The Men from the Boys (19 page)

Ann Marie was watching the kids play. “I wish Mommy would plant her rock garden again,” she said, gesturing toward the grassy mound where once marigolds and petunias' and daffodils had bloomed.

“Yeah, but let's not hold our breaths.”

We both loved that rock garden. All the different flowers, all blooming at different times, perfectly synchronized so there was always color among the slabs of granite and brownstone. I can still see my mother, kneeling in the dirt, planting her flowers, a kerchief on her head, a cigarette between her Passionate Ruby lipsticked lips.

The yard was different then. The old maples were just saplings, held up by fragile wooden posts and white ribbon. The back of the house hadn't been completely painted yet. Much of it remained bare wood. The half that was finished was painted primary blue, like my kindergarten crayons. A fluorescent-green rubber hose was coiled like a long, beneficent snake under the kitchen windows. Similar houses stood all along the street, their half-acre lots evenly drawn, dotted here and there by newly planted shrubs.

Once, Ann Marie and I played in our mother's rock garden. I'd drive my Matchbox cars through the soil, or make up elaborate scenes with my little plastic orange witch, a leftover Halloween decoration that had once been filled with candy corn. I loved that hollow witch more than any other toy, and she's lasted in my memory much longer than any expensive battery-operated gadget from Mattel or Kenner. I can remember her face, even today, big orange eyes and a long nose with a wart. My mother hadn't wanted me to keep it. “Oh, Jeffy,” she said, “boys shouldn't play with
dolls.”

“This isn't a doll,” I insisted, although secretly I knew it was. What was the difference between my witch and Ann Marie's Dawn dolls? Not much, except my witch was much more interesting. The day after The
Wizard
of Oz aired in its annual showing, my plastic witch became Margaret Hamilton. I imitated her cackle, taking her out to the rock garden and driving her around on the tops of my Matchboxes. I couldn't have been more than seven; Ann Marie, four.

I buried the witch in the soft soil of the rock garden, newly turned by my mother's hands. “She's going to rise from the dead now,” I told Ann Marie, who sat cross-legged and wide-eyed in front of me.

“Like Jesus?”

“No,” I said testily, “like Barnabas Collins.” I pushed the dirt around trying to find the witch.

“Do you think the witch on The
Wizard
of Oz will rise from the dead?” Ann Marie asked.

“Yes, she already did,” I said, asserting the wisdom of my older years. “She did, but they never showed it.” I continued to feel around in the dirt, certain this was the spot where I'd buried her. “After Dorothy left, the winged monkeys molded her back together and then she captured the Lion and the Scarecrow and the—”

I stood up, terrified all of a sudden. “I can't find her!” I cried. “She's
gone!”

“Gone where the goblins go,” Ann Marie whispered in awe.

I never found her. It was as if she'd been snatched away from me by some angry macho god. “Boys shouldn't play with dolls,” a booming voice said in my head, and some unseen spirit hand reached up through the soil to whisk her away. For several weeks I would go out there and kick the dirt around with my feet, hoping she'd poke out her little plastic orange head. But she never did. After a while, I gave up.

The man in front of me tosses a cigarette out of his window.

Probably some fat old troll, I think to myself—yet it's a hollow thought, as hollow as my witch, as if I don't mean what I think. I can't deny that I'd prefer him to be some hot young thing, wearing the right boots, suitably muscled. But something about sitting here makes such qualifications irrelevant, even ludicrous.

Another car pulls in behind me. I check my rearview mirror. The driver looks like a librarian: fortyish, with round glasses. Small, thin face. Nothing remarkable. Yet the thought that he's here, that he's here for the same reason I'm still sitting here, that he's as horny as I am, his dick mine for the taking, and mine his—I have to catch my breath, literally, by closing my mouth and looking away.

In the bars, on the dance floor, there's this elaborate ritual. It's hot and exciting in its own way. You ask the required questions: “What do you do?” “Where are you from?” “Come here a lot?” You buy each other drinks. You pretend you are not at all interested in sex, that you are just meeting casually, that there is no ulterior motive. Until that final question, which still ignores the truth: “Want to come back to my room?” When in reality, what you should be saying is: “I want to suck your dick” or “I want to fuck you up the ass.”

