minute before he said, “You know what I’d like?”

“What?”

“I’d really like you to fuck me.”

“Wow.”

“Want to?”

“Oh, wow, yeah.”

“Awrite.”

He reached under the bed and pulled out a tube like toothpaste, and a towel. We knelt, and Marshall squeezed a glob of shiny clear gel from the tube and spread it all over my dick. He rubbed my slick penis up and down a couple of strokes, and said (to himself, to me, I don’ know), “Boy, this is gonna be nice.” I’d always pictured butt-fucking as being done back to front, dogs-on-the-lawn fashion; so I was a little surprised when Marshall lay back, grabbed his ankles, and pulled his legs back nearly to the brass headboard. He said, “Go slow.”

I went as slow as I could, considering by the time I was all the way inside Marshall, I was so excited I was on the very doorstep of another orgasm almost instantly. I began whispering the Gettysburg Address (as well as I could remember it under the circumstances), looked up and counted the cracks in the ceiling, did my level best to concentrate on anything but just how excruciatingly good it felt. Marshall, for his part, thrashed his head from side to side, and moaned so loudly I was afraid I might be hurting him.

“Are you all right?” I said.

“Oh, God, yes!”

When we finished, I fell back on the bed, sweaty and spent and – despite having eaten two dinners – starving.

“Munchies, huh?” Marshall grinned.

“I could eat a horse. A herd of horses.”

There was half a Snackin’ Cake and an almost-full pitcher of strawberry Kool-Aid in the refrigerator; we consumed it all, sitting on the kitchen floor in just our pants, making unabashed smacking sounds as we ate, shoving cake into each other’s face like in some demented gay-wedding picture. I was sucking cake crumbs off my right hand (and Marshall my left) when it hit me. “Ohmygosh! What time is it?” I looked up at the art-deco clock hanging over the stove. “God Bless! It’s nearly two.” I jumped up off the floor, suddenly not feeling in the least bit stoned, and headed for the bedroom in pursuit of my clothes.

“So it’s nearly two.” Marshall followed me into the bedroom.

“So what?”

“So I gotta go home. My mother’s probably having her nineteenth nervous breakdown.”

“Do you have to go? I mean, couldn’t you crash here tonight?”

He touched me on a naked shoulder. “I’d really like you to.”

“Boy, I’d really like to. Correction: I’d love to. But I can’t. I’m supposed to be home at a decent hour, which I’m already too late for.” I yanked my sneakers on and stuffed my socks into my back pocket. “Would you take me home, please.”

“Nope.”

“No?” I panicked. The buses had long since stopped running, and it would take at least an hour to walk.

“I was kidding. Of course I’ll take you.”

I clutched Marshall’s thigh all the way home, praying that Mom and Dad weren’t still waiting up. I wasn’t sure if, upon laying eyes on me, they wouldn’t know (by parent telepathy or something) that, far from behaving as a Christian young man should, I had spent the evening using illegal narcotics and engaging in sodomy. Only one living-room lamp was lit when we got to the house, which meant the folks had more than likely gone to bed. It was practically the only light on the whole block. We sat in the car for a few minutes, staring straight ahead, kneading each other’s hand. I didn’t want to get out of the car. I wanted to go back to Marshall’s, climb back into his big brass bed, and sleep in his arms till nearly noon.

“Thanks for spending the evening with me,” he said.

“Thank you. I had – it was wonderful. I – ” And we were kissing, so hard our teeth clicked against each other.

“Good night, Johnnie Ray.”

“Good night, Marshall.”

I ran into the house, where Dad’s snoring was audible all the way into the living room. Relieved beyond words, I tiptoed into the bathroom and brushed my teeth, staring at my reflection in the mirror, half expecting to look somehow different than I had that afternoon.

I’d barely crawled into bed when I heard Mom’s voice from across the hall.

“Good night, baby.”

“Night, Mom.”

Sleep came immediately, heavy and dreamless.

Chapter Seventeen

No mention was made about my late hours. When I finally made it into the kitchen, around noon, hell-bent for the coffee pot, Mom simply asked if I’d had a good time. I said yes, I’d had a very good time, and that was the end of it. I could only imagine Dad had asked her not to play Spanish Inquisition with me about it. Actually, I would have loved to be able to tell Mom about Marshall. Or tell Efrem or Cherie, or anybody. Actually, Cherie might have been all right, except considering how she felt about me, it might not be the kindest thing to talk to her about. Then I thought, Crystal. I could probably talk to Crystal about it, tell her everything. Of course, knowing her,
she
would probably be able to tell
me
about it.

I wasn’t good for much the whole day. My head was a little foggy, and what little conscious thought I managed was mostly about Marshall. I stayed in my room most of the day, working on a macramé wall-hanging I’d been poking at for weeks, listening to the stereo, finally watching
Stage Door
for the umpteenth time on the late show. About the only time I emerged was for food or the bathroom, and five or six times to call Marshall, just to hear his voice. There was no answer at his place.

Sunday, and church was even emptier than the week before. Pastor and Mrs. Crandall had flown back east – they’d decided to bury Leslie there instead of bringing her back. Daniel Levine, our assistant pastor and youth minister, was preaching, which usually thinned the congregation pretty well all by itself. Daniel is a Jew who’s only recently converted to Christianity; and, while he is possessed of all the religious fervor one would expect, he’s just not much of a speaker. Anyway, the energy was a little strange in the sanctuary, what with Leslie’s death, the Crandall’s absence, and the fact that Todd Waterson was still missing. I’m sure all these things were mentioned, at least alluded to, in Daniel’s sermon, but (to tell the truth) I don’t remember a word of it. My head was full of Marshall MacNeill.

I called him up after church, but there was no answer.

I did decide to tell Crystal about Marshall, in excited but hushed tones at a back-corner table in the library, right before getting thirty-nine out of fifty-two with the cards (I’d been stalled at forty or so for days – I couldn’t seem to get any better).

“Well, good for you,” Crystal said. “I love love, myself. Can I give you a piece of advice, though?”

“Sure.”

“Don’t ask more of this thing than there really is.”

“What do you mean?” Don’t say nothin’ bad about my baby.

“Just don’t get yourself hurt, okay?”

“Is this some sort of prediction?”

“No. Just some free advice, that’s all.”

I didn’t hear from Marshall until Wednesday evening after dinner. I’d been calling his place four or five times a day, from the pay phones at school and from home after. I pounced on the phone somewhere in the middle of the first ring, as I’d been doing consistently since Saturday night.