Suddenly the honesty of this place—this rest stop on the side of the highway, and all places like it—hits me. I don't care what the man's name is in the car behind me. I don't want to have to buy him a beer. I don't care what he does, or if he comes here often. I don't even much care whether he works out, or has a great haircut, or if his underwear is Calvin Klein or Sears. I just want his sex. Here. Now.

I get out of my car.

Behind me, I hear a car door close. I don't look back. I walk briskly along the path, and the realization that it has been forged and matted down by thousands of feet belonging to men as horny as I am thrills me. How many loads have been shot here? That's what makes these woods so alive, so energized, I think—the decades of cum that have fallen to the ground, revitalizing the earth, fertilizing the trees.

I turn, stopping by a cluster of bushes. The librarian continues on past me, and I'm perplexed for a moment, until he turns and looks over his shoulder, once, quick.

Now I'm the one who follows. He's dressed in loose-fitting beige chinos and a white polo shirt. He wears blue-and-white running shoes that don't match the rest of his outfit. But somehow he's the picture of sex, and I want his lips around my cock.

Finally he stops, partially obscured behind a large bush. I stop too, not a foot away from him.

This is it: the moment of truth. I'm going to do it. All of Javitz's stories come back to me at once, of down-and-dirty sex in public rest rooms and in the dunes. When the man's hand reaches out and grips my crotch, I let out the kind of sigh I usually make only after long, long foreplay, when I'm getting close to orgasm.

The librarian wastes no time. He gets down on his knees and awkwardly begins unfastening my belt buckle. I have to help. Then he pops open my jeans, and sticks his face into my open fly. I look down at the top of his head: a bald spot like my father's. It's an odd thought, and what's even odder is that it makes my dick get harder. That's when the librarian pulls down my black boxers and fumbles my erection into his mouth.

I lean back against a tree and look skyward into the lacy network of limbs that crosshatch against the bright blue sky. The man's mouth is warm and slippery. His hands inch up under my shirt to feel my pecs. I instinctively flex and pull off my T-shirt. This is hot—like the dick dock. Raw sex. No games, no script. I suddenly have an image of myself: a young stud having his dick sucked, being worshiped by an aging librarian, who wishes with all his life he was as young and attractive as I am. For once, I'm the youngest one around.

I'm not sure what to do with my hands, so I thrust them into the pockets of my jeans. Wrong move: my fingers make contact with that damn twenty. I think of my father again, and this time he's standing over me, watching me touch the flat space on my G.I. Joe where his genitals should have been.

“Jeffy,” he says, “why did you take his uniform off?”

The horror of that moment returns to me now as this man sucks my dick. In that moment—I couldn't have been more than eight or nine—I felt my father's whole attitude toward me change. I felt humiliated, shamed, dirty. “I was just giving him a bath,” I said weakly, looking up from the pail of water in my mother's rock garden. But my father simply looked down at me, as if he knew the truth. And that truth was plain: I took off his uniform because I liked the hardness of his sculpted chest, and I wanted to know what he had beneath his pants. Nothing, I discovered with no little amount of regret. His crotch was as smooth as his chest, and far less interesting.

“I don't care if it is a soldier,” my mother had said, after a class-mate had given me the G.I. Joe for my birthday. “I just don't think boys should be playing with
dolls.”

My father had defended the gift. “You don't want him growing up to be one of those antiwar protesters, do you?” he asked. This was 1970. The year of Kent State. My father was a Korean War vet. He thought a new war every generation was not only inevitable, but maybe not a bad thing. “Isn't it better that he make friends with soldiers now so he doesn't march against them later?”

Interesting logic, thinking back. But it all seemed moot that day in my mother's rock garden, when my father saw me touching my naked doll. “Why did you take his uniform off?” Such a simple, direct question, one that has never left me, never stopped haunting me.

I hear the sharp snap of a twig. I look up. Another man has just stepped into the clearing, probably the man who had been in the car in front of me. He looks like a lumberjack. He's got short black-and-gray hair, with a large mustache over thick, full lips. He fills out his jeans well, with strong, round thighs. I don't wear my jeans that tight—it's considered out of style these days—but suddenly I'm glad his generation still does. Big biceps—and I mean big, not the “defined” muscles on which Lloyd and I pride ourselves—emerge from his cut-off flannel sleeves. His brown eyes fix on mine.

The librarian stands up, checks out the new man, then goes back to his knees, hands reaching up to unbutton another pair of jeans. “No,” the man says, still looking at me. The librarian, confused, stands up again. The lumberjack reaches over and places his large hand on my shoulder, pressing down. He wants me to suck him. Yes, I thought, falling to my knees. I'll be your boy. I'll suck your cock.

But he takes the top of my head in his hand and pushes me away from his basket, and instead into the flat beige crotch of the librarian. I start to recoil, but his hand is firm. And then, as a new flood of desire washes over me, I think: Yes, yes—this is what I want.

I pull down the zipper of the librarian's fly, and smell something clean. Like soap. His blue bikini underwear—tacky, I would have called it yesterday—is wet with precum. I take his dick into my mouth.

“That's a good boy,” I hear above me. I know it's not the librarian talking. I pull off his dick and look up. The librarian's body tightens, his face contorts, and he draws in his breath—just before coming in thick, forceful spurts, all over my face and hair.

“Yeah,” the lumberjack moans, now stroking his own tool, sticking straight out of his jeans. He shoots his load all over me, too, and then I come: rough, violent, eruptions, aware of the fact that the sticky jizz of two men now streaks my face, my hair, my shoulders, and my chest.

The librarian zips up quickly and leaves. The lumberjack winks at me. “Play safe,” he says, then crunches away through the woods.

I wait until they're both gone. I wipe my face with the back of my hand and then use a leaf to clean it off. I pull my tank top back over my sticky body. I head back to my car, feeling drained, totally sapped. But giddy, too, giddy and alive. By the time I cross the Sagamore Bridge—what Lloyd calls “crossing over to the other side”—and start the trek up the Cape, I'm singing along to the radio, a retro seventies station: “Bad girls, toot toot, beep beep.”

When I get back, Eduardo's there waiting for me.

“Hey, hot stuff,” he says to me.

Aw, shit. What am I supposed to do now? I don't want sex again, not after that incredible experience in the woods. And certainly not with Eduardo. God, does he think we're
married?

“Listen, I'm really tired—” I begin.

Then Javitz appears in the doorway. “Call your father,” he says.

“What's wrong?” I ask.

“Just call him.”

So I do, and he tells me that Junebug is dead. “Ann Marie ran him over as she backed out of the driveway,” he says, his voice thick. “Poor old guy. Just couldn't run like he used to. Just couldn't get out of the way in time. Give your sister a call, Jeffy. She's a wreck.”

I can't say anything for a moment. Then I ask: “Did—did he die instantly?”

“No,” my father says. “Poor old guy. Twitched like the devil. I had to break his neck with a shovel.”

“Oh ...”

I don't want to cry, not with Eduardo standing here, but I can't help myself. The tears just come: hot and stinging. I hang up and go to my room. Eduardo follows.

“Please don't—” I start, but he embraces me and I just let go, crying into his arms over an old cat I left behind when I thought I'd grown up.

Boston, February 1995

“The guy I'm dating,” Tommy says, “knows both of you.”

He looks at me with eyes that I remember well. Eyes that have accused me in the past.

“What's his name?” Chanel asks.

“He's meeting me here,” Tommy says. “You can see for yourself.”

Javitz and Lloyd and Naomi arrive. “Surprise!” Lloyd calls out. They've brought ice cream and hot fudge.

Chanel nudges me. “So is Naomi still straight?”

“Of course,” I tell her. “It's not a condition that goes away, like a case of the hives.”

“I don't know about that. On
Ricki
Lake today—”

“Please.” I scowl at her. “Besides, you're monogamous.”